Читать книгу King Saul - John C. Holbert - Страница 9

4

The look on the old priest’s face those long years ago swam into Samuel’s mind once again, and he smiled a bitter smile as he moved toward the newcomer to Ramah. Eli was certainly not prepared to mentor anyone, the old fool! But, thought Samuel, I suppose he had done his best, given Hannah’s absolute certainty that YHWH wanted the boy to be a priest and a Nazirite. With all these thoughts in his mind, swirling around inside his head, he had awakened that morning fearing that YHWH would present to him the prince he was to anoint. He feared that he, like Eli before him, was about to be forced to mentor his own replacement! He had hoped to get to the sacrifice, perform the rite, eat the sacred meal, and return home in silence. But now he saw the man he did not want to see. He was enormous! He was inordinately good-looking, and he was young, his face unlined and open. Samuel was afraid that he was looking at the first king of Israel. There was no way that he could avoid the duty that YHWH had thrust on him, and he knew that with the thing he must now do, his own family of Israelite leaders would end with his death. When Samuel anointed this extraordinary boy, his sons’ futures were over, and his own memory as a faithful leader of the people was in the most serious jeopardy.

As Samuel deviated from his path toward the high place to meet the boy, YHWH’s voice insinuated itself into his ears once again.

“This is the man of whom I spoke to you yesterday; it is he who will rule over my people.”

Samuel now knew there was no escape. His replacement stood before him; his ruin was walking toward him; the man who had the power to displace him in the hearts of the people he had loved and cherished and protected for fifty seasons of years loomed up like a mountain in his very own city. With all that was within him the mighty prophet of YHWH wanted to shout out for all to hear that he would have no part in anointing a ruler or prince or king over Israel, since only YHWH was king and only Samuel was YHWH’s prophet. But with YHWH’s unequivocal words ringing in the air, he saw no way out; he was going to have to anoint this man prince over Israel. But, he thought, I do not have to like it! Nor do I have to be quietly comfortable with the deed or the man. “Ruler?” “Prince?” “King?” We will see, thought Samuel. We will see what sort of ruler this huge boy may be. We will see.

His reverie was broken by Saul’s first words to him.

“Please tell me exactly where is the house of the seer?”

Was this huge boy so thick as not to know whom he was addressing? Who in Israel did not know Samuel? Had he been born in a cave? Just what sort of fool had YHWH chosen to be prince over Israel? Could it be that YHWH had chosen just such a one to satisfy, on the surface at least, the demands of the people, but at the same time to demonstrate that rulers, kings, were finally no good, that they were incompetent, that they were dangerous? Samuel’s eyes brightened, his mood lightened. YHWH was ever mysterious! Could it be that the great God had chosen just such a fool as this to demonstrate to the people that only YHWH could be king, after all? He thought of all of those years of leading Israel, all of those years of doing the work of YHWH. Who better than he knew the mind of the God? Who better than Samuel, the one who had been uniquely called for leadership of the people, whose words had been God’s word for moons beyond counting? It had begun with that amazing call from his God. He stood mute in the square of Ramah, gazing at the uncomprehending man, and his aging mind wondered back again to a distant time when he was very young, back to that tiny room in Shiloh’s temple.

He had whimpered quietly as he had watched his mother turn her back on him for the first time in his life and to leave him with the smelly old priest whom he had not liked the first time he saw him in the dimness of the temple. His smoky clothes, his straggled hair, dully yellowed by sacrificial fires and cheap lamps, hung in uneven strands down his face and into his eyes. And those eyes! They had once been a green of some sort, but now the cruel march of milky white clouds was invading both so that complete blindness was not far off. The young boy shuddered in terror to look into those eyes that seemed more dead than alive, ghostly, beastly, inhuman. The first few days of his time with Eli, Samuel could not get the look of those eyes out of his thoughts; they followed him as he explored the puny world he had been assigned—the barren, rocky ground around the temple, the temple itself, forever dark and dank and usually silent save the hum of prayers and the crackle of the sacrificial fires. Outside in the animal pits, there were the near constant screams of frightened creatures having their unwilling throats slit for offering to YHWH—birds for the poor and destitute, sheep for the less poor and especially desperate, and for the rich and the nearly hopeless even a cow, though cattle were rare and hard to keep alive in the lean years of bad pasturage.

