The identity of our immensely astute observer of politics and the greatest author ever to write in the Hebrew language remains unknown. This is a most frustrating fact given the magnitude of the debt that we owe whoever crafted these riveting narratives for the wisdom and the insight that we gain from a close and attentive reading of the Book of Samuel. But even though we cannot identify the author, we can safely speculate about some aspects of the environment and the conditions under which this extraordinary book was composed. The author was not a high functionary in some political apparatus of the time, since the outlook expressed in the narrative is that of an outsider. Nor was the author a spokesman for a certain faction, be it the Davidic party or the Saulide party or a representative of the old elite of elders and judges marginalized by the rise of monarchy. The author was not a scribal courtier either. No court would allow the composition of such an unflattering official history of its beginnings and such a complexly ambiguous depiction of its founding father. Its systematic ambiguity, contrary to all hagiographic conventions, is what gives such astonishing force to the author’s account.1 The book is thus not a political manifesto, a piece of agitprop aimed at supporting or advancing a particular political sect, party, or person. It is rather a book about politics in which its author’s distance from all political factions allowed for the creation of a genuine masterpiece of political thought woven ingeniously into a naturalistic retelling of dramatic historical events.
The author does not seek to represent God’s point of view either, given that God himself is among the dramatis personae of the book and is obviously not its concealed author. Nevertheless, God has to find his place in the new order of politics that he self-effacingly accepts, even though it was created against his will. Like a retired boss, the one who used to be king, God substantially redefined his own role at the moment his people demanded a human, and therefore humanly flawed, king. When the Israelite monarchy was first established, God compared his people’s headstrong decision to reject his kingship and replace it with a unified dynastic monarchy to previous episodes when they worshipped other gods. He also warned the people that he would no longer come to their rescue when they eventually begged to be saved after they were predictably abused by their worldly monarch. It was as if he told them: “You wanted me out. Let it be, but do not ask me back.” This was not quite the way God eventually behaved, to be sure. He did not exactly withdraw into the desert.
Through his prophet Samuel, we are told, God made Saul king—the kind of king who in no way resembled a god. And he then commanded the new king to initiate a holy war unnecessary for the immediate political needs of the community. Subsequently, God rejected Saul and replaced him. He next chose David, made an everlasting covenant with him, and punished him when he sinned. This was by no means a full retirement from the political stage. But there was a dramatic change in God’s mode of operation in comparison with the time when he had been the one and only sovereign. For one thing, God no longer played a decisive battlefield role. More significantly, his interventions became deeply intertwined with, even indistinguishable from, the natural course of events. Saul’s internal collapse, his military defeat by the Philistines, his replacement by the charismatically savvy David who survived as a fugitive and guerrilla leader—all these occurrences unfold in an atmosphere suffused with contingency and cliff-hanging suspense and could easily be imagined without any divine activity or plan. David’s punishment for adultery and murder, as foretold by the prophet Nathan, beautifully tracks the natural development and degeneration of dynastic politics. In our author’s narrative, no manna has fallen from heaven, and no Red Sea was miraculously split apart. God’s interventions have become thoroughly political.2 They follow and reveal the imminent logic of politics, as if to say that divine providence and reward and punishment in politics are endogenous to politics itself.
Obviously conversant with the workings of royal and tribal politics, Samuel’s author, though not an active agent of a political machine, must have resided at court or have once been part of the political world itself. To be sure, the author’s acquaintance with political life was not confined to intimate familiarity with what actually happened in Saul’s and David’s courts. Much of what the author reported was no doubt the fruit of a wondrously fertile imagination. It is indeed clear that some of the details in the story are the product of sheer artistic inventiveness since they could not have been known to any author, however at home in the corridors of power. One example is the marvelously detailed account of what Joab said to the messenger sent to inform David about the death of Uriah and of the way the messenger subtly altered the message when conveying the report to David himself. Such specifics—like references throughout the narrative to the distinctive internal lives of the characters—were private details with which no one besides the individuals personally involved could possibly have been acquainted. The author wrote in the tradition of an all-knowing narrator, adding fictionalized material to what was presumably a faithful though skeletal rendering of historical events. When we refer to the author’s firsthand acquaintance with political life, therefore, we don’t have in mind only or even primarily insider information but mainly a deep grasp of political life.
