Give Us a King

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “King and Kingship,” “Samuel, Books of,” “Saul,” “Samuel (person),” “Nagid,” “Anointing,” “Messiah,” “Prophecy (Pre-Exilic Hebrew),” “Seer,” “Philistines,” “Mizpah,” “Gibeah,” “High Place,” “Lots, Casting of,” “Corvée.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books (IVP) — “Samuel, Books of,” “Kingship and Monarchy,” “Saul and Saul’s Family,” “Prophets and Prophecy,” “Philistines,” “Divination and Magic,” “State Officials.”
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — מֶלֶךְ (meleḵ, king), נָגִיד (nāgîḏ, prince/leader-designate), מָשַׁח (māšaḥ, anoint), מָאַס (māʾas, reject), לָקַח (lāqaḥ, take), מִשְׁפָּט (mišpāṭ, justice/custom/claim), שָׁאַל (šāʾal, ask), רֹאֶה (rōʾeh, seer), שׂים (śîm, set/appoint).
• On the Greek — Bernard A. Taylor, “1 Reigns: To the Reader,” in A New English Translation of the Septuagint. Short, and the place to start on what kind of translation 1 Kingdoms is and where its text stands in relation to the Hebrew.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the standard text-critical commentary on this book in English, and the one to have open when the columns differ; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC); David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT); Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); V. Philips Long, 1 & 2 Samuel; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation).
• Robert Alter, The David Story (translation and commentary on 1–2 Samuel) and The Art of Biblical Narrative, for reticence, Leitwort and the shape of the scenes. (Alter reads these texts as literature and does not share the church’s confession; we take the tools, not the metaphysics.)
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible; Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus; F. M. Cross et al., Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel (DJD XVII, 2005) — the scroll itself.

The king’s job description, as the ancient world wrote it down. The prologue to the Code of Hammurabi says why Babylon has a king at all: Anum and Enlil named him “to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak” (ANET 164). That is exactly what the elders ask for — a king “to judge us” (8:5, 8:6, 8:20) — and it is the honest half of their request. Israel had no functioning judiciary left: Samuel was old, and his sons were taking bribes and perverting justice (8:3), which is the one thing a judge must not do (Deuteronomy 16:19). The request is not stupid. It is what any reasonable person in the ancient Near East would have said.

And the king’s bill, as the ancient world also wrote it down. The list in 8:11–18 — conscripted sons, requisitioned daughters, the best fields taken and granted out to royal servants, a tenth of grain and vintage, a tenth of the flocks, the best labour and draught animals seized for the crown — is not satire. Every item of it is documented practice in the Akkadian administrative texts from Ugarit: royal land grants to officials, corvée obligations, and standing levies. Isaac Mendelsohn made the case in a short and much-cited article (“Samuel’s Denunciation of Kingship in the Light of the Akkadian Documents from Ugarit,” BASOR 143 [1956] 17–22), arguing that the speech “does not constitute a rewriting of history by a late opponent of kingship” but reflects the actual Canaanite institution. Not everyone follows him on the dating conclusion, and it does not need to be settled: the point that survives every disagreement is that Samuel is reading them an invoice, and it is a real one.

The Philistines are the pressure under the whole request. They are not a stray tribe; they belong to the wave of movement across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and Egypt has left us its own account of meeting them. Ramses III’s inscriptions at Medinet Habu name them among the Sea Peoples: “The northern countries quivered in their bodies, the Philistines, Tjekk[er, and…]… They cut off their (own) land and were coming” (ANET 262–263). They settled the coastal plain with iron, chariots and organised cities, and by 1 Samuel they had already taken the ark (chapters 4–6). When the Lord says “he shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines” (9:16), that is the concrete thing everyone in the story is afraid of.