All these beasts shed their blood for the God, day after day and week after week, until the ground was red with it, and the pits for slaughter were full of rotting corpses with flesh-picked bones sticking out of the ashes. One of Samuel’s earliest tasks in the temple compound was to shoo away the multitudes of carrion birds that gathered thick as flies around that pit, all too ready to gorge on carcasses either before sacrifice or after. The birds were not picky. Their bloody beaks were not attuned to the technicalities of divine sacrifice; they swooped and cried and dove on the pit despite the five-year-old boy’s valiant attempts to scare them off into the sky. Some always managed to get through Samuel’s cries and screams, accompanied by wild wavings of a stick, said by Eli to have been the very rod of Moses that he used to part the waters of the Sea of Reeds. What would the great lawgiver have thought to see his wondrous rod reduced to a defense against birds, not to mention to witness its wooden sides marked increasingly with bird leavings and sacrificial ashes?

As Samuel grew older, his work in the temple changed as his understanding of the workings of YHWH matured under the teaching of the priests assigned to the task. He learned primarily the stories of Israel’s past; how the world was created by the mighty YHWH; how humanity was made and given a garden, but how they had disobeyed the command against eating the fruit of a certain tree and had been expelled from the garden; how the first murder in history was committed by a brother against his own brother; how the flood had come to wash the evil away, but how that evil persisted even after the waters had dried up; how Abram became Abraham and Sarai, his wife, became Sarah; how they had given birth to a boy called “laughter” (Isaac) when they were far too old; how Laughter had had twin sons, one foolish and the other clever; how the clever one (Jacob) had had many children, one of whom (Joseph) had through marvelous adventures become a powerful man in Egypt and had led Israel there; how they had been enslaved by cruel pharaohs for a very long time; how the great Moses had led them forth from there with the power of YHWH, had given to them the law by which they would live, had led them to the very edge of the land of promise; how he had died before entering the land, after handing the leadership of the people to Joshua; how they had now lived in that land for many years, close to the former owners of the land in uneasy alliances and tentative neighborliness; how the sea-faring Philistines had appeared from the west to populate the coastlands and to threaten again and again those living in the central mountains of the promised land.

The priests were an insulated group of men, little familiar with the world outside of the temple and its restricted compound, but they knew of the Philistines, of their iron chariots and swords, of their designs on the fertile pasturelands of the central highlands. The priests taught that vigilance was always needed to guard against Philistine raids and Philistine deceptions and especially Philistine religious beliefs in the god, Dagon, a god of grain who was of course no god at all in the eyes of the priests. Samuel heard daily that the only God was YHWH, the mountain monarch who had chosen and saved Israel time and again, and who would deal with these blasphemous heathen in YHWH’s good time. By the time of his adulthood, when he had seen fourteen summers, Samuel had no doubt that YHWH was the only God in the universe, and that other gods were useless, mute, powerless, and finally did not exist at all.

These beliefs were underscored by the yearly visits of his mother, Hannah, who made sure that his robes always fit and were well cleaned. She had seen the filthy rags worn by Eli and his priests and did not wish for her son to emulate such disgusting models. Also, the priestly garment, the ephod, was tiny, barely covering their manhood. Cold winters in Shiloh made those strips of cloth around the waist absurd, however holy they were purported to be. So each year she herself would sew him a new garment, each year taking careful measurements to be certain of the right fit. When she came to deliver the new robe, she and Samuel would talk late into the night about YHWH and divine things. She would remind him over and over that his very existence was due to her fervent prayers and to YHWH’s joyful answer. There was little doubt in Hannah’s mind that her son was destined for greatness. The manner of his conception and birth, the prayer that she had spoken in the temple the day she left him there, the ways in which he had grown in knowledge and diligence during his years at Shiloh, convinced her that Samuel would soon enough burst the tiny bonds of the poor village and would be known throughout the land. Each year she would assure him of his destiny and each year both of them would pray to YHWH to bring it about.

