Debating Destiny

I Samuel Chapter 12, the Strange and the Spectacular

Verses: 25

Is It Read At Synagogue?: No.

Famous Quotes/Phrases: Samuel presents the Israelites with yet another description of a blessing and a curse: follow God and receive reward, turn away from God and meet your doom. We find this in Deuteronomy (and the second paragraph of the Shema) and numerous other biblical books.

Basic Plot: The focus returns to Samuel, as he asks the Israelites why they would ask for a king when Samuel has been a faithful leader, just as he argues in Chapter 8. The people testify that Samuel has done nothing wrong. Samuel then launches into a brief history of the Israelites up to that point — their travels to Egypt, their deliverance, their entry into the Promised Land, and the struggles that meet them once inside.

To prove to the Israelites that they have erred by asking for a king, Samuel entreats God to cause a thunderstorm. The people, alarmed that such a storm would damage their crops during the wheat harvest, admit to wrongdoing and ask Samuel to pray on their behalf. Samuel agrees, warning the people that if they return to sinning ways, both they and their king would be swept away.

What’s Strange: There are times when the human characters in the Hebrew Bible sound a lot like bosses of Mafia families. King David certainly does at the end of his life, as we’ll eventually learn. In this chapter, it almost feels like Samuel is saying, “Hey, Israel, that’s a nice wheat harvest you have here … it’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.” Couldn’t you imagine Tony Soprano saying something like this?

What’s Spectacular: To be fair to the Israelites (or at least to give them the benefit of the doubt), there seems to be differing expectations of what national leadership should look like. In his book God, A Biography, Jack Miles notes that Samuel refers to God as “King” in Verse 12 of this chapter. However, Miles writes, “to the Israelites, early in their national life, monarchy was a foreign institution and a foreign category in thought and imagination. After and because of the establishment of the Israelite monarchy, this was to change; but straight through to the end of II Kings, the Lord God is never referred to as a king.” Samuel believes the people have broken some sort of rule by asking for a king other than God, but as even God acknowledges, the people are well within their rights to do so.

Samuel and his contemporaries are not the first to argue about how Israel should be ruled — and they certainly won’t be the last.

As we celebrate today Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day), we too continue to be challenged by differing ideas of what the state of Israel should be and how it should function. Should it focus primarily on being the home of Jews around the world and always act with them in mind? Should Israel be focused mainly on its own domestic affairs and make decisions based on them first and foremost? These tensions, and many others, have existed since the dawning of the modern State of Israel (and for generations before that). Yet even though arguments remain, if we continue to debate these questions out of love, the endurance shown by the state of Israel for 77 years shall never wane.

Shabbat Shalom … and Am Yisrael Chai!