• Code of Hammurabi, Prologue (ANET 164; c. 1750 BC) (a royal law-collection — a witness, not Scripture) — the king exists “to cause justice to prevail in the land… that the strong might not oppress the weak.” Read it beside 8:5 and you can see why the elders wanted one.
• Ramses III on the Sea Peoples, Medinet Habu, year 8 (c. 1188 BC) (ANET 262–263) (an Egyptian royal inscription — a witness, not Scripture) — the Philistines named in an Egyptian king’s account of the migrations that put them on Israel’s coast.
• Isaac Mendelsohn, “Samuel’s Denunciation of Kingship in the Light of the Akkadian Documents from Ugarit,” BASOR 143 (1956) 17–22 — the article behind almost every modern comment on 8:11–18; the Ugaritic and Akkadian texts themselves are in PRU and Ugaritica, outside the range of the ANET scan we can verify locally, so no ANET page is claimed for them.
• Josephus, Antiquities 6.31–67 (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — he retells all three chapters, and his additions are revealing. He says Samuel had “an innate love of justice, and his hatred to kingly government, for he was very fond of an aristocracy” (6.36); he has the people ask for a king who will “avenge them of the Philistines”; and at 6.63 he supplies the motive the Bible withholds — Saul hid, Josephus says, out of modesty, “because he would not have it thought that he willingly took the government upon him.” He also counts seventy guests at the meal (6.52), with the Greek, where the Hebrew has thirty.
• Josephus, Antiquities 6.68–71 — his next section opens “After one month, the war which Saul had with Nahash” and then gives the Ammonite oppression of the Transjordanian tribes and the gouging out of right eyes — substantially the paragraph that stands in 4QSam^a and in no Bible most readers own. Josephus is evidence, and this is one of the places where he is very good evidence.
• Sirach 46:13–20 (Second-Temple, non-canonical in this church’s reckoning — a witness, never leveled with Scripture) — the earliest surviving portrait of Samuel outside the Bible: “beloved by his Lord… a prophet of the Lord, he established a kingdom and anointed rulers over his people” (46:13). Note what Ben Sira does not say: nothing about a rejection. He remembers Samuel as the man who set up the monarchy, full stop.
• b. Sanhedrin 20b (rabbinic-era — a witness, not Scripture) — the single most useful ancient discussion of this chapter, because the rabbis put every option on the table and do not agree. Is 8:11–17 a description of what a king may lawfully do, or a threat meant only to frighten? Both are argued at that folio. Is appointing a king a commandment? R. Yehuda lists it as one of three commandments given on entering the land; R. Nehorai answers that the passage “was stated only in response to the Jewish people’s complaint” and is no commandment at all. And R. Eliezer splits the difference exactly where the text does: “The elders of Samuel’s generation asked appropriately” — “give us a king to judge us” (8:6) — “but the ignoramuses among them ruined it,” quoting 8:19–20, “that we also may be like all the nations.”
• b. Bava Batra 14b–15a (rabbinic-era — a witness, not Scripture) — the tradition that Samuel wrote his own book, with the Gemara’s own objection and answer.

• The ketiv and qere at 8:3. The consonants written are בדרכו, “in his way”; the Masoretic reading tradition says בִּדְרָכָיו, “in his ways,” which is what the ESV prints. Rahlfs has the singular, ἐν ὁδῷ αὐτοῦ, with the written consonants. Nothing turns on it; it is simply an honest example of the two layers inside the Hebrew text itself, and the ESV footnote apparatus does not mention every one of them.
• Two “justice” phrases that English levels and Greek levels differently. 8:9 and 8:11 have מִשְׁפַּט הַמֶּלֶךְ; 10:25 has מִשְׁפַּט הַמְּלֻכָה. The ESV distinguishes them (“the ways of the king” / “the rights and duties of the kingship”); Rahlfs does not (τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ βασιλέως for both). Which means that a reader in Greek and a reader in Hebrew come away with different impressions of what Samuel deposited in the sanctuary — and neither of them is being deceived. This is what translation does, and it is why this church prints the columns side by side rather than choosing one and hiding the rest. See the texts we print.