The author’s basic outlook on political life is rooted in the book’s account of the origins of politics. Sovereignty was established and embraced in response to pressing, life-or-death human concerns and needs. The capacity to organize collective action through the authority to tax and draft is necessary for any community that strives to survive in a hostile and unforgiving environment. A loose-knit confederation of disputatious tribes was especially vulnerable at its frontiers, where territorial disputes with neighboring peoples were most acute. Such vulnerability explains the legitimate aspiration to overcome strife inside a tribal confederacy and to enforce unity. Yet this rationale for pooling collective resources by centralizing the power to command is fraught with a deep contradiction that lies at the core of political life and that our author brings into focus with exceptional artistry and theoretical force.
If the sovereign is powerful enough to protect the people against hostile neighbors, he will also be powerful enough to abuse the people for reasons having nothing to do with collective security. The possibility that rulers will betray the ruled is inherent to the nature of rule itself and may or may not be rooted in the personal psychology of those who inhabit high office. Pointing to this inherent contradiction in the human political project did not lead the author to recommend abolishing sovereign authority or reverting back to the divine anarchy or the weak and decentralized social order that preceded the monarchy, when laws went unenforced and every man did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:26).
Focusing on sovereignty’s dark sides does not lead the author to reject sovereignty as such. The book is not a policy brief or proposal for a model constitution. The political horizons of the author of Samuel did not reach to suggesting reforms or offering alternative institutional mechanisms. Moreover, the many lessons that can be drawn about politics from the Book of Samuel are unrelated to the advocacy of worthy and inspiring political ideals. The book does not preach or endorse the rule of law, care for the poor, civic participation, or the legal equality of subjects in a covenantal political constitution. Instead, the author turned a penetrating gaze onto the punishing costs of sovereign power as such.
The illuminating force of the book’s fine-grained phenomenology of power, therefore, takes us beneath debates about forms of government and public ideals, and reaches a more primary and elemental level of politics. This is what makes it relevant to the study of political power whenever it is practiced, regardless of the particular program or ideology that sovereign government serves. Its anatomy of sovereignty applies not only to dynastic kingship in a tribal society but, with suitable modifications, illuminates important features of every political order, including the welfare state, the liberal state, and so forth.
At the root of the structure of politics unveiled in the narratives of the Book of Samuel lies a double reversal of means and ends that is immanent to sovereign power. Power is an indispensable tool needed for a vital collective good. It must therefore be organized and cultivated. But the sovereign who has gained it and those around him who compete for it do not see supreme political power exclusively from the public’s point of view, as a means for organizing collective defense. The seekers and wielders of sovereign authority inevitably see it from a more personal perspective. The privileges and status of the highest political office can be intoxicating, transforming sovereign authority all too easily into an end-in-itself, a stand-alone goal which becomes the very raison d’être of those seeking to gain or maintain it. It is no secret that many power wielders end up using much of the power they have attained to help them stay in power.3 This perverse conversion of a means into an end afflicts a wide range of political regimes. It is therefore fair to say that it presents a structural vulnerability of politics as such.
The second reversal of means and ends, deeply connected to the first, also looms disquietingly over politics in all its incarnations. It involves the conversion of genuine ends such as the sacred, love, loyalty, and moral obligation into means in the hands of power wielders who, above all, seek to maintain their rule. This is how the instrumentalization of what should not be instrumentalized becomes a defining and degrading feature of political action. It has a corrosive effect not only on those aspiring to seize power but also on those who, after seizing power, fall into its vise-grip. It can and frequently does contribute to an environment of alienation, mistrust, and paranoia that naturally erupts in violence.
This double reversal of means and ends also occurs in other human realms. Money seems to be another necessary tool that suffers from a similarly perverse tendency to turn into something desired for its own sake. But in the case of sovereign power, such an inversion can be immensely consequential. Among the effects of these twin reversals, subtly explored by our author, is the way in which political actions become systematically ambiguous.
The environment in which politics unfolds is defined by the inability of subjects to know with any certainty if the justifications offered by rulers accurately reflect or deceptively conceal their underlying motivations. But the ambiguity of political action, as dramatized in the stories of Saul and David, cuts even deeper than this. It is difficult to disentangle the moral and the tactical in the action of political rulers not only because we cannot read their minds but also because obligation and calculation, the moral and the instrumental, are very likely to be juxtaposed and fused in a sovereign ruler’s mind. Multiple and mixed motives mean that “unmasking” the supreme ruler by exposing cynical plots lurking behind a pseudomoral facade is based on an overly dichotomous understanding of the relation between motivation and justification. The idea that sovereign power is inevitably exercised under the shadow of this systematic ambiguity is another striking and still resonant theme of our author’s political thought.
