The Grip of Power
Our author’s initial and arguably most striking revelation concerning power is that the paramount aim of those who successfully attain supreme authority is often reduced to nothing more exalted or idealistic than staying in power. This obsessional fixation on the means and trappings of power, independent of the greater or lesser purposes it can serve, defines not only the psychic life of many of those who exercise great political power, but also the way in which politics is institutionally structured to sustain and secure the ruler’s privileges and capacities. Whenever retaining hold on high office, rather than realizing an ideological vision or implementing a political program, becomes the dominant aim of politics, sovereign power becomes for its wielder an end in itself, even while being publicly justified as a means for providing collective security. Although power is always justified to subjects as a means of repelling foreign conquest and attaining other collective goods, for the one who exercises it, sovereign power may easily turn into something desired for its own sake. This inversion of a means into an end, all too common in modern as well as archaic politics, causes another inversion in turn. As power becomes an end for a sovereign clinging desperately to it, other intrinsically worthy ends turn into disposable means. Rulers who wield their authority in the service of power as an end in itself regularly convert such ends as love, loyalty, the sacred, and moral obligation into mere means for eliminating dangerous rivals and staving off the loss of power, a loss that they morbidly dread.
Instrumentalizing such inherently valuable ends and turning them into mere means has a further fateful consequence for human politics. Since sovereigns are always able, and often tempted, to turn morality into an instrument, their observable actions become chronically ambiguous. Observers of such sovereign actions find themselves in perennial doubt as to their genuineness. Is the moral justification adduced by the wielder of power a mere pretext covering a purely self-serving political motivation, or is the action principled and driven by a moral quest? As our author details with exceptional subtlety, the irresolvable ambiguities of political action and passion are rooted in the deeply enigmatic and hugely consequential relation between public justification and private motivation. Although—and indeed because—the instrumentalization of morality is pervasive in political life, the political and the moral are thoroughly intertwined in ways in which even the sovereign himself cannot always disentangle. The exploration of these interconnected themes—the double reversal of turning means into ends and ends into means that lies at the heart of politics and the resulting ambiguity of political action—runs through much of the Book of Samuel, but it initially comes into focus as our author meticulously examines the corrosive impact of the psychological and political imperative to retain power on the life of Saul, the first king and the first genuine political figure known to the Bible.
I
Saul makes his first appearance in the chapter that follows the request of Israel for a king and God’s initially indignant and ultimately resigned acquiescence. Introduced as the son of Kish from the tribe of Benjamin, Saul is described as “a fine and goodly young fellow, and no man of the Israelites was goodlier than he, head and shoulders taller than all the people” (1 Sam 9:2). Saul had the physical stature of a leader, but the sequence of events that follows makes clear that he was anything but an ambitious young man craving power and political authority. It is no accident that the narrative of Saul’s journey away from home—a journey that leads to his anointment by Samuel as the future king—began with Saul seeking something trivial; he was sent by his father with one of his lads to retrieve some lost asses. After searching a large terrain and failing to locate the asses, Saul exhibited a sensitivity and uncertainty incompatible with crassly cynical ambition or a burning lust for power. He addressed the accompanying lad: “Come, let us turn back, lest my father cease worrying about the asses and worry about us” (1 Sam 9:5–6). Saul was a considerate and decent son, worrying about his father’s worrying. So the lad, his inferior, took the lead, making sure that the quest did not end prematurely: “Look, pray, there is a man of God in this town, and the man is esteemed—whatever he says will surely come to pass. Now then, let us go there. Perhaps he will tell us of our way on which we have gone” (1 Sam 9:6–7). Drawing a sharp contrast between Saul’s irresolution and his lad’s initiative, our narrator has Saul voice an additional worry: “But look, if we are to go, what shall we bring to the man? For the bread is gone from our kits and there is no gift to bring to the man of God. What do we have?” And the lad answers: “Look, I happen to have at hand a quarter of a shekel of silver that I can give to the man of God, that he may tell us our way” (1 Sam 9:7–8). Not Saul but the lad carried the cash that could be offered to the man of God (who happened to be Samuel), and Saul merely followed his lead.1 Although tapped to become king, Saul is artfully portrayed as the diametrical opposite of a political schemer consumed by naked ambition. Before acceding to the throne, he bears absolutely no psychological resemblance to the voracious monarchs whose insatiable craving for ever-greater power at the expense of their people’s well-being was the subject of Samuel’s prophetic warnings.2
Saul did not covet power. Power coveted him. Stung by what he apparently felt was a personal betrayal, Samuel initially took no action to fulfill the people’s demand for a king. Indeed, a hapless Saul, singled out for the throne by God, had to be brought before the prophet: “At this time tomorrow,” God said to Samuel, “I will send to you a man from the region of Benjamin and you shall anoint him prince over My people Israel” (1 Sam 9:16). Approaching Samuel for oracular help in tracking down the missing asses, Saul was stunned by Samuel’s suggestion that what he had found instead was the hereditary kingship: “And as to the asses that have been lost to you now three days, pay them no heed, for they have been found. And whose is all the treasure of Israel? Is it not for you and all your father’s house?” (1 Sam 9:20). Saul responded in character with wholly unfeigned modesty: “Am I not a Benjaminite, from the smallest of the tribes of Israel, and my clan is the least of all the tribe of Benjamin? So why have you spoken to me in this fashion?” (1 Sam 9:21). Disregarding this palpably sincere protest, Samuel proceeded to anoint the hitherto ambitionless Saul.3 Samuel then demonstrated his prophetic gifts by accurately foretelling events that will occur soon thereafter, thereby convincing Saul that he was indeed destined to become Israel’s first king.
Staged without witnesses on the outskirts of town, the clandestine anointment of Saul by Samuel is followed in the narrative by a public coronation at Mizpah, which again serves to underscore Saul’s natural reluctance to assume the power that has been so unexpectedly thrust upon him. In the presence of all the people, a divinatory procedure was enacted in the form of casting a lot meant to reveal the monarch already selected by God. The lot fell first on the tribe of Benjamin, and then on the clan of Matrit, and finally, from among that clan, the lot fell on Saul. After the identity of the new king was thus made known, a strangely embarrassing moment ensued. Saul, the chosen one, couldn’t be located: “and they sought him but he was not to be found” (1 Sam 10:22). When he was discovered at last hiding among the gear, the people dragged Saul to a kingship that he had unequivocally never sought for himself:
And they ran and fetched him from there, and he stood forth amidst the people, and he was head and shoulders taller than all the people. And Samuel said to all the people, “Have you seen whom the LORD has chosen? For there is none like him in all the people.” And all the people shouted and said, “Long live the king!” (1 Sam 10:23–24).
In this oddly graceless coronation ceremony, distinguished by Samuel’s residual resentment and Saul’s embarrassingly humble demeanor, a handsome but ambitionless king-designate was grudgingly enthroned.
Unlike someone long preparing to assume power, Saul didn’t move swiftly to exploit the momentum of his coronation and consolidate his authority. The public gathering at Mizpah ended in anticlimactic dispersal: “Samuel sent all the people away to their homes. And Saul, too, returned to his home in Gibeah, and the stalwart fellows whose hearts God had touched went with him” (1 Sam 10:26–27). It is no wonder that Saul’s slinking back into private life was followed with words of derision spat out by some skeptical and oppositional voices among the people: “And worthless fellows had said, ‘How will this one deliver us?’ And they spurned him and brought him no tribute, but he pretended to keep his peace” (1 Sam 10:27). But why exactly does the author of Samuel make sure that we see Saul as wholly devoid of lofty ambition and craving for power? It is sometimes said that the only one who can be trusted with power is the one who doesn’t seek it. Yet our author, in these passages, obviously wished to convey a diametrically contrary thought. The account of Saul’s first two coronations prepares us to see how the intoxicating appeal of supreme power will overtake even a character as naturally uncalculating, unassuming, and unenterprising as Saul.
The real establishment of Saul’s authority and the emergence of a structure that resembles a permanent and concentrated political force capable of taxation and conscription occurred through neither clandestine anointment nor public coronation, but only after a decisive victory in war. As told in 1 Samuel 11, the Ammonite king Nahash offered a humiliating pact to the people of Jabesh-gilead, who were situated at the easternmost and therefore highly exposed margins of Israel’s tribal settlements. The proposed pact included the gouging out of the right eye of each of the men of Jabesh-gilead, marking their defeat and subjugation in a permanent and visible facial defect that also rendered them unfit for military self-defense. Messengers from the city of Jabesh-gilead were urgently dispatched to Saul’s residence at Gibeah to plead for reinforcements. Saul, the newly selected but still reticent king, hadn’t yet assumed leadership. He was still working the land as a private farmer:
And, look, Saul was coming in behind the oxen from the field, and Saul said, “What is the matter with the people that they are weeping?” And they recounted to him the words of the men of Jabesh. And the spirit of God seized Saul when he heard these words, and he was greatly incensed. And he took a yoke of oxen and hacked them to pieces and sent them through all the territory of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying, “Whoever does not come out after Saul and after Samuel, thus will be done to his oxen!” And the fear of the LORD fell on the people, and they came out as one man. (1 Sam 11:5–7)
Meant to humiliate all Israel, the Ammonite king’s proposal roused Saul from his retreat into private life, dramatically overcoming his residual disinclination to exercise the royal office to which he had been raised. Acting in a way reminiscent of the charismatic ad hoc leaders portrayed in the Book of Judges, Saul’s call for arms, including his threat to destroy the economic livelihood of any community within the Israelite federation that failed to send troops to lift the siege of Jabesh-gilead, was spectacularly successful, leading him to an utter rout of the Ammonites.
