A Promising Beginning

This reflection is part of the ongoing Forest Hills Haftorah Series. The rest of the content can be found here: https://www.sefaria.org/groups/FHJC-Haftorah-Series .

This week's Haftorah takes us back to one of the most sweeping turning points in all of Israelite history; the move from confederacy to monarchy; the Coronation of Saul, our first king.

While for most of our Haftorah, the prophet Samuel tries to temper the joy with his own admonition and rebuke, there is no denying that the TaNaKh describes Saul's coronation as a moment of utter euphoria and celebration for Israel:

But given Samuel's reproach that Israel's asking for a king is akin to abandoning God (see 12:12), why all of the hype and excitement at transitioning to a monarchy?

To understand this, we have to go back to the beginning of chapter 11, when the Ammonites laid siege to Jabesh-gilead over the Jordan. When the Israelites of Jabesh-gilead volunteered to surrender, the ruthless Ammonite king Nahash ("snake" in Hebrew) replied that he would accept their subjugation only on condition that they also give up their right eyes (!!!!) :

The Israelite inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead then sent out an SOS to their brothers throughout Canaan. Saul, still a cattle-driver at the time (although he and the Israelites had already been informed by Samuel in prior chapters that he would regin) hears what had transpired, and what he does is amazing:

Saul responds decisively and immediately, and with enough force of character to rally Israelites throughout the tribes to the righteous cause of defending their brethren from the Ammonites, resulting in his immediate and universal acceptance.

Recall that for hundreds of years before this, the Israelites were living during the pre-monarchic era of what we now call the "Judges" era. Personally, the impression I get as I read through the stories of this period is that the land of Canaan was much like the "wild-west!" (Or, at least how the wild-west is portrayed in those old westerns.) People seemed to do what they want, when and how they wanted. There was constant tension and war. There was no central leadership, and no unity amongst the Israelites. In fact, they saw themselves first and foremost as members of their respective tribe rather than as Israelites.

With that, tensions between tribes were oftentimes high, and they were just as likely to wage war against each other as with neighboring kingdoms. It was when an outside, non-Israelite threat was serious enough and the time called for it, that a charismatic leader (or warchief) would emerge, would the tribes together, and muster a defense.

The era of Judges was therefore cyclical, with the following repeated motifs: (1) Rejection of God, as well as the core values of Israel; (2) Chaos, war, and oppression; (3) Israel recognizing her wrongdoings and returning to God, begging for forgiveness and salvation; (4) God capitulating, and sending along a champion; (5) Relief from oppression, and periods of peace; (6) Complacency, and back to rejection.

However, with each cycle, the stakes are raised ever higher, and the repercussions of turning from God become increasingly unbearable. The end of the book of Judges ends in civil war, with one tribe (Benjamin) being nearly entirely wiped out.

The last line of the book drives the message home:

The push to a monarchy was in effect, the Israelites declaring:

"Enough is enough! No more chaos, no more lawlessness. We are all a part of one nation under God. Samuel, we demand a model of leadership which reflects that! We want to be led by an individual who shows care and concern for his people, wherever, and whomever they are, and who will defend us when we are in trouble. Jabesh-gilead faces an oppressor? It's an immediate problem for all of us, even on the other side of the Jordan."

Saul did not flinch when the time came to demonstrate the care and concern he had in his heart for his brothers and sisters over the Jordan, and he was therefore

instantly loved and respected. In fact, the Israelites wanted to show their acceptance with so much fervor that they demanded that those who doubted him be put to death:

And while Samuel would declare that turning to an earthly king is akin to turning away from God Almighty, Saul reacts to the people's favor and fervor above by directing their gratitude away from himself and back to God:

We will come back to Saul in a moment, but first a quick aside about psalms, which we will tie back in in the end.

There is a reason that the poems of the psalms were included by the Judeans in the TaNaKh as we have it; they speak to the whole gamut of the human experience, and any situation we find ourselves in has a corresponding psalm which can bring comfort and encouragement, or give us words to express gratitude of and love towards God.

Rabbi Yehoshua, an early Jewish sage quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, recognizing such power but also holding ancient, traditional assumptions about the psalm's Davidic authorship, stated the following:

This statement has developed into the idea that King David, with ruach hakodesh, or a type of "mini-prophecy," was able to hold every situation that any future Israelite or Judean would ever find him or herself in.

Being a skeptic, for many years I had trouble accepting this claim for two reasons. Firstly, scholarship has demonstrated that King David did not author the majority of the psalms, if any at all. And secondly, even if he did author them, he was writing in first-person, about his own trials and tribulations! He had a hard enough life as it is. Did he need to hold my own personal struggles in mind as well???

But what I always find amazing is when the discipline of contemporary, academic-critical scholarship comes full circle and reaches the same conclusion that our tradition has been claiming and teaching all along, for thousands of years already.

And in this case, there is an incredibly influential 20th-century bible scholar, Sigmund Mowinckel, who claims the following:

The vast majority of psalms were written for a royal context. Ie., To be recited (or prayed) by the kings of Israel or Judah, to give them the words with which to turn to God in prayer on behalf of the entirety of the nation. He also says that Israelites did not view the greater entity of Israel as a collection of individual Israelites - but as one, united organism, of which each individual was but a part, a limb. In his own poetic words, here is what he says about the role of the king:

The king represents the whole. He is not merely a casually chosen 'representative' in our modern sense of the word. He could not be replaced by anybody else. He is the 'representative' because the 'soul', the history, the honour, the vigour and the blessing of the whole are concentrated in him. And the other way way round, all the others participate dynamically in what he represents. Because the clan, outwardly as well, constitutes a community, having not only 'flesh and blood' in common, but nature, blessing, soul and honour too, everything flows fromthe one to the other, from the representative to the whole, and vice versa. ---- from Mowinckel's The Psalms in Israel's Worship, 1962, page 43.

below: Mowinckel

In effect, it almost reads as if Israel is like a bee-hive, with the Judean or Israelite-kings being akin to the "quee-bee," who feels for, cares for, and holds every experience of all her hive in mind. This, for me, was a paradigm-shattering idea, and suddenly I appreciated, in a way I never thought I would, the notion that our ancient Judean Kings could have been thought of as holding all of Israel - present and future - in mind during the writing of and reciting of psalms.

Let's connect this back to Saul:

Saul would end up being one of the most tragic of figures in our history. It is widely agreed today that he must have been suffering from manic-depression, as well as paranoia, and as we read his narratives, we see him plummeting further and further into the depths of darkness. If we take the narratives as we have them in the TaNaKh at face-value, this seems like a conclusion hard to reject. (However, Joel Baden has pushed back heavily on the "paranoia"-part in his work The Historical David, in which he argues that everything Saul feared about David was more than justified.)

But even with this; Are we able to give credit where credit is due? Saul was told by Samuel, against his own wishes and aspirations, that he was being summoned to fulfill a role that had never existed before. And step into it he did. Whether Israel was threatened by Aram, the Philistines, the Midianites or others, Saul saw it as his responsibility to stand up for each and every one of his people, embodying this notion expressed by Mowinckel that an Israelite King considers every Israelite with as much importance as seeing him or her as an extension of himself. He put his life on the line for this, even dying for it on the battlefield.

No one pays homage better than King David himself, in his heart-wrenching dirge to Saul and Jonathan upon hearing of their death: