‘There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite.” From the first line of Samuel, the reader is hooked. “There was a certain man” could be the opening of an O Henry short story or a Raymond Chandler novel. With the ment- ion of the hill country and then the list of exotic names going back to Elkanah’s great-grandfather, it is impossible not to read on. How long can it be, this being the Bible, before sex and violence raise their heads?
Sure enough, by only verse 19 there is sex, when Elkanah makes love to his wife Hannah. We like Hannah because Elkanah’s other wife, Peninnah, is vicious enough to have “kept provoking her in order to irritate her” over Hannah’s inability to have children. Peninnah obviously hates the fact that Elkanah loves Hannah more than her. (For all that it sounds like a fun concept for men, bigamy must be hard work and full of socially-awkward situations.)
The miraculous result of verse 19 is that Samuel is born to Hannah, which presum-ably must have sent Peninnah into convul-sions of fury and resentment. One of the great pleasures of Samuel is that its sparse dispersal of information – almost on a need-to-know basis, with minimal padding – allows the imagination a wide leeway.
The sex dealt with, violence arrives at the start of 1 Samuel 4 when: “The Israelites went out to fight against the Philistines. The Israelites camped at Ebenezer, and the Phil- istines at Aphek. The Philistines deployed their forces, and as the battle spread, Israel was defeated by the Philistines, who killed about 4,000 of them on the battlefield.” That was a huge number of men to lose in a single battle when Samuel was written (between 630 and 540 BC); it was clearly a very significant defeat, even if ancient sources tended to exaggerate numbers for literary effect or propaganda.
Yet by verse 10, a further 30,000 Israelites had been killed, and the Ark of God captured. This was utterly catastrophic. When told the news, which included the deaths in battle of his sons Hophni and Phinehas, the 98- year-old Eli, who had led Israel for 40 years, didn’t just die of a heart attack, but instead “he fell backward off his chair by the side of the gate. His neck was broken and he died, for he was an old man, and he was heavy.”
It’s details like this that lend verisimilit-ude to Samuel; most writers would not have bothered to mention the gate, or ladled on the melodrama when there was so much already. Samuel (or the group of writers brought together under his name) had a journalist’s eye for observation, and bowls the reader along effortlessly.
There is plenty in Samuel that is frankly so weird that it must be true. At one point the Philistines ask their priests and diviners what they can give the Israelites to stop the plague of rats and bodily tumours that have been afflicting them since they captured the Ark of the Lord. They come up with the somewhat macabre suggestion of five gold rats and five gold tumours, and the cart delivering them had to be pulled by “two cows that have calved and have never been yoked”. The number five came both from the five Philistine tribes, and also the five towns of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath and Ekron. For all the bizarre nature of the “guilt offering”, it seems to have done the trick.
Mention of Gaza reminds us how Sam-uel, the rest of which is largely a history of Israel at the time of Kings Saul and David, is the primary literary source for the exist-ence of a significant Israelite presence in Palestine around 3,000 years ago. There is archaeological evidence in Jerusalem for King David’s existence too, of course, though some of that has been disputed.
What Samuel does is to give superb literary evidence that anchors King David’s Israelite kingdom in the centre of the Holy Land. It thus confirms the views of those who rightly see Israel as deriving her legiti-macy not just from 20th-century political documents such as the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Treaty and David Ben-Gurion’s 1948 Declaration, but in fact from time immemorial. Samuel thus destroys the essentially anti-Semitic trope that Jews are mere colonial “settlers” in the Holy Land, rather than being what they truly are: the indigenous natives of 30 centuries.
Lord Roberts of Belgravia is an author, journalist and Conservative peer.
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