Winners write history. But they do not always write it well.
Haftarat Shabbat Zakhor recounts perhaps the most shameful episode both in Jewish history and God’s biography. First, God demands the genocide of Amalek for crimes it committed several generations earlier. Samuel tells King Saul:
Thus says the Lord of Hosts: “I am exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them on the road, on their way up from Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”
Saul complies, but then God strips the king of his crown because although he slaughters all the Amalekites, under the prodding of the troops he saves some of the sheep for sacrifice. Saul begs and pleads for divine forgiveness, but Samuel contemptuously rejects him, telling him, “I will not go back you, for you have rejected the Lord’s command, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel.” In a few years, The Holy One will forgive David for murdering Uriah the Hittite to sleep with Bathsheba.
This is the Deity-as-Psychopath. Or is it?
The text provides clues that something here is not as it seems. God’s genocidal command against Amalek comes in a strange form:
Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over His people Israel. Therefore listen to the Lord’s command!”
Why introduce it this way? Previously, if the Tanach wants to tell us that God said something, it reports something like, “The Lord said to Moses” or “The Lord said to Joshua.” Here, however, “the Lord” doesn’t say anything, and all we have is Samuel claiming that this is what God told him.
Then, to preface God’s decree that Saul be stripped of the crown, we read “the word of the Lord came to Samuel.” This is strangely passive, and like the previous command, unprecedented. Finally, the rejection of Saul also does not come from God: Samuel just asserts that it has.
Could it be that these divine injunctions did not come from God at all? Both history and text suggest that this is indeed the case.
Samuel detested even having to deal with Saul. He hated the idea of the monarchy, and despite God’s gentle pleas (1 Samuel 8:6-8), he took the people’s call for a king as a personal insult, contending that he should direct and judge the people. (Haftarat Korach, 1 Samuel 11:14-12:22). His reminder that God sent him to anoint Saul – which the king was well aware of – reveals Samuel’s ongoing pettiness.
Resentment leads to anger. Samuel combined rage with a not-unreasonable belief in his divine connection, and the mixture was toxic, curdling his anger into vengeful bitterness.
The call for genocidal war followed. One can see the psychological move. “Amalek is evil. I can show God how valuable I am by eliminating the evil.” It became frantic. “God wants that. Surely God wants that.” What better way to make God happy than destroying Amalek? Yes, that must be it.
And how much more frantic it became when Samuel realized that his dream of satisfying God through complete destruction had not been satisfied. “Obviously, this means that everything that I warned them about – that kings would betray the Lord – was right.” The aged and fanatic Samuel cuts the Amalekite king to pieces himself.
Did Samuel consciously turn his disaster into an opportunity to undermine Saul’s reign? Or did he genuinely believe that Saul had relinquished the crown? Maybe the two went together: it tempts everyone to believe things that are in our interest to believe. As Upton Sinclair acidly observed 75 years ago: “It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” Thus, while “the word of the Lord” came to Samuel, the Lord actually did not say it. Samuel knew that that was what God wanted. If it was too late to destroy the monarchy, it was not too late to destroy the monarch, and replace him with another. That is a coup.
Now of course, the coup worked, in large part because Samuel found his man, or rather his boy: David son of Jesse. And one could argue that God wanted it that way because after all, David won. But lots of Israelites didn’t see it that way, and revolted against the House of David as soon as they got the chance: ten northern tribes established the kingdom of Israel, and the Davidic monarchy was left with a rump southern kingdom, Judah.
When the northern kingdom was overrun by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, northern scribes sought refuge in the House of David’s realm. But perhaps they were not fully convinced by the triumphant story of either genocide or the coup. Maybe they subtly changed the manuscripts of the Book of Samuel to give us hints of another narrative.
Such alterations were hardly unheard of. As the University of North Carolina’s“>powerfully argued in regard to the New Testament, subtle scribal editing helped make the case for Catholic orthodoxy 1,000 years later. Similar struggles may have played themselves out in Old Testament text. Northern scribes could not simply argue that Saul was treated unfairly. But they could leave us faint, indirect clues that there is another side to the story, sneaking it under the noses of the triumphant Davidic partisans.
This argument resembles the case famously made by political philosopher “>“Persecution and the Art of Writing.” The influence of persecution on literature, argues Strauss, “is precisely that it compels all writers who hold heterodox views to develop a peculiar technique of writing, the technique which we have in mind when we speak of writing between the lines.”
Strauss uses the example of a liberal in a totalitarian state. She could not defend liberalism, so she would write an article putatively attacking it, but restating it in such powerful and vigorous form that an intelligent reader would be convinced of liberalism’s value. In our case, the scribes only needed to place clues for readers that genocide and Saul’s overthrow were not God’s idea.
Don’t believe any of it? Skeptical of textual criticism and its conspiracy theories? Then simply say this: some Force wanted to signal that the command for genocide was not God’s, and neither was the harsh and brutal treatment of the hapless Saul. It is not too difficult to see Who that might be. And in our current era, we might think twice when the wrathful demand we go abroad in search of Amaleks to destroy.
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