The public’s uncertainty about the ruler’s motivations are matched by an epistemic deficiency afflicting the ruler himself. Aloof and distant, he is dependent on others to provide him with a picture of reality and, given his immense power to bestow benefits and harms, members of his close circle and others, too, tend to manipulate the information they provide him in the service of their own private or factional interests. Disconnect and vulnerability to disinformation can easily deepen, moreover, as a result of the sovereign’s instrumentalization of his followers. The consequence, in such a case, can be gnawing suspicion and a complete breakdown of trust. The trite observation that even paranoids have enemies does not diminish the role of pathologically exaggerated distrust in distorting the judgment of those who exercise sovereign power. Encircled by those who covet or envy his position and sometimes unjustifiably projecting his own hunger for power onto them, the sovereign can easily be overtaken by conspiratorial fears and insecurities, states of mind that powerfully distort his mode of operation. By virtue of its peerless preeminence and solitary remoteness, therefore, sovereign power can burden its wielder, as in Saul’s case, even more than its subjects. Endemic to great political power in all its forms, the ruler’s isolation brings us to another of our author’s key insights, this time into the sources of political violence.
The twenty-three verses that the author devotes to the massacre of the priest of Nob at the hands of Saul and the chapter that narrates the murder of Uriah by David provide startling accounts of two distinct faces of violence. The first draws attention to the relationship between violence and insecurity and the second to the roots of violence in entitlement. Saul’s paranoia leads him to distrust everyone around him, suspecting that his officers and retainers are loyal only opportunistically and that they could easily abandon him for a militarily more successful rival. Deprived of ordinary sanity checks by the very aloofness of his royal office, he casts himself as an unfairly abused victim even while he is engaged in an aggressive attempt to track David down and kill him. His maudlin self-pity, tellingly, is a prelude to violence. Infuriated by the inability of his forces to capture David, he lashes out against Abimelech and the wholly innocent priests of Nob, using a foreign mercenary who is devoid of religious scruples and tribal loyalty to do the killing that Saul’s own troops—illustrating the dependence of rulers on their armed retainers—righteously refuse to commit. Saul’s crime resulted from some central features of sovereign power, especially the endemic isolation that comes from a relentless instrumentalization of those around the sovereign who remain perpetually subject to his whim. That supreme power functions as a magnet for lies is another reason why the supremely powerful can easily fall into a state of paranoid suspiciousness. In Saul’s case, the acute fear of being betrayed by his own agents naturally resulted from the isolation chamber in which the wielder of supreme executive power is enabled or compelled to live.
The danger posed by sovereign power when it becomes existentially insecure resonates across the political spectrum in all its modes and forms. The detailed yet spare narrative of the massacre of the priests of Nob illustrates the potential consequences of such a condition. Specific to paranoia is the lack of a defined and delimited object of dread. This is what makes a paranoid mental condition easy to manipulate, redirect, and inflate. Violence loosed in conditions of paranoia will naturally escalate into overkill, sweeping up innocent and guilty subjects alike, since it roams in an unbounded and uncontrolled vicious cycle of burning rage, bogus victimhood, and baseless suspicion.
Another essential feature of politics and the root of its irresistible appeal is the way hierarchical structures facilitate the possibility of collective action. Sovereign bodies organize hierarchical chains of command and establish a meticulous distribution of labor across diverse agents, thus magnifying the aggregate effectiveness of individuals by forging them into a cohesive group able to act in concert. When the sovereign turns the political machine against his own subjects, however, these same essential structures, so vital for publicly beneficial collective action, allow the sovereign to escape any personal responsibility for the infliction of publicly unjustifiable violence. The long chain at the sovereign’s disposal facilitates and thus encourages crime by distributing the commission of criminal acts across many agents, each contributing to a multitiered distribution of labor, diffusing responsibility, frustrating accountability, and granting the supreme ruler deniability and impunity. In the author’s narrative of the murder of Uriah, these themes are masterfully explored through the power of David to “send” and act at a distance. The dissociation enabled by the obscuring of agency finds its most penetrating expression in David’s statement, one of the greatest literary portrayals ever presented of political deniability, “for the sword devours sometimes one way and sometimes another.”
