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, the opening stretch of the Nevi’im that runs from Joshua and Judges through Samuel and Kings — the narrative spine on which the prophetic books proper are hung. They are not in the Ketuvim, the Writings; a reader who reaches for Samuel among the Psalms and Proverbs has mistaken the architecture of the canon. In the older Greek tradition Samuel and Kings together were counted as the four “Books of Reigns” — Basileiōn, the Kingdoms — so that what later printers would call First Samuel was once First Reigns, the opening volume of a single dynastic chronicle that did not stop until Jerusalem fell.

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, who broke the long scroll where a Hebrew copyist would not have, and that division passed through the Latin Vulgate — where the same four volumes are the four Books of Kings — into the manuscript habit of the West. It entered Hebrew printed Bibles only in the sixteenth century, with the great Venetian editions of Daniel Bomberg; before that, a Hebrew Samuel was one book and the seam between a First and a Second Samuel did not exist. The Hebrew text that survives is in places damaged and hard to read. P. Kyle McCarter, whose two-volume Anchor Bible commentary is the standard English critical treatment, opens his account with the blunt judgment that the received Hebrew text of Samuel, in its Masoretic dress, is in poor repair — short not with the wholesome shortness of a text spared interpolation, but with the shortness of one worn down by copying errors and omissions, some of them long, scattered the length of the book. To read Samuel critically is therefore to read it through its versions.

That is where the desert manuscripts changed the picture. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran lay fragments of three Samuel scrolls from Cave 4 — 4QSamuel-a, -b, and -c — and a fourth from Cave 1. The most extensive, 4QSamuel-a, preserves pieces running from the first chapter of First Samuel to the last of Second, and it does something a textual critic could once only hope for: again and again it sides with the old Greek against the standard Hebrew, confirming what scholars had suspected from the Septuagint alone — that more than one ancient version of Samuel once circulated, and that the Greek sometimes preserves readings older than the Masoretic. Where the Hebrew of First Samuel 11 opens abruptly with Nahash the Ammonite already besieging Jabesh-Gilead, 4QSamuel-a carries a fuller paragraph explaining how the siege began — a passage no medieval Hebrew Bible contains, recovered from the sand. Frank Moore Cross, who first published these scrolls and built from them his account of competing local text-traditions, used Samuel as his showpiece: here the manuscript evidence was thick enough to watch a biblical book exist in more than one shape at once. The narrative itself, beneath all this, reads as the work of several hands joined over time. Source critics since Leonhard Rost have read distinct older blocks inside it — an Ark Narrative tracing the captured Ark of the Covenant, a History of David’s Rise carrying him from the sheepfold to the throne, and a Succession Narrative, the long court history of who would sit on David’s throne after him, which Rost prized as among the finest sustained prose in the Hebrew Bible. Martin Noth folded the whole into his Deuteronomistic History, the great editorial project that ran from Deuteronomy through Kings and judged every reign against the law of the Torah. An older account of the monarchy’s founding, in this reading, was reworked by later editors with their own verdict on kings — and the seams between the hands are part of what a careful reader feels as friction in the text.

Before any of that, the book begins not with a king or a battle but with a barren woman at a shrine. Hannah, childless and taunted, prays at Shiloh so fervently that the old priest takes her for drunk; she vows the son she asks for to God, bears Samuel, and gives him up. Her thanksgiving — the Song of Hannah — is the overture to everything that follows, and it sounds the book’s deepest note in advance: that the Lord brings low and lifts up, empties the full and fills the empty, raises the poor from the dust to seat them with princes. Its last line asks God to give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed — meshicho, his messiah — spoken before any king exists, as if the whole arc of monarchy and the hope that outlived it were folded into a mother’s prayer at the start. The narrative that grows from that seed is one long study of reversal: the favored falling, the overlooked rising, power changing hands by a logic that is not the world’s.