Hannah had come with the spring, but Samuel began to see that her hair was no longer dark, her gait no longer easy, her back no longer straight. She always asked him first, “Are you eating well enough, my son?” He imagined mothers had asked such a question of their departed children since children first were born to them. And he, as others before him, always replied with a small chuckle, “Well enough, mother, well enough,” though she looked askance at his too small frame, his spindly arms, his greasy hair, uncut to fulfill the vow, the hair of a priest too long near the sacrificial pyre. Finally, in the final year of her coming, he saw she could barely walk, her eyes dim, her face deeply lined. And her first question that last time had been, “Will you bury my withered self when the time comes, my son, in the hallowed way?” His throat had closed however briefly, but he knew that priests were not expected to weep in the face of death, no matter how unwelcome it was. Besides the vow of the Nazirite, made by Hannah herself, forbade Samuel from touching her dead body himself. But he said, “I will be certain that your body is well treated, mother. Do not be afraid.” He added this last, since he had learned from the older priests that such words were to be said to the dying, and Samuel knew that his mother was dying. And not long after her final visit to Shiloh she did. And Samuel made certain that she was well and rightly buried near her home, but not too near her long-time rival Peninnah. He was sure she would be glad of that.

He did wonder about where his mother was now that she no longer saw the light of the rising sun. The usual answer, of course, was Sheol, that shadowy place far below the surface of the soil, somewhere deep in the earth, far away from any living thing. The priests regularly warned the people about Sheol, picturing it as a great maw, ever ready to swallow down the unsuspecting fool who failed to follow the ways of the great YHWH. Yet, every dead one went to Sheol, they said, whether wise or foolish, whether fat or thin or short or tall, whether known for goodness, like his mother, or known for wickedness, like numerous greedy and grasping people living around Shiloh. There was no shortage of greedy fools, so far as Samuel could tell. Did they too go to Sheol? Were they also there with his lovely mother? What did they do there? The priests said they did nothing, that they were shadows, wraiths, ghosts, floating and moving in the place of darkness, darker than the caves of Ein Gedi, more silent than the Salt Sea. Yes, all went to Sheol; the goal was to delay the trip for as long as possible, and Samuel felt no desire to join his mother there. He planned to live a long time, because he knew that YHWH had plans for him that were still to be revealed.

Yet, Samuel, who had imbibed the religious language of Eli and his priests for all this time, and had listened carefully to the words of his mother, had not yet had any personal experience of YHWH to prove to him finally that the God was in fact his God. His need for such an experience was great, because the terrible sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas, had proven as bad as they had been rumored to be. It had long been known that they were not fit to be priests of any kind, let alone high priests in the land, so when Eli reported to Samuel that a messenger from YHWH had come to him to warn him about the appalling actions of his sons, their bribe-taking and sexual immorality, and how he, Eli, had not done enough to restrain them from their foul behaviors, Samuel began to realize when Eli died, he would need to take the role that Eli’s sons were not equipped to take. But he wanted a sign. The stories of Israel were important and exciting and regularly filled his mind, but he needed an experience of his own. He needed his own story with YHWH.

But with the aging and increasingly incompetent Eli, experiences of YHWH were very rare, if they existed at all. His two nauseating sons and his own now complete blindness had led the priest to despair and profound depression. He sat day after day on his seat by the doorpost of the temple, sometimes failing to move for hours at a time, forgetting to eat, lost in a trance of prayer or confusion; it was hard to tell which. Each evening Samuel would lead the pathetic man to his room behind the temple and help him get into his filthy bed. However often Samuel cleaned the room and the bed, both remained unspeakably rank, with small white insects scurrying in and under the bedclothes and the acrid smells of rotting flesh permeating the fetid air. Eli saw and felt and smelled none of it; he just collapsed into the bed and stared unseeing into a place only he seemed to know.

