Books of Samuel

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The Books of Samuel are two books of the Hebrew Bible that tell how Israel became a kingdom. They open with the prophet Samuel — the last of the judges who had governed the tribes — and follow the consequences of the people’s demand for a king: the anointing and ruin of Saul, the long ascent of David, and the wars and household griefs of his reign. In the Hebrew canon they stand among the Former Prophets; in the older Greek tradition Samuel and Kings together were counted as the four “Books of Reigns.”

What the text was, materially, is not simple. In the Hebrew Bible Samuel was originally a single book; the division into First and Second Samuel came from the Greek translators and entered Hebrew printed Bibles only in the sixteenth century. The Hebrew text that survives is in places damaged and hard to read, and the discovery of Samuel manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed what scholars had suspected — that more than one ancient version of the book once circulated, the Greek sometimes preserving readings older than the standard Hebrew. The narrative itself reads as the work of several hands joined over time, an older account of the monarchy’s founding reworked by later editors with their own view of kings.

The figures are drawn without flattery, and that has long been part of the book’s hold on readers. Saul, the first king, is anointed in secret and then unravels into jealousy and despair; near the end he consults a medium at Endor, who calls up the dead Samuel to foretell his defeat — one of the few scenes of necromancy the Hebrew Bible reports at length, and the more striking for the book’s general hostility to such practices. David is shown as warrior, poet, fugitive, and king, and also as the man who arranges the death of Uriah to take his wife; the text neither conceals the crime nor lets its consequences pass.

Jewish and Christian traditions received these books as scripture and as the charter of a particular idea: that kingship in Israel was answerable to God through the prophet, and that David’s line carried a promise. The covenant made to David in the seventh chapter of Second Samuel — that his house and throne would endure — became one of the deepest roots of messianic expectation, the hope of an anointed king to come. The Hebrew word behind that hope, mashiach, “anointed one,” names exactly the act Samuel performs with a horn of oil over Saul and again over David.

For all the theology built upon them, the books are at ground level a study of power: what it costs to want it, what it does to those who hold it, and how a people who asked for a king lived with the answer.

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