Delving deeper into the microworkings of power, the narrative excavates another potentially perverse consequence of acting through an extended chain of agents. It brings to light the relative independence of the links in the chain and the way in which subordinates, while attempting to protect themselves and “improve” upon the sovereign’s commands, have a tendency to increase the lethality of the crime they have been detailed to carry out. Our author illuminates the way these subordinate links in the ruler’s chain of command, because they operate in the dark world of state secrets where possibilities for monitoring are radically reduced, can hold their sovereign hostage even as they carry out his crimes. This complex and fine-grained analysis of deniability and dissociation, distilled from observing the very origins of sovereignty and collective political action, reverberate chillingly up to the present day.
Continuity of sovereignty is another deadly serious political concern. The need to assure the smooth transfer of power rests on a sincere anxiety stemming from a community’s vulnerability, during an interregnum, to foreign attack and domestic civil war. Without an agreed-upon succession formula, no state can be considered even minimally stable or secure. Yet, the dynastic way of insuring the continuity of sovereignty, like the necessity of sovereignty itself, is fraught with self-defeating potential.
The author of the Book of Samuel does not argue against the dynastic solution to the continuity problem. His book focuses, instead, on the costs that centralizing political power inflicts not only on the ruled but also on the ruler and his children, exploring the impact of mingling family love and political ambition and the ways in which the core members of a royal dynasty can be crushed as their family becomes a vehicle for the transfer of sovereignty. The problem of political continuity, like the problem of collective action in general, has to be solved. But no plausible answer can be given to such a deep social problem without engendering other problems, of no lesser gravity and intractability.
In the second period of David’s reign, after Uriah’s murder and the subsequent weakening of the king’s political prestige, the price of sovereignty is paid, sequentially, by Tamar, Amnon, Absalom, and Adonijah. And no doubt the ultimate expression of the cost that sovereignty exacts upon its wielders is David’s heartfelt cry: “My son, Absalom! My son, my son, Absalom! Would that I had died in your stead! Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Sam 19:4). The civil war between Israelite tribes, which the Unified Monarchy was meant to suppress, had reappeared within the king’s own household. Similarly, lethal rivalry between the Saulide and the Davidic dynasties segues smoothly into lethal rivalry inside David’s house. So the dynastic solution to the continuity problem displaced rather than resolved the problem of violent transfers of power. The drivers of the fratricidal and conspiratorial violence that occupy this portion of the narrative are the entitlement and impatience inculcated into potential royal heirs, the bitter envy of close relatives excluded from the succession, and the calculations of rival military and religious officials of the king.
Admittedly, the rape of Tamar, the ambush of Amnon, and the conspiracy of Absalom may seem less relevant to political power in nondynastic systems of rule than other parts of the Book of Samuel. Indeed, democratic systems for the alternation in office of rival parties can be understood as a way to discipline the factional struggle for supreme power in a way that does not require the winning party to kill the leaders and chief adherents of the party that loses. The eventual separation of judicial and executive power, the fusion of which made David vulnerable to Absalom’s rebellion, had a similarly stabilizing effect. Yet despite such institutional innovations, political competition today, and not only in the world’s few remaining monarchies, occurs under the shadow of the kind of violence that the Book of Samuel so revealingly details.
In mercilessly and painstakingly exposing the structural tensions and contradictions of the political project, without ever denying its necessity and centrality, our author has left us an extraordinary treasure-house of insight. The document that we have inherited is also the first of its kind in world literature. The story it tells was written in great proximity to the moment of origin of the political life in the author’s own community, a moment of origin that allowed an unprecedented clarity of thought and perception. The Book of Samuel is a kind of manual for all who are touched and defined by political life, be they kings, officers or subjects. It will serve them as a luminous lens through which to read their own reality and sometimes to overcome and remedy what can potentially go so wrong in politics. As a revelation, the book is an act of witnessing. The author’s witnessing assumes the following form: “The people of Israel embarked on this risky political project out of necessity. The deep problems inherent in such a project can be seen and analyzed most clearly in its initial phase. Here is my account of this experiment. Beware of what I saw and have told you now.”