Writing about a world where battle-hardened tribes fought for exclusive control of fertile land, the author of Samuel was well aware that decisive victory in war is the most effective way of establishing political legitimacy. Following Saul’s victory we are told: “And the people said to Saul, ‘Whoever said, “Saul shall not be king over us,” give us these men and we shall put them to death.’ And Saul said, ‘No man shall be put to death this day, for today the LORD has wrought deliverance in Israel’” (1 Sam 11:12–13). This was the moment when Saul began to act like a king. He established a permanent court with a small standing army; he would no longer be found plowing his fields. Military victory gave him a taste for power and the confidence to assume it. Even the hesitant and ambivalent Samuel was swayed by Saul’s success in war. In the wake of victory, the prophet initiated a third coronation,4 this time wholeheartedly accepted by the people and by Saul himself:
And Samuel said to the people, “Come, let us go to Gilgal and we shall renew there the kingship.” And all the people went to Gilgal and they made Saul King there before the LORD at Gilgal, and they sacrificed their communion sacrifices before the LORD, and Saul rejoiced there, and all the men of Israel with him, very greatly. (1 Sam 11:15)
From this point forward, the author of the Book of Samuel will turn his penetrating gaze to the radically transformed inner life of the originally unassuming and modest person who first had power thrust upon him and only afterwards was seized by the power that had descended upon him unsought.
Whether attained by craft or by chance, great power has a way of defining the person who wields it. Finding themselves venerated by those around them, the supremely powerful almost inevitably begin to worship themselves. Once such intoxicating superiority is tasted, relinquishing it can be experienced as an obliteration of the self. This is especially true for an office that can be bequeathed to one’s heirs, a promise or expectation that gives its present occupant an intimation of immortality. Even Samuel—the boy with no dynastic pedigree, who was born to a barren woman as gift of God, and who was brought to the center of leadership as a challenge to a corrupt dynastic priesthood—displayed fierce resistance to the loss of great hereditary power. In his old age, Samuel wished his sons to inherit his leadership role even though they were plainly unworthy. He felt personally betrayed by the people who rejected his sons. And he was seemingly forced by God to anoint a king against his will. Despite Saul’s initial victories over the Ammonites and other tribal enemies of Israel, Samuel continued to resent the king he had anointed, and his seething resentment will inflict continuous blows on Saul until the very end. Though Samuel had witnessed firsthand Saul’s personal reluctance and innocence, he couldn’t resist treating Saul as an illegitimate usurper of his own role and power. A young and inexperienced king was destined to make mistakes. And Samuel, as we will see, did more than his share in pushing Saul to, and over, the brink.
Besides providing a telling and astute commentary on the complex role of religion in stabilizing and destabilizing political authority, the trap that Samuel arguably laid for Saul in order to undermine his confidence in the future also lets us glimpse the particularly problematic form of instrumentalization that will play such a prominent role in the narrative to come. Following Saul’s first and clandestine coronation, we are told that Samuel commanded Saul to wait at Gilgal for seven days until he arrived to officiate over a burnt offering to God.5 The narrator is careful not to say that this command was God’s. It was initiated by Samuel, presumably motivated by his desire to be in charge and to ritually validate the properly hierarchical relation between himself and the new king. In the meantime, the Philistines were mustering for war, and Saul, who had enlisted the people of Israel, was waiting with increasing impatience for Samuel, whose delayed arrival was encouraging rampant desertion among the soldiers. Desertion was to be expected, as forces who are gathered for war but who do not engage tend to disperse. But it also reflected Saul’s tenuous authority over an incompletely unified tribal confederation. As time passed, Saul’s army shrank to a minuscule rump, and the remaining troops were paralyzed and frightened. A sacrifice had to be offered to restore the soldiers’ sagging morale by eliciting God’s assurances about the outcome of the battle, and Saul, who by now despaired of Samuel’s arrival and who was laboring under the pressure of his disintegrating army and the threatening Philistines, initiated the offering without the presence of the prophet. As recounted in the story, the timing of Samuel’s arrival seems far from accidental.6 He arrived at Gilgal almost immediately after the frantic Saul had offered the sacrifice on his own:
And it happened as he finished offering the burnt offering that, look, Samuel was coming and Saul went out toward him to greet him. And Samuel said, “What have you done?” And Saul said, “For I saw that the troops were slipping away from me and you on your part had not come at the fixed time and the Philistines were assembling at Michmash. And I thought, ‘Now the Philistines will come down on me at Gilgal, without my having entreated the LORD’S favor.’ And I took hold of myself and offered up the burnt offering.” (1 Sam 13:10–12)
To Saul’s reasonable, distressed, and apologetic account, Samuel offered a rebuke fashioned deliberately to inflict maximum psychological distress:
And Samuel said to Saul, “You have played the fool! Had you but kept the commandment of the LORD your God that He commanded you, now the LORD would have made your kingdom over Israel unshaken forever. But now, your kingdom shall not stand. The LORD has already sought out for Himself a man after His own heart and the LORD has appointed him prince to his people, for you have not kept what the LORD commanded you.” (1 Sam 13:13–14)
Thus did a venial cultic transgression that could have been excused given Saul’s parlous military posture provide Samuel the opening he was apparently seeking to bring Saul down.
Turning worthy ends into dispensable means, including the instrumentalization of religion and the sacred by rivals for power, is a central theme in Samuel, and it surfaces already in this short and harsh encounter. An offering has to be sacrificed before the battle. The king, who in the new dispensation has been divested of any significant religious role, has been made dependent on the comings and goings of the prophet, who had insisted that he must preside personally over the offering. The prophet’s claim to an exclusive role in religious ritual became a tool to be used in a competitive struggle manipulated by the personally embittered prophet. Samuel used his presumptive monopoly over ritual sacrifices to shake the throne of the anointed king. Saul had been compelled by a combination of desperate battlefield conditions and Samuel’s arrival at the very last minute to disobey the prophet’s command. It is difficult to avoid the reasonable speculation that Samuel’s resentment and wish that Saul would fail was at the heart of this sequence of events.
After Saul’s first stumble as king, orchestrated by Samuel and wrapped in a religious aura, Samuel, who had anointed Saul, now ominously prophesied the end of his reign. Samuel’s all-too-human motivation is accentuated in the narrative by an embellishment that the prophet artfully added to his condemnation of Saul’s trespass. Samuel claimed that a substitute for Saul had already been picked by God, anticipating a divine decision that the reader knows has not yet been made, in order, as it were, to nail Saul’s coffin shut in advance.7 God’s own voice is notably absent from the drama because, at this moment, God and cult have become mere instruments in a struggle between contestants for power. The angry prophet did not accompany the king into battle, and Saul was left alone to prosecute the war: “And Samuel arose and went up from Gilgal on his way, and the rest of the troops went up after Saul toward the fighting force” (1 Sam 13:15). Relinquishing power, including the dynastic power to pass on one’s authority to one’s male heirs, is difficult even for a religious virtuoso like Samuel. That competitive emotions swirl violently around the winning and losing of hereditary power seems to be the principal lesson of this episode. Samuel used his religious prestige to demoralize and deflate the person he viewed, with very little justification, as his undoer. What the author of Samuel conveys by this striking episode is how religion, even when sincerely believed, can be instrumentalized in power struggles and how political rivals can shed moral qualms about treating the sacred as just another weapon to be opportunistically deployed in a competitive struggle for prestige and power.
Saul’s next cultic failure severed the relationship between Saul and Samuel forever, this time accompanied by God’s explicit repudiation of Israel’s first anointed king. The final fracture occurred after Samuel had commanded Saul, in God’s name, to engage in a holy genocidal war of annihilation against the Amalekites. Although he dutifully killed all the Amalekites, Saul saved from the slaughter the best of the cattle and the king of the Amalekites, an act prohibited in a holy war marked by herem, which forbade the use of any spoils of war for human purposes.8 Upon hearing of Saul’s transgression, Samuel confronted him, declaring again in harsher terms God’s rejection of Saul’s kingship. After recording the stinging reproach, the narrator paints a vivid and painful scene of the parting of the ways between the scornful prophet and the devastated monarch:
And Samuel turned round to go, and Saul grasped the skirt of his cloak, and it tore. And Samuel said to him, “The LORD has torn away the kingship of Israel from you this day and given it to your fellowman, who is better than you. And, what’s more, Israel’s Eternal does not deceive and does not repent, for He is no human to repent.” (1 Sam 15:27–29)
The divine rejection of Saul was declared to be eternal, transcending, like God’s own word, all human mutability and change. In the last verse of this drama one cannot avoid sensing the bitter irony implicit in the narrator’s report that God now rued the coronation of Saul: “And Samuel saw Saul no more till his dying day, for Samuel grieved over Saul, and the LORD had repented making Saul king over Israel” (1 Sam 15:35).9 God’s everlasting commitment turns out to have been contingent and reversible, but only against Saul, not in his favor.10 Nevertheless, till his last breath Saul will doggedly seek to falsify the prophet’s dark prediction. His remaining life struggle and the utter loneliness of the futile quest to retain his hereditary throne will turn him into one of the Bible’s most tragic figures.
The poisonous seeds of insecurity and expected loss were now planted ineradicably in Saul’s soul. But rather than yielding to the inevitable and relinquishing power after being disowned by God, Saul became completely identified with his royal office. The guileless man who had acceded only reluctantly to the throne now became obsessed with keeping it. The foretelling of his deposition made him cling ever more desperately to power. The maddening cycle of paralyzing self-doubts and frenzied efforts to beat back threats to his power were magnified by Saul’s knowledge that his substitute, “who is better than you,” had already been chosen and was waiting in the wings. His rival, the one who would end Saul’s dynasty even before it passed on to the next generation, was David. And the presence of a challenger, who offered Saul’s followers reasons and incentives to abandon him, pushed Saul over the edge. So thoroughly does hereditary sovereignty captivate the one who wields it that the fearful anticipation of losing it, even for one who did not originally seek it, suffices to unhinge the mind.
We first encounter David in the chapter that follows Samuel’s terminal breach with Saul. Expressing his determination to replace Saul, God ordered Samuel to travel to Bethlehem to Jesse’s family and anoint Saul’s successor, a command to which Samuel responded with great trepidation: “How can I go? For should Saul hear, he will kill me” (1 Sam 16:2). Saul, who in his youth had to be dragged from hiding in the gear to become king, had now become a murderous threat to anyone, including the prophet, who might put his throne in jeopardy. This is how supreme power can utterly remake the man who is allowed or compelled to wield it.