• Deuteronomy 17:14–20 — start here, because Moses wrote their sentence down before they said it. “When you come to the land… and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me’” (17:14). Compare 8:5: “set for us a king… like all the nations” — the same verb (śîm), the same object, the same comparison; and in the Greek the phrase is identical, καθὰ καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ ἔθνη. Deuteronomy then does two things at once: it permits the king (“you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose”) and it limits him — no multiplying horses, wives, silver and gold, and he must write out a copy of the law and read it all his life. Samuel’s warning is the mirror image of that law. Deuteronomy says what the king must not accumulate; Samuel says what he will accumulate anyway.
• Judges 17:6; 18:1 and Judges 19:1; 21:25 — the refrain this passage answers. Four times: “In those days there was no king in Israel” — twice with “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Judges leaves you wanting a king. 1 Samuel 8 gives you one and tells you what it costs. The two books are not disagreeing; they are the two halves of one honest account.
• Judges 3:9, 3:15; 6:6; 10:10 — and then 8:18. In Judges, crying out (zāʿaq) is always the hinge: they cry, and God raises up a deliverer. Samuel takes the one reliable thing in the whole book of Judges and says it will stop working: “you will cry out because of your king… but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” And yet one chapter later, “their cry has come to me” (9:16). Hold both.
• Judges 8:22–23 — the same offer, refused. Israel says to Gideon, “Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also,” and Gideon answers, “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you.” That is the theology of 8:7, stated by a judge two hundred years earlier — and Gideon then makes an ephod that becomes a snare, and his son Abimelech murders seventy brothers to make himself king anyway, with Jotham’s fable of the bramble as the commentary. Israel has tried this before. The narrator knows the reader knows.
• 1 Samuel 2:12–17, 2:22–25 — the pattern repeating in the prophet’s own house. Eli’s sons were “worthless men” who took what was not theirs from the sacrifices; Samuel’s sons “turned aside after gain… took bribes and perverted justice.” The book has now shown the same failure twice, in the two best houses in Israel, and it makes the elders’ complaint in 8:5 impossible to dismiss. This is not a story about good leaders being unfairly rejected.
• 1 Samuel 2:10 — Hannah got there first. Before there is a king, before there is a request, a woman sings that the Lord “will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.” The book’s opening poem already knows where it is going, which is why the request in chapter 8 is not a surprise to the narrative — only to the elders.
• 1 Samuel 7:10–13 — the chapter immediately before. At Mizpah — the same place as 10:17 — “the Lord thundered with a mighty sound that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion,” and Samuel set up a stone and called it Ebenezer, “Till now the Lord has helped us.” The request for a king who will “go out before us and fight our battles” (8:20) is made by people who had watched God do exactly that, on that exact ground, in the previous chapter.
• Deuteronomy 18:9–22 — the prophet, and the way you find things out. Israel is forbidden the divination of the nations and given prophets instead. Chapter 9 is a case study: two men who cannot find their donkeys go to a seer, and what they get is not a location but a kingdom. Note also that Saul’s ruin will come at the point where he goes back to the forbidden way (1 Samuel 28).
• 2 Samuel 7:8–16 and Psalm 2 — where this ends up. The God who called the request a rejection takes a shepherd, calls him nāgîḏ — the same word he used of Saul — and swears to establish his house and his throne forever; and Israel sings, “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.” Neither text cancels the other. That is the shape of the whole Old Testament on this subject.
• Hosea 13:11 and Acts 13:21 — two later readings, both short and both blunt. Hosea: “I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath.” Paul at Pisidian Antioch, telling Israel’s story to a synagogue: “Then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years.” Paul says it without a word of blame — and then, in the next verse, moves straight to David.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the fullest text-critical treatment in English; it is where to go for the 10:1 plus, the 8:16 “cattle” reading and the 4QSam^a paragraph, and it argues positions this page reports without adopting.
• Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC); David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT), which is markedly more conservative than McCarter about departing from the Masoretic Text and is worth reading precisely for that; Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); V. Philips Long, 1 & 2 Samuel.
• Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation) — the sharpest theological reading of chapter 8 in the standard series, and one to argue with; Robert Alter, The David Story, for the narrative art and a translation that keeps the repetitions audible.
• J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, vol. IV (1 Samuel 1–12) — exhaustive on the structure of exactly these chapters.
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible; Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus and The Biblical Qumran Scrolls (the source of the 4QSam^a extents given above); F. M. Cross, D. W. Parry, R. J. Saley and E. Ulrich, Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel (DJD XVII, 2005).
• Isaac Mendelsohn, BASOR 143 (1956) 17–22, on 8:11–18 and the Ugarit documents; Bernard A. Taylor, “1 Reigns: To the Reader,” in NETS.