After getting him settled one night, which was just like so many other nights, Samuel went out to tend the temple light that by custom was never to be allowed to go out. The people were convinced that the light somehow represented the presence of God, and if it ever were extinguished God would disappear with it. So Samuel’s job, one of many, was to be certain that the light was always seen. As he approached the lamp, a small poorly made clay vessel, with an uneven point on one end and a loop at the other, by which it was hung on the wall with a peg, he noticed that the light was sputtering more than usual, threatening to go out. He hurried to the vat of olive oil that rested under the lamp and quickly dipped out a ladle of the oil and poured it carefully into the bowl of the lamp. The flame sputtered a bit more and then caught strongly; the light briefly illuminated one of the corners of the dark temple. But after that surge of light, the flame settled back down to its usual dimness, being less the source of light than a source of comfort for the few worshippers who were wandering through the place.

Samuel shooed out the few desperate souls still in the place of God and locked the large wooden door, placing the bar into the slots on either side of the doorframe. At last, he thought, I can finally go to my own bed. Though the room was smaller than Eli’s, at least it was clean and neat, devoid of the nasty bugs and upwind of the rotten animal smells. The room opened right out into the larger temple room. From his bed, Samuel could look directly into that room at the mysterious box of YHWH, the holy Ark of the Covenant. Samuel thought how strange it was that such a fabled object had ended up in this dank and rather pathetic room in a miniscule village in the highlands of Ephraim. Given what was believed about this wooden chest, Samuel thought that it deserved a more splendid context, a brighter, larger temple, with gold curtains, ornate lampstands, huge images of power and splendor all around. It was nothing less than embarrassing to see the holy thing sitting on the dirt floor, shoved without any real ceremony against the back wall of this miserable room, nearly forgotten, usually avoided by worshippers intent on bloody sacrifice at the altar.

The Ark of the Covenant had a colorful, supernatural history. When the people of Israel had escaped from Egypt, led by the hero Moses, they had moved toward the sacred mountain of Sinai where God was said especially to live. At the mountain God had given to Moses the Ten Commandments, incised on two tablets of stone by God’s own fingers. While that gift was being given, at the base of the mountain, Aaron, Moses’ priestly brother, was creating with his own fingers a splendid golden calf as a way to calm the terrified Israelites who had become certain that Moses had abandoned them to the horrors of wilderness. Moses carried the precious tablets down the mountain to offer them to his people, but instead of seeing people anxious to receive the law of God, he witnessed scenes of complete wanton debauchery, as they worshipped their little bull with unspeakable acts. Aaron was nowhere to be seen. When Moses finally found Aaron, and had demanded he explain the monstrous things his eyes beheld, Aaron calmly lied that he had not made the calf at all, but had merely tossed the gold brought to him by the people into the fire, and the calf had magically popped out! Moses was so enraged that he shattered the two clay tablets of God into a thousand shards. He then had rushed back up the mountain to ask forgiveness of YHWH for the people’s evil and had even offered his own life in their place if God demanded such a sacrifice. God did forgive them, and even made for Moses another set of the ten laws for him to take with them as they moved toward the land God had promised.

It was then that the Ark was made, as a receptacle for the tablets of God. It was made to the exact specifications of YHWH, big enough to contain the two divine tablets of the law, but not so big as to be unwieldy to carry the long distances through the wilderness. It was wooden, nothing special to look at, oblong in shape with leather loops at the four corners on the top through which long wooden poles could be passed so that it could be carried by two men on their shoulders. Carved on the top, too, was the monstrous figure of an ancient Cherubim, a winged creature with cruel claws and sharp beak that warned away those who would abuse the Ark or even touch it. The carving was surprisingly crude, but again, thought Samuel, if it were too ornate it might rival the God who was thought to be enthroned upon the Ark, seated somehow on that Cherubim itself. The Ark possessed a wondrous power, nothing to be trifled with, bearing as it did the tablets of the Almighty YHWH. Samuel had learned as one of his first lessons the Song of the Ark. When the Ark was made to appear, this was said:

“Arise, O YHWH; let your enemies be scattered!