To protect the prophet from Saul’s predictable fury, God suggests that Samuel pretend to be going to Bethlehem not to anoint the next king but simply to officiate over a festive ritual sacrifice to which Jesse and his family can be unobtrusively invited. Samuel adopts God’s alibi and, after fruitlessly considering Jesse’s eldest seven sons,11 has the youngest son David fetched from shepherding the herd and anoints him in the presence of his brothers. “And the spirit of the LORD gripped David from that day onward” (1 Sam 16:13).
Saul’s replacement has now been selected, and when he enters the scene he naturally appears to be a mortal rival to the sitting king. Our narrator heightens the dramatic and psychological effects of this rivalry by locating David, with virtually no transition, at the court of Saul and indeed in Saul’s innermost circle. In such intimate proximity, a lethal rivalry over supreme political power becomes entangled in a complex web of personal relationships between Saul, his family, and David. The dramatic unfolding of these familial entanglements and confrontations allows the narrator to explore in ever-greater depth how the emergence of a centralized and inheritable sovereign authority over all Israel inevitably gave rise to a ruthless and, for Saul, emotionally fraught winner-take-all struggle for power.
The Book of Samuel offers us two distinct accounts of how David, the shepherd from Bethlehem who has been secretly anointed, joined Saul’s inner court. According to the first version, Saul, a doomed king holding desperately onto power, sank into a dizzying depression. He had been rejected by the prophet who anointed him and informed that a more talented and lovable rival had been picked to replace him. To relieve the king’s chronic melancholy, David was brought to Saul by his servants because of his reputation as a skilled lyre player. David’s music had a comforting effect on Saul, exorcising his evil demons, and we are told that “Saul loved him greatly” (1 Sam 16:21). This particular way of introducing David to the court emphasizes Saul’s emotional dependency on David. That Saul’s mood swings were controlled by David’s music foreshadows the way that Saul’s emotional life will be defined by his struggle with David. Saul will vacillate uncontrollably between a bitter hatred toward his rival and a loving recognition of him as almost an adopted son.
In the second account of how David joined Saul’s court, David was brought into Saul’s inner court not through David’s soothing musical gifts but due to his heroic and ambitious qualities. According to this account, Saul first became aware of David when David the young shepherd was dispatched by his father to carry supplies to his older brothers, soldiers in Saul’s army facing the Philistines in the Elah valley. While the two armies stood confronting one another, Israel’s army was challenged by Goliath the Philistine to select a man willing to fight him in single combat to determine the outcome of the battle. Upon hearing Goliath’s challenge to Israel and the prize that was promised by the king to the one who would dare fight Goliath, David volunteered to face the giant and was brought before the skeptical king. David’s confidence and ambition and the paralysis of the rest of the troops ultimately convinced Saul to allow the young shepherd to fight.12 After David resoundingly defeated Goliath, he joined Saul’s court, becoming one of the king’s leading and most trusted officers.
David had a meteoric rise at court. His charisma was irresistible. Saul loved David, Saul’s children Jonathan and Michal loved David, and so did all Israel and Judah. In stark contrast to the politically reluctant Saul, David is depicted in the narrative as ambitious and completely at ease on center stage. Over time, the insecure and melancholy king began to perceive David’s rising popularity as a threat. As often occurs under the pressure of such emotions, a single incident brought Saul’s latent hostility and jealousy to a boil:
And it happened when they came, when David returned from striking down the Philistine, that the women came out from all the towns of Israel in song and dance, to greet Saul the king with timbrels and jubilation and lutes. And the celebrant women called out and said, “Saul has struck down his thousands and David his tens of thousands!” And Saul was very incensed, and this thing was evil in his eyes, and he said, “To David they have given tens of thousands and to me they have given the thousands. The next thing he’ll have is the kingship.” And Saul kept a suspicious eye on David from that day hence. (1 Sam 18:6–8)
Saul had not conspired to become king. But now, driven by compulsive suspicion and fear, Saul started plotting to retain the throne, in defiance of Samuel’s prophecy, by first covertly and then overtly compassing David’s murder. It is in exploring Saul’s desperate efforts to maintain the power previously thrust upon him, and thereby dramatizing the psychological grip that supreme political authority exercises over its wielder, that the author of Samuel returns to another one of the deepest and most problematic features of political life—a specific form of self-defeating instrumentalization. In detailing the rise and rule of two very different kings, our author reveals the theoretically fascinating connection between treating ends as means and treating means as ends. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this is arguably one the Book of Samuel’s central themes and perhaps the one most resonant with political life as we continue to experience it today.
By refusing to acknowledge moral restrictions on legitimate methods for eliminating rivals who threaten to lure away their military and political supporters, seekers and wielders of sovereign authority end up using the power they have been granted for the welfare of the community for the hollow purpose of clinging to political power for its own sake. This theme emerges with unforgettable force in one of Saul’s plots to have David killed. Saul heard that his second daughter, Michal, was in love with David, setting in motion a protracted and complex plot: “And Michal the daughter of Saul loved David, and they told Saul, and the thing was pleasing in his eyes. And Saul thought, ‘I shall give her to him, that she may be a snare to him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him.’” And Saul commanded his servants:
“Thus shall you say to David: ‘The king has no desire for any bride price except a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take vengeance against the king’s enemies.’” And Saul had devised to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. And Saul’s servants told these words to David, and the thing was pleasing in David’s eyes, to become son-in-law to the king. And the time was not done, when David arose and went, he and his men, and he struck down among the Philistines two hundred men, and David brought their foreskins and made a full count to the king, to become son-in-law to the king, and Saul gave him Michal his daughter as wife. And Saul saw and marked that the LORD was with David, and Michal the daughter of Saul loved him. And Saul was all the more afraid of David, and Saul became David’s constant enemy. (1 Sam 18:21–29)
In the plan that Saul devised, Michal’s uncalculating love became bait to lure her beloved to his death. Saul, we are told, was pleased to hear of his daughter’s love of David, though he was not happy in a way we would expect a father uninvolved in a lethal contest for power to be. Instead, he connived to use her unscripted love in a plot to eliminate his rival to the throne. The Philistines would savagely resist, he naturally assumed, and David would be the one to die. The narrative emphasizes Michal’s intensely vulnerable condition by its unprecedented ascription of love of a woman for a man. As Robert Alter notes, it is the first and only time in biblical literature that a woman is described as loving a man.13 That his daughter would be devastated if his scheme succeeded didn’t enter Saul’s calculus in any way. Whatever paternal affection he may have felt for his female child was as nothing compared to his desire to maintain power for himself and his male descendants. He had no qualms about using Michal’s wholly noninstrumental love as one more instrument to deploy in his ultimately futile attempt to retain his hereditary crown.
The plot might possibly have succeeded. This is because Saul, who by now understood the workings of ambition and lust for power, was certain that David, too, would not hesitate to use Michal’s love as an instrument to serve ends of his own. And this assumption proved correct. Here too, as in the rest of the narrative, David’s inner life, as Robert Alter pointed out, is meticulously kept opaque.14 While detailing how everyone was enamored of David, the narrator avoids mentioning anything about David’s own feelings. Jonathan loved him deeply. But did David love Jonathan? Did he love Michal? We don’t know. Opaqueness is intrinsic to the mystique of charisma. Screening David’s subjective intentions and sentiments from the reader’s view is one of the ways in which the genius of our author constructed David’s aura. But the general illegibility of David’s motives did not prevent Saul from foreseeing that David, too, would have no qualms about using Michal’s love as a stepping-stone to power. A royal marriage would presumably enhance his legitimacy in the future. In his dialogue with Saul’s servants, David, always the astute tactician, refrained from openly flaunting his eagerness to marry into the royal family. But Saul understood that this apparent reserve had been merely a subtle ploy. They both wished to use Michal, although David aimed to use her to forge a political alliance, while Saul schemed to use her to murder the man she loved.15 While David’s way of treating Michal instrumentally was typical for traditional societies, Saul’s way was morally depraved. As it turned out, in any case, David won this round, delivering twofold the requested hundred foreskins and obtaining thereby a legal connection to the king’s household that would abet his unspoken ambition to succeed Saul on the throne.
In its essence, love is a noninstrumental relationship. The other whom you love is not solely a means to your end. You care for the beloved person for his or her own sake. Yet Saul’s treatment of his daughter as an instrument in a plot to kill her beloved violated the protection that parental love is supposed to grant. Michal’s story epitomizes the problem of instrumentalizing essentially noninstrumental relations, since it concerns the way in which the quest for power corrupts its wielders and seekers to the point of debasing love itself. Uninhibited political instrumentalization, our author implies, spreads its poisonous reach into what should be the most secure fabric of human relations—the father’s love for his children.16
II
In multiple ways, David’s character is portrayed as diametrically opposed to Saul’s. Without wishing to simplify or flatten the complex portrayals of both, we can say that Saul is generally self-doubting, unambitious, and insecure, while David is generally entitled, ambitious, and self-assured. While Saul is perpetually tormented, prone to panic, and transparent, David is unfalteringly cool, calculating, and opaque. Such a clash of human personalities undoubtedly adds to the quality and richness of the narrative, but more importantly, it provides the author with another perspective from which to explore sovereign power when wielded by political personae with radically different dispositions.
Our emphasis thus far has been on the various ways in which our author explores the double reversal at the core of politics: turning means into ends and ends into means. This double reversal is a central feature of the reigns of both Saul and David. But the Saul/David contrast serves to uncover a third poignant theme, whereby this double reversal, in David’s case, results in an irreducible ambiguity of political motivation and political action. A deeper look into the contrast between Israel’s first two kings is necessary before we can fully unpack that third theme.