• Is the monarchy commanded, permitted, or conceded? The question is old, and the sources named answer it differently. Deuteronomy 17:14–15 reads as permission with limits (“you may indeed set a king over you”) inside a prediction of the request. 1 Samuel 8:7 reads as rejection. 1 Samuel 8:22 reads as divine grant. b. Sanhedrin 20b preserves all three readings as a live dispute — R. Yehuda (a commandment), R. Nehorai (a concession to complaint), R. Eliezer (the elders asked rightly, the crowd spoiled it). Christian readers have divided along nearly identical lines. We name the positions and do not adjudicate, because Scripture states both the rejection and the grant and never states the relation between them.
• The “two sources” question, described accurately. Since Wellhausen it has been common to divide these chapters into an early, favourable account of Saul’s rise (9:1–10:16; 11) and a later, hostile one (8; 10:17–27; 12), on the grounds that they give the monarchy opposite valuations and Saul is made king more than once. Many recent scholars — including several in the list above — read the chapters instead as a single deliberately double-sided composition, and point out that ancient Near Eastern accessions regularly involved designation, acclamation and confirmation as separate acts (which is what 9:1–10:16, 10:17–27 and 11:14–15 actually look like). Nothing on this page depends on the outcome, and the doubleness the theory was invented to explain is, on any view, really there in the text.
• The longer Greek at 10:1 is the passage’s most consequential textual decision, and your English Bible has already made it for you. The ESV and NRSV print the Greek and footnote the Hebrew; the KJV, NKJV, NIV and JPS print the shorter Hebrew and footnote the Greek. Checked, not assumed. The mechanism usually proposed is homoioteleuton — a scribe’s eye jumping from the first “to be prince” to the second and dropping everything between — which would mean the Greek preserves what the Hebrew lost. The alternative is that the Greek (or its Hebrew parent) filled out a terse verse. Both are seriously held. What matters pastorally is that no doctrine moves either way, and that the difference is printed openly in the footnotes of nearly every study Bible. See the texts we print.
• 4QSam^a, Josephus and the Nahash paragraph: a genuinely instructive case, and one to state carefully. The scroll has, before 11:1, a paragraph about Nahash of Ammon gouging out right eyes in Gilead; Josephus has substantially the same material (Ant. 6.68–71); the MT and Rahlfs have neither, and the MT instead ends 10:27 “but he held his peace,” where the scroll and the Greek have “about a month later.” The NRSV prints the paragraph; the ESV and most others do not. Frank Cross, Eugene Ulrich and McCarter argued it is original and fell out; others hold it is a later expansion that the scroll and Josephus share. The evidence is real, the disagreement is real, and this page reports both without deciding. Note what it is not: it is not a case of the Greek against the Hebrew, since here the Greek and the Hebrew agree in lacking it.
• Saul’s hiding, and the discipline of saying less than the tradition. The narrator gives no motive (10:22). Josephus gives modesty (6.63). Preachers have given cowardice, false humility, and prophetic irony. All of those are additions. What can be said is what the text says: the lot fell on him, he was not there, God told them where he was, they ran and fetched him, and he was still the tallest man in the country. If a study needs Saul to be contemptible in chapter 10 in order to make chapter 15 land, the study is doing the work the text declined to do.
• What 8:11–18 is not. It is not a general biblical verdict on forms of government, and it is not a description of taxation as such (Israel already tithed, to God). It is a description of what happens when a people transfers to a man the trust that belonged to God, told in the concrete currency of the ancient world: bodies, land, labour and a tenth. Preaching that turns it into commentary on a modern administration — any modern administration — has changed the subject. The subject is 8:7, and the audience is the church.

• The complaint was true and the request was still a rejection. Samuel’s sons really were taking bribes. The elders were not lying and they were not stupid, and God does not tell them they were. He tells them what they were actually doing underneath a reasonable request: transferring their trust. You can be completely right about the problem and still be reaching for the wrong thing.
• Three words did the damage: “like all the nations.” It is the only phrase they repeat (8:5, 8:20), and it is the phrase Deuteronomy had already predicted. Not “give us justice” — that God would have answered. “Make us normal.”
• Count the takings. Six “he will take”s in seven verses, and the list is bodies, daughters, land, harvest, workers, animals, a tenth, a tenth. Then: “and you shall be his slaves.” Israel had been slaves once and been brought out (10:18). The warning is that they are asking to walk back into it with their eyes open, and the narrator does not have to say so.
• God said no and then said yes, and the Bible never explains it. He calls it a rejection of himself, and in the same conversation tells Samuel to do it. He gave them what they insisted on and then went with them into it — chose the man, sent his Spirit on him, and eventually bound himself by oath to a king’s house forever. That is not God changing his mind about the sin. It is God refusing to leave.
• The one thing 8:18 takes away is the thing Judges never withheld. “You will cry out… but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” And then 9:16: “their cry has come to me.” Do not flatten either sentence. Sin has consequences that prayer does not simply undo, and God hears his people anyway, and both of those are in the same three chapters.
• Leave Saul his dignity. He is out looking for donkeys when this lands on him; he says he is from the least family of the least tribe; and on his coronation day some of his own countrymen ask what use he is, and he says nothing. Whatever you know about how his story ends, do not read it back into chapter 10. The text has not said it yet, and neither should we.
• And notice what Samuel does after the shouting. He writes the constitution down, and lays it up before the Lord (10:25). The nation now has a king and a document that outranks him. That is not a small thing, and it is the last thing the prophet does before going home.

A word about typology, clearly labelled: it is tempting to run straight from “they have rejected me from being king over them” to “we have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15), and Christians have often done it. Hold it carefully. The New Testament does not make that link; what it does do is far more restrained and far more interesting — Acts 13:21 tells the story straight, without reproach, on the way to David and then to Jesus, and the whole New Testament calls Jesus Christ, the Anointed, using the word Samuel’s flask made possible. If you want a Christ-ward reading of this passage, take that one: the office Israel asked for wrongly was the office God filled rightly, in his own time, with his own Son. Offered here as a devotional analogy, clearly labelled as one, and not as what 1 Samuel 8 is about.

Step in response: two things this week. First, find the place where your own request is reasonable and your trust has quietly moved — the arrangement, the person, the plan that has started doing the work God was doing. Name it out loud to somebody. Second, if you are the one who has been asked to hand over what only God should hold, notice what Samuel does with the request: he is offended, he prays about it, he tells them the truth in full, and then he obeys and blesses the outcome anyway. That order is worth copying.