May those who hate you flee from your presence!”

And when it was returned to the temple, the people would say:

“Rest, O YHWH; may the thousands of Israel increase!”

Samuel had memorized these ceremonial words that were uttered whenever the Ark was moved in and out of the temple. But those exciting days were few now; he could not remember the last festival day for the movement of the Ark of the Covenant. So it sat, silent, neglected, gathering dust, the memory of its vaunted power fading with its cracking varnish and splitting wood. In every way the boy Samuel could see the glory of Israel was something far less than glorious, the temple of Shiloh was a crumbling hulk, and the future of the land was as uncertain as the flickering lamp on the wall. He closed his eyes with these dark and hopeless thoughts clouding his mind, and tried to recover that first excitement that his early days in this place had given. He was as close to despair as the day his mother had left him here so long ago.

Suddenly, a voice shattered the silence.

“Samuel, Samuel!”

Immediately and automatically, the boy replied,

“Here I am!”

This was the correct way to respond to a summons, and Samuel leapt out of his bed to rush to Eli’s room. Perhaps the old man was ill. Perhaps he had had a bad dream, as was common as he aged. There was some irritation in Samuel’s reply, however much he tried to keep it polite; he got little enough sleep as it was without the interruptions of a foolish old man.

“I’m here; you called me.”

Samuel waited for the instructions to get Eli some water, or to soothe his troubled mind, or to clean up his bed after still another accident; he could hardly control his body anymore. But instead the man said,

“I did not call; go and lie down.”

Samuel trudged sleepily back to his bed.

But the voice spoke again.

“Samuel, Samuel!”

This time, without replying, a disgusted Samuel stomped toward Eli’s room, ready to berate the slobbering idiot, but before arriving he calmed enough to say again, “I’m here; you called me.”

But Eli, turning his head in the direction of Samuel’s voice, said with genuine surprise, “I did not call, my son. Go and lie down.”

Samuel wanted to add that he thought Eli was so addled as not to know what he was saying, but left the rank room in silence.

But no sooner had he settled into his bed when the same voice came a third time.

“Samuel, Samuel!”

And a third time, Samuel got out of his bed and with real anger walked to Eli’s room. And through clenched teeth, he glared at the blind priest and said, “I’m here; you called me!”

But this time Eli paused before responding, as if he were thinking, as if his muddled brain was attempting to come to some sort of conclusion about what appeared to be happening.

This time he said, “Go and lie down, and if the voice comes again, say exactly this: ‘Speak, YHWH, for your servant is listening.’”

Samuel stared in shocked silence. Could YHWH be calling him? Could this be the experience he had hoped and prayed for? It seemed completely unlikely that YHWH would announce the divine presence in the dead of night to him, a boy, not a man, in the failing temple of Shiloh, calling his own name again and again.

He rushed back to his bed and waited…and waited…and waited. There was no sleeping now, no ruminations on past glories and present disappointments. Samuel’s ears strained to hear the voice again. All was silent. The voice must have been Eli’s, the priest’s confused mind manifesting itself in incoherency. Samuel had about convinced himself that the explanation for the nighttime voice was Eli’s uncontrollable shouting after all, when the voice spoke again just as it had before.

“Samuel, Samuel!”

Samuel was terrified, but not really believing that this was in fact the voice of YHWH, he did not quite respond as Eli had told him to.

Instead, he said, “Speak, for your servant is listening,” not identifying the ghostly voice as YHWH.

But to his amazement and horror, it soon became clear that it was the voice of YHWH, and that Samuel had been singled out for a terrible task.