Unlike Saul, David is portrayed as a figure at home with power. He is controlled and confident—a resilient, effective, and charismatic warrior. The sharp differences between the two are already clearly etched by the way each initially steps into the story. David springs into the narrative as a young shepherd who has single-handedly killed both lion and bear while protecting his flock and who has now volunteered in the presence of more experienced yet intimidated warriors to protect the Israelite nation by facing the giant Goliath in single combat. This debut sets him apart from Saul, who first appears as a young man sent by his father to locate some stray asses and who, wholly against his will, was anointed king. It was perhaps this contrast that, among other factors, fueled Saul’s jealous rage.17 Power seemed to come too easily to David; he wore it lightly, without sweating. Saul wished to be like him but was unable to do so. The seeming effortlessness of David’s rise was yet another reason why an often-struggling monarch became utterly obsessed with destroying a challenger with whom he could not compete in personal adroitness and charisma.
Saul’s flailing efforts to maintain his and his dynasty’s claim to the throne, in the face of God’s decision to the contrary, led to stark raving madness. One of the essential features of the condition of madness is psychic exposure. A mad person sheds the thin layer that ordinarily masks the chaos of inner life from the outside observer. He walks in the world stripped of the psychological skin with which the “sane” shield themselves. Saul’s transparent state of mind was thus an expression of his derangement. His uncontrolled rage precipitated a dissolving of the boundaries of the self. This psychological disintegration is depicted, in a stroke of genius by our author, as an episode of ecstasy: “And on the next day, an evil spirit of God seized Saul and he went into a frenzy within the house when David was playing as he was wont to, and the spear was in Saul’s hand. And Saul cast the spear, thinking, ‘Let me strike through David into the wall.’ And David eluded him twice” (1 Sam 18:10–11). In the Hebrew original, the description of Saul’s state of mind “went into frenzy” is conveyed by the verb “va-yitnabe,” which literally means “and he prophesied.” Prophecy, at times, is a condition of ecstasy in which the boundaries of the self are effaced to give way to the word of God that will overwhelm the prophet.18 Music, too, sometimes has the effect of dissolving the rigidly bounded self and may therefore lead to ecstasy. But Saul’s “prophetic” loss of self occurred despite the music David was playing to soothe him. In that state, resembling ecstatic prophecy, what entered Saul’s torn and unshielded self was not God’s word but rather a convulsive furor that drove Saul deliriously to attempt to murder David with his own hand.
As already mentioned, obsessional efforts to attain and maintain political power can easily become self-defeating. Among the many self-defeating dimensions of power politics epitomized in the life of the heroes of Samuel, the way in which the unconcealed pursuit of power undermines the very aura of power stands out. In one short and rather peculiar incident, the narrative drives the relationship among loss of self, ecstasy, and exposure to an extreme manifestation. The incident occurs as David takes his first steps as a wanted fugitive seeking refuge. Having been threatened several times at the court of Saul, David realized that he had no chance of surviving in immediate proximity to the king and his loyalists. In his last night at the court, David saved his own life in a hurried escape with the aid of his devoted Michal, and he sought refuge at the home of the prophet Samuel, who had earlier anointed him as the future king:
And David had fled and gotten away and had come to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done to him. And he, and Samuel with him, went and stayed at Naioth. And it was told to Saul, saying, “Look, David is at Naioth in Ramah.” And Saul sent messengers to take David, and they saw a band of prophets in ecstasy with Samuel standing poised over them, and the spirit of God came upon Saul’s messengers and they, too, went into ecstasy. And they told Saul and he sent other messengers and they, too, went into ecstasy. And Saul still again sent a third set of messengers, and they too, went into ecstasy. And he himself went to Ramah, and he came as far as the great cistern which is in Secu, and he asked and said, “Where are Samuel and David?” And someone said, “Here, at Naioth in Ramah.” And he went there, to Naioth in Ramah, and the spirit of God came upon him, too, and he walked along speaking in ecstasy until he came to Naioth in Ramah. And he, too, stripped off his clothes, and he, too, went into ecstasy before Samuel and lay naked all that day and all that night. (1 Sam 19:18–24)
The king of Israel lay naked in an ecstatic state, stripped of his aura, exposed and incapacitated in front of the prophet and the rival he was desperately plotting to destroy. The verb that captures Saul’s ecstatic state of mind in this passage—“to prophesy”—is the same verb that was used in the description of Saul’s murderous rage. It signifies the unraveling of the self that is shared by both states. The frenzied attempt to hold onto power made Saul internally powerless. Naked and therefore stripped of the regalia of power, his manic breakdown was an outcome of the corrosive effects of this pursuit. Lying naked and dispossessed of all the marks of authority, Saul’s personal weakness and emotional breakdown became manifest. That kind of mental collapse, in its extreme forms, is displayed in two ways—in an incapacity to hide one’s inner life culminating in the dissolving of the boundaries of the self, and in a radical vacillation of moods and attitudes, caused by a hypersensitivity associated with psychic overexposure and the unraveling of one’s personality. The reigning king was afflicted with undefended transparency and vertiginous emotional instability.
III
As Saul is exposed, so David is opaque. David’s enigmatic disposition presents another and deeper perspective on the double reversal of means and ends, one that our author explores through the narrative of David’s political trajectory from fugitive to king. In David’s case, unlike Saul’s, the instrumentalization of what should not be instrumentalized is repeatedly suggested without ever being explicitly underscored. David’s disciplined and savvy self-restraint open an ambiguous field of action liable to different interpretations, as the voluminous and constantly growing secondary literature shows. But one thing seems clear. David is the master of walking the fine line between innocence and manipulation. The author of the Book of Samuel is less interested in deciding on which side of the line to locate David than in showing what it is to walk that fine line: what it means to defend one’s power by exploiting ambiguity, and by fostering a habitual uncertainty in public perceptions of one’s underlying character and motivations.
Attempts to unmask David as nothing but a cynical opportunist fail to do justice to the many ambiguities woven artfully into his story. But it would also be naive to locate David wholly on the side of innocence, piety, and saintliness. He was a thoroughly political being operating in a violently competitive environment. Evading Saul’s attempts on his life and then going on to seize and maintain royal power were essential to his identity as an immensely shrewd and slippery survivor, not simply the fulfillment of a divinely ordained mission. The author of the Book of Samuel narrates some incidents early in David’s political life that reveal his capacity to manipulate the situation to save himself while forcing others to pay the ultimate price. One such incident is described in detail when David, while fleeing Saul’s court, still lacked a power base of his own. He arrived alone, unarmed, and with no supplies at the sanctuary of Nob, not far from Saul’s court:
And David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest, and Ahimelech trembled to meet David and said to him, “Why are you alone and no one is with you?” And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a mission, and said to me, ‘Let no one know a thing of the mission on which I send you and with which I charge you.’ And the lads I have directed to such and such a place. And now, what do you have at hand, five loaves of bread? Give them to me, or whatever there is.” And the priest answered David and said, “I have no common bread at hand, solely consecrated bread, if only the lads have kept themselves from women.” And David answered the priest and said to him, “Why, women are taboo to us as in times gone by when I sallied forth, and the lads’ gear was consecrated, even if it was a common journey, and how much more so now the gear should be consecrated.” And the priest gave him what was consecrated, for there was no bread there except the Bread of the Presence that had been removed from before the LORD to be replaced with warm bread when it was taken away. And there a man of Saul’s servants that day was detained before the LORD, and his name was Doeg the Edomite, chief of the herdsmen who were Saul’s. And David said to Ahimelech, “Don’t you have here at hand a spear or a sword? For neither my sword nor my gear have I taken with me, for the king’s mission was urgent.” And the priest said, “The sword of Goliath the Philistine whom you struck down in the Valley of the Terebinth, here it is, wrapped in a cloak behind the ephod. If this you would take for yourself, take it, for there is none other but it hereabouts.” And David said, “There’s none like it. Give it to me.” (1 Sam 21:2–10)
Shocked and apprehensive to see David, a high-ranking officer of the king, traveling alone, Ahimelech was misled by David’s improvised claim to have been sent on an undercover mission by Saul. By making Ahimelech a partner to an alleged state secret, David prevented the priest from double-checking the reliability of his information, since any attempt at verification might well have constituted a dangerous disclosure. Here our author reveals another deep truth about political power. The concealed realm that inevitably accompanies power politics unavoidably allows and even invites deception, crime, and cunning. By invoking the excuse of state secrets, nominally subordinate and obedient political agents can behave in unmonitored and unaccountable ways, because investigating the sincerity of their claims and plans could rend the veil of secrecy that is always presumed to be necessary—because it sometimes really is. Manipulated into supplying David with food and arms, Ahimelech became an inadvertent accomplice to a crime, helping an aspiring usurper escape the punitive hand of the established authorities.
As in many such cases, one lie does not suffice. Pushed by the circumstances at the sanctuary, David had to add other layers of deception, this time instrumentalizing not only the priest’s discreet respect for state secrets but the sacred itself. The priest, we are told, had only consecrated bread at his disposal and worried about defiling it. David, who needed the whole of the supply for his escape, fabricated the existence of a group of lads who were waiting for him in another place due to the secrecy of his mission, and he vouched as well for their state of ritual purity. The priest’s anxiety was assuaged by the two lies—David is a loyal officer of the king on a clandestine mission, and his entourage is waiting at an undisclosed location in a state of purity. Cozened by these untruths, Ahimelech handed David the consecrated bread.19
The sacred is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp. Yet sacredness has a constant and essential feature. Like love, the sacred is essentially noninstrumental. It is the realm that is normatively protected from human manipulation and use. For example, in describing the sacredness of the synagogue structure, the Mishnah says that one cannot use its space as a shortcut between two streets; its territory can’t be utilized or manipulated for human purposes.20 The deceptive acquisition of the consecrated bread was therefore another boundary that was transgressed by David, who was driven, by a winner-take-all political competition in which the alternative to victory is death, to embrace without compunction the uninhibited instrumentalization of that which, viewed morally, should never be instrumentalized.
