Samuel: Chapter 12
On stories and deeper stories still...
Make your voice heard
over the storm
See, fear, tell your story.
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“Then Samuel said ‘I have listened to your voice in all you have asked and set a king over you’”--from the redemptive “joy” of Saul’s story in the previous chapter, we return to the pain of Samuel’s frame story. If previously God had commanded Samuel to “listen” to all the nation’s demands, subsuming his hurt and betrayal, now it is Samuel who makes his voice heard. The chapter is sturctured around the thrice-repeated anaphora And Samuel said...and Samuel’s singular “call”.
Many before have “judged” Israel, but Samuel here makes judgment cosmic, demanding the people stand (n’t’v) while calling for testimony in a recreation of Moses’s final address.
This linkage to Moses is central to Samuel’s assertion of a vision of leadership that subsumes this shiny-new king. God, he asserts, comes first. It is he who “made” Moses and Ahron. History needs to be seen as a continuum from that primary act of redemption, with the people forgetting, and then being saved by those whom God “sends”. It is you, Samuel, asserts, who have disrupted this continuity, by asserting “‘No, we must have a king reigning over us’—though the ETERNAL your God is your King.”
Redemption lies in seeing-fearing (r’e’h) (another leitwort) the deeper reality, which always subsumes human kingship: “if you will see-fear (ti’reuh) your God… and listen to his voice...if both both you and the king that he crowned over you follow God...” The voice that must be heard is not yours, but God’s. The human king is subordinated to this overarching Voice, just as the tale of Saul’s coronation is subsumed by the frame story of Samuel’s critique of it.
The king might lead, but the deepest service (a’v’d) is to God: you must serve him, and listen to his voice. Samuel drives home the lesson with a recreation of Sinai’s overwhelming sounds, at the very time of the giving of the Torah—Shavuot’s “wheat harvest” (See Exodus 34:24). Do not fear, Samuel concludes. You have not yet lost true leadership, which lies in this continuous connection to God. Samuel returns to his role as intermediary, yet if before he was almost an invisible conduit, now he is a continual force: I will not cease to pray for you.
The child born through an act of definitive prayer makes prayer the definitive act.