The figures are drawn without flattery, and that has long been part of the book’s hold on readers. Samuel himself is a hinge: judge, priest, and seer together, the last man to hold the old offices before the new one swallows them, and he warns the people in advance what a king will take from them — their sons for his armies, their daughters for his kitchens, the best of their fields — before he pours the oil anyway. The book is divided against itself on the matter, and deliberately so: in one strand the demand for a king is a rejection of God’s own kingship, granted in anger as a punishment fitted to the crime; in another, kingship is God’s gift and Saul’s anointing a deliverance. The editors did not resolve the tension — they preserved both voices, so that the monarchy arrives into the canon already accused and already blessed. Saul, the first king, is anointed in secret, a tall and reluctant man hiding among the baggage on the day of his acclamation, and then he unravels into jealousy and despair as the favor that chose him passes to a younger man. Near the end he consults a medium at Endor, who calls up the dead Samuel to foretell his defeat. It is one of the few scenes of necromancy the Hebrew Bible reports at length, and the more striking for the book’s general hostility to the practice — Saul himself had driven the mediums from the land, and now, abandoned by the channels he was permitted, he goes by night to one he had outlawed. The shade rises wearing the prophet’s mantle and speaks no comfort: the kingdom is torn away, and tomorrow Saul and his sons will be among the dead. David, by contrast, is shown across the full arc of a life — shepherd, harpist, giant-killer, fugitive in the wilderness, captain of a war-band, king of Judah and then of all Israel, the maker of laments over the men he loved. He is also the man who, from his roof, sees Bathsheba bathing, takes her, and arranges the death of her husband Uriah to cover the pregnancy — sending the loyal soldier to the front with his own death-warrant in his hand. The text neither conceals the crime nor lets its consequences pass: the prophet Nathan walks into the palace, tells the king a parable about a poor man’s one ewe lamb, and turns it on him with two words — you are the man. The sword does not leave David’s house afterward. A son dies; another, Absalom, rebels and is killed; the king who could not be defeated in the field weeps in the gatehouse for the son who tried to take his throne.

What sets Samuel apart from the chronicles around it is the depth of its interior life. These are not figures glimpsed from outside in the act of ruling; they are watched in their fear and self-deception. The young David appears in two incompatible introductions side by side — in one he is the court musician summoned to soothe Saul’s black moods, in another the unknown shepherd boy who walks out alone against the Philistine champion — and the editors set both down rather than choose, leaving the reader to feel the join. The single combat with the giant, the friendship with Jonathan that runs against Jonathan’s own dynastic interest, the twice-refused chance to kill the sleeping Saul, the dirge over Saul and Jonathan with its refrain that the mighty have fallen, the broken cry over Absalom in the gate — these are the passages on which later readers hung the figure of the poet-king, the traditional author of the Psalms. Rost’s judgment that the Succession Narrative stands among the masterworks of ancient prose rests on exactly this restraint: motive shown rather than stated, a king condemned without a word of editorial comment, the moral weight carried entirely by the order in which things are told.

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 — delivered through Nathan, when David proposes to build a house for God and is told instead that God will build a house for him — turns on a play that runs through the chapter: house as palace, house as temple, house as dynasty. David’s house and throne, the oracle promises, will endure; his offspring will reign, and the relation between that king and God will be that of son to father. That promise of an enduring throne became one of the deepest roots of messianic expectation, the hope of an anointed king to come from David’s line — taken up in the Psalms, where the king is called God’s son and seated at his right hand, and sharpened by the prophets after the monarchy fell, when the throne stood empty and the promise had to be reread as a future rather than a fact. In the book of Isaiah the shoot grows from the cut stump of Jesse, David’s father, and the empty covenant becomes a charter of return. Both Judaism and Christianity read the oracle of Second Samuel 7 forward along divergent paths from a single verse — the one awaiting a son of David still to come, the other reading him as already arrived — but the verse they are reading is the same, and it was written here. 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: anointing was the rite that made a king, the visible sign that this man, and not another, was chosen. Every later messiah, in either tradition’s telling, is a continuation of what a prophet did with a horn of oil in these pages.

The historical reach of David himself is contested ground, and Samuel is at the center of it. For a long stretch of modern scholarship the figure stood near the edge of legend; then in 1993 excavators at Tel Dan in the north turned up a fragmentary Aramaic victory stela that names the bytdwd, the “House of David,” as a kingdom — the earliest extrabiblical mention of the dynasty, and a fixed point that has reset the debate without ending it. The books themselves are not a chronicle in the modern sense; they are theology written as narrative, shaped by the Deuteronomistic verdict and carrying within them older songs and court records whose age is hard to fix. What they offer is not a transcript of the tenth century but a sustained meditation, in story, on the institution Israel chose.

Text, versions, and scholarship

The critical study of Samuel is, more than for most biblical books, a study of its textual transmission, because no single witness can be trusted alone. The standard English commentary remains McCarter’s two-volume Anchor Bible I Samuel (1980) and II Samuel (1984), the first to build its translation systematically on the Qumran fragments alongside the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The source-critical frame descends from Leonhard Rost, whose 1926 study of the Succession Narrative was made available in English as The Succession to the Throne of David (1982); the broader editorial hypothesis is Martin Noth’s Deuteronomistic History. On the manuscripts, Frank Moore Cross’s The Ancient Library of Qumran (3rd ed., 1995) set the terms for reading 4QSamuel against the versions, and the formal edition of the scrolls appears in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. For an accessible survey of the book’s composition and its standing as a historiographical source, Moshe Garsiel’s The Book of Samuel: Its Composition, Structure and Significance as a Historiographical Source (Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 2010) is open to read in full. The Hebrew and a parallel English of the book are hosted in full at Sefaria, where the Masoretic text against which all this scholarship works can be read chapter by chapter.

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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