In making the priest complicit in his escape, David put Ahimelech’s life at risk, and this maneuver, while arguably saving David’s life, proved scandalously fatal for the priest. In the midst of the dialogue between David and the priest, the narrator reveals an important fact that will have a grave impact on the fate of Ahimelech and his family. Doeg, a member of Saul’s court who happened at the time to be in the temple, had witnessed the entire affair firsthand. Doeg’s testimony to Saul of what occurred at the sanctuary will lead directly to the massacre of the priests of Nob. In the next chapter we will provide a close reading of the section in the narrative that describes the barbarous crime against the innocent priests, but one detail is worth mentioning already here. When Abiathar, the only survivor of that massacre, informed David of the grim fate of the priests at Nob, David admitted that he had been fully aware of the presence of Doeg at the sanctuary and of exactly what it would entail: “And David said to Abiathar, ‘I knew on that day that Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul. I am the one who caused the loss of all the lives of your father’s house. Stay with me. Do not fear, for whoever seeks my life seeks your life, so you are under my guard’” (1 Sam 22:22–23). David could have excused his manipulation of Ahimelech by presuming that Doeg would keep quiet, or that in the event that he didn’t maintain his silence, Ahimelech would survive by telling Saul that he had been deceived by David. But David already “knew on that day” that neither excuse would hold. With his life and therefore his divinely promised accession to the throne at stake, David naturally refused to tell Ahimelech the truth and give him the option to judge for himself if he wished to assume such risk. Here we return to the Book of Samuel’s systematically ambiguous perspective on politics as a sphere of action driven by necessity but suffused with haunting compromises. David made Ahimelech a disposable instrument of his survival at a morally unconscionable and politically typical human cost.
Summoning the courage to confront a giant in single combat may be easier than overcoming an innate sense of entitlement or belief in one’s providential mission, however steep the cost to others. In narrating the incident at the temple of Nob, our author established the fact that David, an exemplary seeker of political power, felt no scruples about sending his fellow Israelites to their unjust deaths, although he retrospectively acknowledged their descendants’ right to some form of compensation. The way David’s motivations and character are shaped by his competitive struggle for sovereign authority is revealed in the early stages of his flight from Saul’s court. David’s unsqueamish act of throwing Ahimelech and the priests of Nob to the wolves will cast a shadow of doubt over other more ambiguous moments in the narrative to come, enabling our author to develop a deeper phenomenology of political motivation, agency, and self-presentation.
IV
A central moral and political dilemma of the Book of Samuel is rooted in the dynamics of inherited kingship. The logic of dynastic monarchy defines the field of systematic ambiguity in which Samuel’s power-seekers and power-wielders necessarily operate and interact. The monopoly of sovereign authority by a single house or lineage not only gives rise to a lethal winner-take-all struggle for supremacy; it also creates, as we now want to show, the fluid line between innocence and manipulation that David skillfully treads. The Book of Samuel contains a story of two dynasties, Saul’s and David’s, the second replacing the first. In line with the logic of dynastic structures, a usurper of monarchical power cannot permit any members of the previous dynasty to survive. This is a bitter but inescapable rule. If they live, survivors of the ousted dynasty will provide a dangerous rallying point for social forces discontent with the ruling family. Survivors will be resentful troublemakers, constantly conspiring against the upstart family who expropriated their hereditary rights. Any moment of public dissatisfaction with the new king will rekindle their latent hopes for a restoration. It is no wonder that Jonathan, Saul’s own son, who loved David and accepted him as the future king, was haunted by the possibility of both his own death and his descendants’ extirpation at the hands of David. He even made David swear an oath to alleviate this fear:
“and the LORD shall be with you [David] as He was with my father [Saul]. Would that while I am still alive you may keep the LORD’S faith with me, that I not die, and that you do not cut off your faithfulness from my house for all time … For Jonathan has sealed a pact with the house of David and the LORD shall requite it from the hand of David.” (1 Sam 20:13–16)
In the end, David kept only the letter but not the spirit of this sacred oath. Yet David’s reputation required its basic violation to be shrouded in ambiguity. Indeed, the detailed account of David’s efforts to control his public image, both before and after he becomes king, is a striking feature of the Book of Samuel. It is no exaggeration to say that the principal question raised by our author’s tale of two warring dynasties is this: How can David replace Saul without being blamed for regicide and without bloodying his hands with the politically unavoidable extinction of Saul’s descendants?
Regicide and the destruction of the former king’s family conform to the logic of dynastic monarchy, but raise a religious as well as moral problem: since the king was anointed by a prophet, neither tribal leaders nor the assembled people but God alone should enthrone his replacement. But the transfer of the crown from one family to another poses a dilemma for realpolitik as well. By committing regicide and organizing the extinction of a rival house, the new king runs the risk that he will be widely disparaged as a criminal usurper rather than as a genuinely legitimate monarch. Toppling a ruling dynasty, moreover, sets a dangerous precedent, potentially easing the way for future regicides and bloody depositions. Wielding sovereign authority is dangerous, above all, because supreme power is an irresistible magnet attracting ruthless competition from ambitious and talented rivals to its exercise. Indeed, the essentially contested or fought-over nature of sovereign power is one of the Book of Samuel’s basic themes. Gaining such power through violence and murder can easily invite emulation. The very usurper who succeeds in extinguishing the line of the previous monarch risks becoming the next ex-king whose person and family are mercilessly rubbed out.
Saul and his family had to die. But David, aspiring to become not merely Israel’s de facto ruler but also its legitimate monarch, made heroic efforts to disassociate himself from regicide and dynasticide. After he acceded to the throne, moreover, he went out of his way to publicize his noninvolvement in the piecemeal obliteration of Saul’s descendants and former power base. The most remarkable example of the political deftness with which David dissociated himself from his predecessor’s fall from power occurred at the cave in the Judean desert.
David had already been a fugitive for some time, hunted like a wild animal by Saul and his troops. He had gathered some men around him, consisting of his close loyal family and other shady characters who, like David, were fleeing the law. His “army” was but a band of six hundred men skulking along the desert borders of the Judean land in untamed, inaccessible terrain. Apprised of David’s location at En-gedi, Saul organized an expedition to reach David and kill him. When Saul’s forces approached Engedi, where David had been reported to be ensconced, David and his men were hiding in the depths of a cave nearby. By chance, Saul entered this very cave to relieve himself, and David’s men begged permission to seize the occasion and kill the fortuitously unprotected king, thereby ridding themselves once and for all of their tenacious pursuer.
Refusing to allow such a perfidious stab-in-the-back and indeed holding his men in check, David decided instead to cut off the skirt of Saul’s cloak. It was a symbolic act of destruction aimed at the king’s vesture, and David made sure to express regret even for this minimally invasive and seemingly impulsive act:
And it happened then that David was smitten with remorse because he had cut off the skirt of the cloak that was Saul’s. And he said to his men, “The LORD forbid me, that I should have done this thing to my master, the LORD’S anointed, to reach out my hand against him, for he is the LORD’S anointed” (1 Sam 24:6–7).
Being himself one of God’s anointed, David carefully instructed his loyalists that the anointed are hedged with divinity and must never be injured in any way. To illustrate David’s respect for this political-theological prohibition, Saul was allowed to exit the cave alive. At this point, in a daring move, David followed him into the open, running a risk that might well have cost him his own life and the lives of his men. In order to rebut in advance suspicions that he might conceivably conspire to commit regicide, he shouted out to Saul:
“My lord, the king!” And Saul looked behind him, and David knelt, his face to the ground, and bowed down. And David said to Saul, “Why should you listen to people’s words, saying, ‘Look, David seeks to harm you’? Look, this day your eyes have seen that the LORD has given you into my hand in the cave, and they said to kill you, and I had compassion for you and said, ‘I will not reach out my hand against my master, for he is the LORD’S anointed.’ And, my father, see, yes, see the skirt of your cloak in my hand, for when I cut off the skirt of your cloak and did not kill you, mark and see that there was no evil or crime in my hand and I did not offend you, yet you stalk me to take my life. Let the LORD judge between me and you, and the LORD will avenge me of you, but my hand will not be against you…. The LORD will be arbiter and judge between me and you, that He may see and plead my case and judge me against you.” (1 Sam 24:9–17)
Although he purportedly regretted having cut off the skirt of Saul’s cloak at the cave, David put the clipped vestige to an impressive political use, exhibiting to Saul and the onlooking soldiery his innocent intentions, a state of mind that would otherwise have been hidden unobservably within his own conscience and thus impossible to prove to skeptics. By exhibiting the skirt, David demonstrated that Saul’s life had been David’s to end, and that David had honorably refused.21 In the event, this outward badge of David’s inner innocence, as well as his willingness to expose his own life to Saul’s wrath, also disarmed the vacillating Saul, whose chronically unstable attitude suddenly flipped from homicidal rage to heartfelt love: “And it happened when David had finished speaking these words to Saul, that Saul said, ‘Is this your voice, my son, David?’ And Saul raised his voice and wept” (1 Sam 24:17). David’s artful display of his own innocent intentions, combined with his warning that God would punish Saul for trying to kill the anointed successor, brought Saul to acknowledge momentarily that David would indeed be the future king, but also led him, conscious as he was of the ruthless logic of dynastic replacement, to beseech David to let his descendants live:
“And so, look, I know that you will surely be king and that the kingship of Israel will stay in your hands. And now, swear to me by the LORD, that you shall not cut off my seed after me and that you shall not blot out my name from my father’s house.” And David swore to Saul, and Saul went home while David and his men went up to the stronghold (1 Sam 24:21–23).
One question posed by these verses is the degree to which genuine moral and religious beliefs, including a pious expectation that God alone will judge and depose Saul, motivated David’s decision to refrain from taking the king’s life. An obvious alternative is that his behavior at En-gedi was driven by political expediency. On this account, he conformed to publicly accepted norms of behavior solely to bolster his own future legitimacy.22 To the extent that the double reversal of ends and means dominates the political life of those who aim to seize and hold power, morality itself becomes a matter of tactics. The tactical dimension of such seemingly moral behavior is stressed by its patently contrived publicity.
