Saul

Saul is rejected twice, and both occasions have troubled readers because the offences look small beside the sentence.

At Gilgal he is waiting for Samuel to come and offer sacrifice before an engagement. Samuel is late by a day, the army is deserting, and Saul makes the offering himself. Samuel arrives as he finishes and tells him his kingdom shall not continue.

The second is the campaign against Amalek, where the instruction is total destruction, people and livestock together. Saul defeats them, spares the king Agag, and keeps the best of the sheep and cattle, saying they were for sacrifice. Samuel answers with the line that has outlived the episode: to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. As he turns to go Saul catches his robe and it tears, and Samuel makes the tear the sign that the kingdom has been torn from him. Then Samuel kills Agag himself.

Neither passage lets the modern reader off. The first sentence falls on a man doing something a king might reasonably do; the second falls on a man who declined to complete an order for the killing of a whole population, and the text treats the incompleteness as the sin.

The books do not soften this, and they carry more than one account of how Saul became king in the first place: anointed privately, chosen by lot at Mizpah, and acclaimed after a victory. The founding of the monarchy is preserved as contested material, and its first king is judged by a standard the narrative never explains.

After the rejection the narrative describes an evil spirit from the Lord troubling Saul, and the remedy his servants find is music. David is brought in to play the lyre, and the spirit lifts while he plays. The same spear Saul carries as a mark of office is twice thrown at the musician.

What follows is one of the most closely observed portraits of deterioration in ancient literature. Saul promises his daughters to David and withdraws them, sets a bride price designed to get him killed, orders his own son to kill him and is talked out of it, hunts him through the Judean wilderness, and massacres the priests of Nob for feeding him. Twice David has him at his mercy in a cave and by a camp fire, and twice lets him go, and both times Saul weeps and calls him son and goes home, and then resumes the pursuit.

The end comes on Mount Gilboa. His sons fall, he is hit by archers, and he asks his armour bearer to finish him; when the man will not, he falls on his own sword. The Philistines fasten the bodies to the wall of Beth-shan.

The last act belongs to Jabesh Gilead. Their city had been Saul's first rescue, at the very beginning of his reign, when he mustered Israel to save them from an Ammonite who intended to put out their right eyes. Their fighting men travel all night, take the bodies down from the wall, and bury them. Forty years later, whatever else had happened, the debt was still owed and they came and paid it.