Yet for those engaged in an implacable winner-take-all struggle for dynastic kingship, where the choice comes down to killing or being killed, the very distinction between the moral and the instrumental, so important to those of us uninvolved in power politics, may effectively disappear. This is especially likely for an entitled or pre-anointed power-seeker like David, who probably viewed his accession to the throne as a divine calling. Did he view the regicide taboo as a genuine norm to be religiously obeyed or as a hollow slogan to be publicly eulogized and privately ignored? Or were moral and instrumental ways of thinking conjoined in his mind? It is impossible to say. What is clear is that David wanted his personal horror at regicide to be publicly notorious, to be dramatized in a much talked about public spectacle.23 Needless to say, the public cannot look directly into the hearts and minds of their rulers. Private motivations may or may not diverge significantly from public justifications. Observers can never be totally sure. Moreover, political actions remain irreducibly ambiguous in an objective sense as well. The human mind is a tangled skein and thus the motives of human beings, including those of powerful men, are always mixed. Downplaying both the inscrutability and inherent ambivalence of political motivations is the most common mistake made by the many interpreters who cast the Samuel author as a facile debunker and unmasker. Cynical or “Machiavellian” readings of David’s conduct are not wholly implausible, of course. The tendency to treat relationships and moral norms instrumentally in the effort to grab and keep power does cast a shadow of duplicity over all political actions, including the winner-take-all dynastic struggle between David and Saul. Even morally good actions can be performed for exclusively instrumental reasons. Arguably, no genuinely political act can avoid raising suspicions in this regard. But this is far from being our author’s last word on the motives of would-be kings.
Both the calculatingly public way in which David distances himself from Saul’s fall from power and the fine line between morality and tactics that the psychologically opaque David carefully toes accompany David’s career as Saul and his dynasty are gradually annihilated. David was not directly or demonstrably implicated in Saul’s and Jonathan’s deaths. Saul’s three sons, including Jonathan, were killed in the war against the Philistines at the mountain of Gilboa. Encircled by enemy troops, Saul committed suicide by falling on his sword. The messenger who brought David the news of Israel’s defeat and Saul’s and Jonathan’s deaths, however, committed a fatal mistake. He assumed that David’s palpable interest in eliminating a rival dynasty would make him willing to gloat publicly about the deaths of its leading members. He wanted to ingratiate himself with David by bringing news that both Saul and Jonathan had expired in the battle. In order to magnify his status in David’s eyes, the messenger even claimed that he had personally delivered the final blow to the dying Saul. So he brought to David Saul’s regalia, his diadem and band. But David, upon hearing what had happened, did not celebrate.24 On the contrary, in a consciously public display of lamentation, he tore his clothes. After interrogating the messenger, who happened to be an Amalekite foreigner, he asked him rhetorically: “How were you not afraid to reach out your hand to do violence to the LORD’S anointed?” (2 Sam 1:14). And immediately following this harsh rebuke, David ordered the messenger’s execution, thereby memorializing his own noninvolvement in Saul’s death and simultaneously reaffirming that no one can ever be allowed to touch God’s anointed.
David’s lament and his execution of the messenger may have been sincere, genuine, pious, and moral. But David’s earlier behavior during the fatal war itself raises nagging although ultimately unanswerable questions about his motivations. For some time prior to the war, in order to protect himself from Saul, the fugitive David had adopted the last-resort option: going over to the enemy’s side. Being hunted even in the more remote redoubts of Judah, David offered his services as the chief of a guerrilla band to Achish, the Philistine king of Gat, thus obtaining shelter in a domain beyond Israel’s jurisdiction. It took a rather complex maneuver on David’s part to cultivate Achish’s trust while avoiding overtly hostile actions against Israel. David’s band repeatedly raided desert tribes at the southern extremes of Philistine’s territory while pretending that the spoils they brought from their raids came from attacks on Israel’s villages and towns. Having enlisted as a mercenary in the Philistine’s army, however, David was presumptively obliged to join the military campaign against Israel, the very campaign that led to the war in which Saul and his sons were killed: “And the Philistines gathered all their camps at Aphek, while Israel was encamped by the spring in Jezreel. And the Philistine overlords were advancing with hundreds and with thousands, and David and his men were advancing at the rear with Achish” (1 Sam 29:1–2). Although he had gained the trust of Achish, David was saved at the last moment from engaging in actual combat against Israel due to the suspicions of other Philistine commanders who demanded that David and his men be removed from the battlefield. They didn’t want a former Israelite hero, of dubious loyalty, fighting at their side against his own people. Achish was careful to assure David that he personally trusted him completely and that David was being kept off the battlefield only because of pressure from unduly mistrustful Philistine commanders. Angling to solidify Achish’s trust, David protested his removal from the front and was sent back south to engage in his own battles, while the Israelites were defeated by the Philistines at the mountains of Gilboa where Saul and his three sons died. The narrator does not say what David would have done if he had not been granted that last-minute reprieve from the battle. Would he have fought against his people to save his own skin? We are not told, and the silence is deafening.25 All we know for certain is that, in his dealings with Achish, David is consistently portrayed as a master of masking his intentions.
Although David managed to avoid being involved in the war against Israel, his absence from the war, his playing it safe as a passive bystander while his people and king were defeated, raises obviously disturbing questions.26 David’s sin of omission might possibly have been excused given his ongoing struggle to survive Saul’s attempts to have him killed. Yet the narrator, deftly calibrating the scene, left open the possibility that, through his absence from the crucial final battle, David intentionally facilitated Israel’s defeat in order to seize the throne without being implicated in the deaths of Saul and his sons. The role played by contrived alibis and plausible deniability in David’s long political career is too persistent to be entirely accidental. Yet David’s moving lament for Jonathan and Saul is ultimately impossible to disambiguate. His mourning may have been a politically expedient way of covering his distance from the battlefront, after the fact, with a patina of grief. Or, alternatively, it might reflect a genuine sorrow felt, despite his mortal rivalry with Saul, when told of their deaths. Sorrow and expediency may be thoroughly intertwined within David’s mind, moreover, so that both could be motivating his response simultaneously. Disentangling such mixed motives is beyond the capacity of outside observers, as our author makes clear. But that is no reason to conclude that David himself, with all the advantages of introspection, would know for certain what drove him to act the way he did. The rich and tangled complexity of David’s character, which accompanies all his public and private actions throughout his long career, powerfully resists all simplistic unmasking.
What cannot be denied is that morally unsavory actions necessary to consolidate David’s power are performed by others, while he, although benefiting royally from such misdeeds, always manages to maintain an aseptic distance from them. The fate of Saul’s legitimate heirs after the deaths of Saul and his sons in battle is the most noteworthy example. To gain a fuller picture of these processes, we need to develop a more detailed account of the events that transpired in the wake of Saul’s death.
After the Israelites were defeated by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa, David proceeded immediately to seize the throne of Judah as a stepping-stone to replacing Saul as king of a united Israel, transferring his band to Hebron, the central city of the tribe of Judah. This was politically the proper place to launch a bid to replace Saul, since Judah was David’s tribe and served as his power base. Because the rest of Israel’s tribes remained residually loyal to the house of Saul, a civil war ensued between David’s followers and Saul loyalists. Saul’s dynastic stronghold was the tribe of Benjamin, and the Saulide faction was led by Abner, Saul’s cousin and the commander of his army. After the battlefield deaths of Saul and three of his sons, Abner enthroned Ish-bosheth, Saul’s remaining son, as a kind of a puppet king over Israel. An all-out civil war between rival dynasties ensued. On David’s side, the war was led by his three nephews—Joab, Abishai, and Asahel, the sons of David’s sister Zeruiah. Joab, the oldest among them, emerged as David’s lead henchman and most powerful general. He will play a complex and decisive role in David’s future political life.
In one of the skirmishes of the civil war, while Abner’s men were beating a retreat, Asahel, the youngest of the Zeruiah brothers, was pursuing Abner on foot. Abner recognized Asahel and pleaded with him to give up the chase, since Abner, being a more experienced warrior, didn’t want to kill Asahel, knowing that such an act would entangle him in a risky blood feud with Asahel’s brother, Joab. But Asahel persisted in the pursuit, and Abner, who was left with little choice, killed the young man to save himself. Thus did the political rivalry between Judah and Benjamin become a matter of family honor. When Asahel was killed, Joab became morally obliged by the logic of the feud to avenge his brother’s blood.
Slowly, David gained an upper hand in the civil war, and his cause was considerably advanced by a rift that opened up inside what remained of Saul’s household. Being the strongman at court, Abner took Saul’s concubine to himself, an act that symbolically implied entitlement to Saul’s power. Ish-bosheth, the weak king of Israel, reproached Abner for appropriating Saul’s concubine and thereby signaling his aspiration to the throne. As a result, Abner, resentful at what he considered lack of gratitude for his service to Ish-bosheth, decided to transfer his loyalties to David. Ish-bosheth’s personal insult might have sufficed to motivate such a dramatic shift of alliances. But it is more likely that Abner’s decision was prompted by his understanding that David was on the verge of prevailing in the civil war and that he needed to ensure his own future by attaching himself to the probable victor. Abner then began persuading the tribe of Benjamin to accept David’s kingship, coming to Hebron to seal the bargain that would make David the king over all Israel. After Abner left Hebron, Joab, returning from a military expedition, received the news that such a deal had been brokered and that Abner, having completed the negotiations, was on his way back north. Apparently keen to avenge his brother’s killing, Joab was ostensibly angered by the fact that David, rather than arresting Abner for a blood crime against a kinsman, had let him go scotfree. So he sent messengers to bring Abner back to Hebron and, craftily pretending to be his ally in line with the new alliance, Joab caught Abner off guard and took his life.
Joab’s killing of Abner provides yet another perspective on the problem of treating instrumentally that which should not be instrumentalized. Revenge in a blood feud is a sacred obligation that, like love, is supposed to be noninstrumental. It is a sacred duty owed to the deceased by his relatives, who are morally responsible for avenging his death. And yet Joab, while killing his brother’s killer, was simultaneously and consciously eliminating a potential rival who might have undermined his status at David’s court. What makes the story even more complex is that Abner was a palpably ambitious schemer who had betrayed his previous weak sovereign to help raise David to the kingship over all of Israel. This opportunistic shift of loyalty had two possible implications, either of which would have sufficed to motivate Joab’s decision to eliminate Abner from the scene. On the one hand, Abner was a proven defector with royal ambitions of his own. On the other hand, if Abner proved sincerely loyal to the new king, he might have gained precedence over Joab as commander of David’s military forces.
In the drive to retain great power both the moral obligation to avenge the blood of kinsmen and the unflinching loyalty to the legitimate monarch, like love and the sacred, risk becoming dispensable means in service of political ambition. In the end, we cannot be sure about Joab’s motives. The ambiguity cannot be dissolved. Did his public justifications accurately reflect his private motivations? Or did he cynically invoke both a sacred clan obligation and a sacred duty to protect David’s throne merely for the sake of personal ambition? Or were his instrumental and moral motives conjoined rather than opposed?
We are told nothing about Abner’s own hidden calculations. But Joab’s murder of his military rival, compassed immediately after Abner had sealed a treaty with David, must have seemed to Abner’s supporters like an unforgiveable act of betrayal. It could conceivably have endangered the fragile alliance that emerged between the tribe of Benjamin and David, which was, in turn, politically essential for David’s extending his rule to include all the tribes of Israel. To manage these destabilizing repercussions, David had to take immediate measures to distance himself from the murder of Abner. Such distancing was performed by a public spectacle of mourning and grief over Abner’s death:
And David said to Joab and to all the troops who were with him, “Tear your garments and gird on sackcloth and keen for Abner.” And King David was walking behind the bier. And they buried Abner in Hebron. And the king raised his voice and wept over the grave of Abner, and all the people wept … And all the people came to give David bread to eat while it was still day, and David swore, saying, “Thus and more may God do to me, if before the sun sets I taste bread or anything at all.” And all the people took note and it was good in their eyes, all that the king had done was good in the eyes of the people. And all the people and all Israel knew on that day that it had not been from the king to put to death Abner son of Ner. (2 Sam 3:31–37)
David’s genius at neutralizing doubters and rallying public support is on full display in this passage. The degree to which the ruler’s legitimacy hinges on his ability to cleanse his public image is the more general insight being conveyed. And yet David’s grieving would have been more convincing if justice had been fully done and David had punished Joab for murdering Abner. But punishing Joab was too costly politically for a king who needed Joab’s services as his lead henchman.27 Being aware of the incongruity between the public spectacle of mourning for Abner’s death, designed to exonerate David in the eyes of Abner’s supporters, and the complete impunity granted to Abner’s killer, David offered a feeble apology to his circle: “And the king said to his servants, ‘You must know that a commander and a great man has fallen this day in Israel. And I am gentle, and just anointed king, and these sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me. May the LORD pay back the evildoer according to his evil!’” (2 Sam 3:39). David’s amply recorded ingenuity and fortitude in coping with hardships makes this protest of helplessness ring hollow. The outwardly pious reliance on God to exact condign punishment was an indirect way of stating that the demonstrably loyal Joab remained indispensable to David’s rule and was simply too valuable politically to sacrifice for the sake of justice.
When it helps consolidate rather than undermine the ruler’s hold on power, justice is much more likely to be done. Saul’s remaining son, Ish-bosheth, had been completely dependent on Abner’s capacities and support. Abner’s death therefore left him even weaker and more exposed. Eventually betrayed by two assassins, officers from his own army, the politically enfeebled Ish-bosheth was decapitated while sleeping in his bed. Opportunely for David’s public image, these assassins committed the very same mistake as the Amalekite messenger who had informed David of Saul’s battlefield death. They presented the head of Ish-bosheth to David in a bid to win his favor: “And they [the assassins] brought Ish-bosheth’s head to David in Hebron and said to the king, ‘Here is the head of Ish-bosheth son of Saul your enemy, who sought your life. The LORD has granted my lord the king vengeance this day against Saul and his seed’” (2 Sam 4:8). David responded with the requisite severity, reminding listeners of his morally upright response when faced with the Amalekite lad’s attempt to reap a reward by announcing the battlefield deaths of King Saul and his sons:
“As the LORD lives, Who saved my life from every strait, he who told me, saying ‘Look, Saul is dead,’ and thought he was a bearer of good tidings, I seized him and killed him in Ziklag instead of giving him something for his tidings. How much more so when wicked men have killed an innocent man in his house in his bed, and so, will I not requite his blood from you and rid the land of you?” (2 Sam 4:10–11)
To complete this public parade of his immaculately clean conscience, David turned the obviously just execution of the two into a brutal public spectacle: “And David commanded the lads and they killed and chopped off their hands and feet and hung them by the pool in Hebron” (2 Sam 4:12).
The last obstacle to David’s total consolidation of power over Israel was now removed. Immediately following the death of Ish-bosheth, David completed a pact with the rest of the tribes. Although the consolidation of David’s kingship was wholly dependent on the destruction of Saul’s dynasty, David had no provable role in bringing it about. Saul and three of his sons died in the war with the Philistines, Abner was killed by Joab, and Ish-bosheth was assassinated by the two foolishly miscalculating officers. By engaging each time in a highly visible act of mourning, David removed himself, in the public mind, from any connections with such events, even though he had obviously gained everything from them. Joab killed Abner, it should also be said, only after Abner had arranged for Saul’s daughter Michal, potential mother of male heirs in the Saulide line, to be returned to David’s custody where her childlessness could be assured. The timing suggests that Joab was at least partly motivated by fidelity to David’s house. In any case, Joab was not punished for his arguably counterfeit revenge killing. He was not removed from power for murdering one of Israel’s great commanders. And one still wonders how David could have stayed on the sidelines in the land of Achish while his sovereign and his people were being slain.
David’s veiled and ambivalent attitude toward the fate of Saul’s descendants is only gradually and sketchily disclosed in our narrative as David secures his kingdom, sitting safe and sound in his Jerusalem stronghold. After Saul’s family had been largely decimated, David issued the following request to locate a survivor from the family: “And David said ‘Is there anyone who is still left from the house of Saul, that I may keep faith with him for the sake of Jonathan?’” (2 Samuel 9:1). An old slave of Saul’s was sought out as a possible source of intelligence on the matter, and he informed David that Jonathan had a surviving crippled son named Mephibosheth living among Saul’s old loyalists. Brought to David’s court, Mephibosheth approached the king submissively, terrified at what could happen to him as a living remnant of the former, now-deposed dynasty. But David reassured him, restoring to him Saul’s household property that David had presumably confiscated after the destruction of Saul’s family. These comforting gestures seem completely sincere and wholehearted. Yet David added to the “favor” bestowed upon Jonathan’s son another item that sheds an ambiguous light on David’s motivations. Keeping faith, in a formal sense, with the oath he had sworn to Jonathan, David arranged for Mephibosheth to eat at his table at court and to be treated as if he were close kin to David: “And Mephibosheth dwelled in Jerusalem, for at the king’s table he would always eat” (2 Sam 9:13). Yet this apparent privilege was also a way to maintain tight control over Mephibosheth, making him a virtual prisoner in David’s court, a condition underscored by Mephibosheth’s physical immobility, “lame in both his feet” (2 Sam 9:13). In light of this move, David’s initial request, “Is there anyone who is still left from the house of Saul that I may keep faith with him for the sake of Jonathan?” acquires a harsher or at least a more ambiguous edge.28 It is true that David could have publicly justified his move to keep the last crippled remnant of Saul’s dynasty under virtual house arrest by invoking his sacred obligation to honor a promise to Jonathan. But, as we have been arguing, justification and motivation, while conceptually distinct, are not always easy or even possible to unscramble in any particular case.
Neither his subjects nor his courtiers can ever be sure that David is motivated solely by political ambition. The moral norms that he so publicly espouses may, after all, provide genuinely independent reasons for action. This irrepressible ambiguity about the underlying motivations of rulers, in fact, helps explain why their moral excuses are politically effective. If we searched for the most conspicuous example of political ambiguity in the Book of Samuel, David’s succinct question—“Is there anyone who is still left from the house of Saul that I may keep faith with him for the sake of Jonathan?”—would shine through. By having him ask this question, our author managed to convey subtly the irreducible ambiguity of David’s political motivations, capturing simultaneously his generous desire to reach out and bestow a favor, his fidelity to the letter of a sworn promise, and his determined quest to tighten his complete control over the prior dynasty by bringing its lame sole survivor to sit in perpetual custody at his table.
Throughout the narrative, as we have seen, David is artfully portrayed as a brilliantly elusive character treading the fine line between morality and tactics. In his case, the double reversal of means and ends that haunts the actions of both Saul and David produces a further characteristic feature of sovereign power. In his obstacle-strewn rise to power, David will be constantly tempted to treat instrumentally what from a moral perspective should not be instrumentalized. But our author is careful to avoid any sort of crass debunking. David’s real motives are never nakedly revealed.29 Moreover, the reason why David’s intentions remain opaque is itself uncertain. One explanation could be that his intentions are hidden by political craft. Another could be that his motives are genuinely multiple and mixed. These two powerful sources of ambiguous motivation and action remain all-pervasive throughout his rise and reign. That ambiguity is one of the most important reasons why his story speaks so directly to students of political power today.
V
In recounting a remarkable episode that occurred while David was still a fugitive and leading a guerilla band in the Judean desert, the author of the Book of Samuel introduces us to an extraordinarily astute woman who intuitively understands the essential role played by demonstrative morality in the legitimation of David’s pursuit of, and eventual accession to, royal power. Roaming desert areas at the time, David and his men are surviving on occasional in-kind payments of wool and meat granted by the owners of lands and flocks in exchange for what passes as protection of sheep and property from marauders and wild beasts. As sometimes happens with extortion rackets, one particularly proud owner refuses to comply with what he sees as an outrageous shakedown, no doubt bridling at the veiled threat wrapped in a speciously polite request. His name was Nabal and his refusal to share his wealth with David and his men was especially haughty and defiant: “Who is David and who is the son of Jesse? These days many are the slaves breaking away from their masters. And shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I slaughtered for my shearers and give it to men who come from I know not where?” (1 Sam 25:10–11).
Nabal could have justifiably argued that he never asked for the services provided by David’s armed band of drifters, that he hadn’t heard of David, and that he had therefore no intention of paying for alleged protection services. Yet Nabal’s refusal to fork over the requested gifts seethed with class superiority and insolence. The social gulf separating a high-status wealthy landowner from a low-status landless gang leader was brought to the surface in this characteristic tug-of-war over the distribution of agricultural surplus. From Nabal’s perspective, David was little more than a runaway slave, a nobody, or, even worse, a conspiring usurper who aimed at upending the social structure and who, in any case, did not deserve to share in a rich man’s plenty. The gratuitously insulting way in which Nabal delivered his refusal to make the requested “offering” may have sparked David’s fury. Or perhaps David coolly calculated that he needed to make Nabal into a visible exemplar in order to discourage other flock-owners from refusing his protection. On hearing that his request had been arrogantly rebuffed, in any case, David vowed not to leave any male member of Nabal’s household alive, the innocent included.
As David and his men were on their way to unleash havoc on Nabal’s family and estate, Abigail, Nabal’s wife, learned from one of her husband’s shepherds of Nabal’s insulting ingratitude in refusing to pay for what they testified was David’s invaluable protection of their flocks. She also knew that David had already set out to destroy Nabal’s estate and family. Supplied with whatever goods she was able to scrape together on short notice, Abigail rushed to preempt the looming massacre by supplying David’s followers with the very gifts of bread, cakes, meats, and wine that her husband had refused.
Abigail’s encounter with David is one of the most memorable instances of both human savviness and personal persuasion recounted in all of biblical literature. Courageously approaching the bloody-minded band and casting her plea for mercy in the language of piety, Abigail addressed that place in David’s self-understanding, of supreme importance to our author, where moral expectation bleeds indistinguishably into political calculation: “And so when the LORD does to my lord [David] all the good that He has spoken about you and He appoints you prince over Israel, this will not be a stumbling and trepidation of the heart to my lord, to have shed blood for no cause” (1 Sam 25:30–31). As Abigail here reconfirms, David has already been tapped to be Israel’s future king. He therefore naturally needs to consolidate his reputation as a protector whose demands for supplies and manpower cannot be safely refused. But looking tough does not exhaust the ruler’s need to control his public image. Israel’s future legitimate king must also carefully distinguish himself from the random chieftain of some desert-crawling protection racket. To legitimate his authority to extract resources from the population, he must do his best to appear not only calculating and ruthless but also lordly, discriminating, and virtuous. He must refrain from blotting his record with unnecessary bloodshed. And above all, as we have already seen, he must keep his personal fingerprints off the violent deaths of personal enemies. In his resolve to punish Nabal’s contemptuous refusal to disburse some of his hoarded foodstuffs in exchange for protection, David momentarily lost sight of the essential role played by both demonstrative morality and the inscrutably ambiguous motives of rulers in political calculation. That is to say, he had forgotten the all-importance of plausible deniability in the maintenance of legitimate authority. Abigail’s shrewdly crafted speech, delivered with an extravagant self-abasement calculated to flatter a roving bandit seeking to become a sitting monarch, jolted him back to his senses. He therefore thanked her profusely for her sage political advice and ended up taking her as his wife soon after learning of Nabal’s sudden death, which came with apparent serendipity as an act of God, untraceable to David’s desire for exemplary punishment or revenge. That all the guiltless males in Nabal’s house were spared while the guilty Nabal alone died was presumably the moral aim sought and achieved by Abigail’s plea.30 But David’s pliant bending to her entreaties brings the irreducible ambiguity of his motives into sharp relief. The extent to which amoral raison d’état alone dictates his acquiescence remains entirely uncertain. Through Abigail’s intercession, then, our author sheds crucial light on an essential element of political action. After his temper cools, for David as for all shrewd political players, freedom from petty malice and spite, like the duty to punish the guilty and spare the innocent, is desirable in itself. But it can also be feigned or learned, on realpolitik grounds, in a bid for much-needed political legitimacy.
The stark contrast between the exposed Saul and the elusive and opaque David, dueling for sovereign power, allows our author to convey two deep lessons about the nature of political power and those who seek and possess it. The case of Saul embodies and illustrates a central paradox of political ambition. Whoever chooses to treat love, duty, or the sacred instrumentally for the sake of gaining and maintaining power ends up confined claustrophobically to the airless and companionless prison-house of power, bereft of any humanly worthy life-purpose, focused without respite on retaining power for the mere sake of retaining power. The case of David, by contrast, drives home the inescapable ambiguity of political action. Actions that turn out to have been politically expedient may have been initially undertaken for sincerely moral reasons. And yet it is no easy matter to identify any political action that is both effective and unambiguously moral. We can never be certain, in analyzing political life, that human compassion or a compelling sense of duty is a genuine motive rather than a calculated pretext. This is a second way in which the lust for power can take total control over the one who seeks or wields it. The qualms and misgivings we recurrently feel whenever we encounter thoroughly political actors stem from a genuine perplexity. Because the corrosive reach of instrumentalization engulfs morality itself, we will never be sure what course of action will be taken by those occupying positions of great political power, even if they have a past record of decency and humanity, when their interest in maintaining that power clashes with the morally upright and honorable thing to do.
VI
In order to sharpen our awareness of this dilemma, the author of the Book of Samuel presents us with several contrasting acts of genuine compassion performed by nonpolitical characters operating completely outside the orbit of power.31 The moving story of the ghostwife of En-dor is just such a case. We come to know the ghostwife of En-dor on the last night of Saul’s life, on the eve of his tragic defeat and battlefield suicide. Preparing for war against the Philistines, whose arrayed forces appear dauntingly powerful, Saul already senses his approaching doom:
And the Philistines gathered and came and camped at Shunem. And Saul gathered all Israel and they camped at Gilboa. And Saul saw the Philistine camp, and he was afraid, and his heart trembled greatly. And Saul inquired of the LORD, and the LORD did not answer him, neither by dreams nor by the Urim nor by prophets. (1 Sam 28:4–6)
Despairing, isolated, and deprived of the comfort of divine direction by any authorized channel, Saul seeks to learn from a legally prohibited occult source what the future holds and how he should behave: “And Saul said to his servants, ‘Seek me out a ghostwife, that I may go to her and inquire through her’” (1 Sam 28:7). At the beginning of the story, the narrator had informed the reader that Saul, adhering to the commandments of the law, had banned all necromancers from the land. The prohibition on seeking knowledge from ghosts was not grounded in biblical law’s denial of the accuracy and efficacy of such knowledge, however. On the contrary, such knowledge might well be reliable. But the law nevertheless insisted that God and his messengers must be the exclusive transmitters of prophetic knowledge. In his utterly destitute state, therefore, Saul was reverting to a source that he himself had zealously and piously outlawed in the past.
His servants located for him a woman in En-dor not far from Israel’s encampment, and a disguised Saul along with two servants stole from the camp at night to glean from her some knowledge of what was to come. When she heard their request to call up dead spirits to help predict the future, the woman, who initially didn’t recognize the disguised Saul, informed them of what they should have already known, namely that the king had banned all necromancers from the kingdom on pain of death. Thus, the ghostwife had reason to fear that such a request might be a trap set to catch her violating a royal proscription, thereby exposing her to execution. Saul tried to reassure her by vowing, in God’s name, that nothing bad would happen.
Even though he had been rejected by Samuel, the frightened king was still dependent on the prophet who had originally anointed him. He therefore asked the ghostwife of En-dor to summon Samuel from the land of the dead. When Samuel’s ghost emerged from the underworld, the ghostwife screamed, suddenly realizing that it was Saul himself who had lodged the request.32 She then pointedly blamed him for having deceived her when he vowed that no harm would befall her. Assuring her once again that she was perfectly safe, the now-exposed king urged her to proceed.33 But, Samuel, when he had been successfully summoned up, had no comforting words and no practical advice to offer to the terrified and disoriented king. In death, Samuel resented Saul just as bitterly as he had done while he was still alive. In harsh words, after reiterating God’s irreversible rejection of, and enmity to, Saul, he declared with an almost sadistic zeal that Saul and his sons were to die the very next day: “And tomorrow—you and your sons are with me” (1 Sam 28:19).
The now-broken king was left totally speechless to the point of collapsing on the ground, physically debilitated by Samuel’s merciless doomsaying as well as by his own failure to have eaten earlier that day. What comes next is the ghostwife’s empathetic and kindhearted response to the hopelessly distraught Saul. It is a rare moment of pure compassion devoid of any trace of instrumentalization. Moreover, the ghostwife’s compassion is evoked by the very man who had persecuted her and was in his last day among the living, defeated and unable to promise her any future reward:
And the woman came to Saul and saw that he was very distraught, and she said to him, “Look, your servant has heeded your voice, and I took my life in my hands and heeded your words that you spoke to me. And now, you on your part, pray heed the voice of your servant, and I shall put before you a morsel of bread, and eat, that you may have strength when you go on the way.” And he refused and said, “I will not eat.” And his servants pressed him, and the woman as well, and he heeded their voice and arose from the ground and sat upon the couch. And the woman had a stall-fed calf in the house. And she hastened and butchered it and took flour and kneaded it and baked it into flat bread, and set it before Saul and before his servants, and they ate, and they arose and went off on that night. (1 Sam 28:21–25)
Saul’s last supper was served to him by a socially marginalized woman who was as disconnected from political power as can possibly be imagined. Moved by the shattered king lying inert on her floor, a persecuted sinner proved capable of a pure act of compassion seemingly beyond the moral capacities of the powerful heroes populating the Book of Samuel. The resentful prophet Samuel had only harsh, unforgiving words for Saul on the last night of his life. David and his band were securely hiding in Achish’s territory. The only person willing and able to provide Saul with some measure of warmth and care, feeding him from what little she had in her own home, was the woman of En-dor.34 Her uncalculating compassion is luminous in a narrative replete with moments of questionable piety and political duplicity. The unambiguously noninstrumental nature of her charitable act is the measure of her distance from the equivocal ways of power-seekers and power-wielders. She is a rare moral hero in a world where morality can rarely escape from the cloud of ambiguity that pervades political life.