“I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone daring to hear it tingle. On the day when I act I will do everything I said I would do to the house of Eli. I am about to punish him and his family and all his relations, because he knew all the evil of his disgusting sons, who spend their lives blaspheming me, and did not do enough to restrain them. As a result, there are not enough sacrifices, not enough prayers, not enough vows to assuage my fury against all of them, and that fury will never be quenched but will forever rage and rage and rage!”

And with that final “rage” echoing in the air, or it seemed to be in the air, the voice was stilled. And Samuel was stunned.

YHWH was infuriated beyond calming! God had announced to Samuel that he was coming to punish Eli and all of his house. But how? When? And what was Samuel to do? YHWH had not told him to do anything. YHWH had just vented fury, warning about coming judgment. The boy-man lay on his bed trembling all night. Was he to tell this monstrous news to Eli? Why should he, an apprentice to the priest, be called to announce such things to a pathetic old man? And just why was God so enraged against him? Samuel had heard Eli attempt to censure his two boys, but they were incorrigible, untrainable, unchangeable. Surely, a doddering and enfeebled father could not be fully blamed for the actions of two wayward sons. Surely he could not be held so culpable that his entire future, and the future of his family, were now forfeit? Is YHWH so demanding as all that? Could there not be forgiveness from God for all the faithful priestly service, for all the prayers and all the sacrifices Eli had offered in the little temple at Shiloh? This YHWH was a hard taskmaster, a demanding God who brooked no argument, whose mind when made up was not to be changed. Samuel wrestled all night with his love and respect for Eli, who however weak and confused, had mentored him as well as his limited gifts could do, and he wrestled with the harsh pronouncement of YHWH who was determined to obliterate the house of Eli for all time.

But how was YHWH to act? The anger was clear but the means of that anger were not. Was this the way that YHWH charged chosen servants with divine work? Was it up to the servants to choose just how the divine work was to be carried out? Samuel struggled all night with what he should do. This YHWH was stern and demanding, but not as clear as the boy had hoped or needed.

As the sun rose, Samuel got up off his bed, removed the bar off the door, and flung the door to the temple wide. The bright sun streamed into the dim room, and the lamp flared with the morning breeze. But still he hesitated. He feared to tell the news to Eli; such news could easily kill him. He thought he might reveal only part of it, just the part about God’s anger, that God wanted him to reprimand his two sons to bring them back into line with God’s will and way. Perhaps that would suffice. He went about his morning chores—the lamp, fresh water for the animals and for him and Eli and the priests, rekindling the fire for the daily sacrifices. He went out of his way to avoid Eli as long as he could.

But he could not avoid him forever.

Soon Eli’s voice, he knew it was his voice this time, crackled through the air, “Samuel, my son.”

And Samuel could do nothing else than respond, “I’m here.”

Eli drew him down to sit on the edge of the filthy bed and with surprising strength demanded, “What did God tell you? I know it was God. What exactly did God tell you? Do not hide it from me! May God strike you dead if you hide anything God said to you last night!” The old man spoke with a vehemence born from a divine silence too long endured. If God had spoken to this boy, the priest had to know what was said. Samuel noticed that Eli had not called the God YHWH. Perhaps he was too fearful to utter the divine name for fear that what had been said was too terrible to hear?

And Samuel had to decide. His youthful mind weighed again what he felt he was called to do. The whole truth of God? But what exactly was the whole truth of God? Was it God’s truth to destroy the future of an old and faithful man whose life was about over in any case? Or was it God’s truth to protect Eli from the full horror of God’s fury against him? In an instant, Samuel chose, and the choice was fateful for the rest of his life and for the life of Israel. He saw himself here and now and for as long as he lived as God’s avenging messenger, God’s hammer, called upon by a harshly demanding deity over and over to correct the ever-sinning people, to correct them without question or pause, to speak the full truth of God as Samuel discerned that truth in every place and in every time. Samuel now knew he was God’s agent, God’s prophet, and that when his words were spoken they were without doubt and without contradiction the words of YHWH.

And so with that resolve he told Eli all that he had heard the voice say in the night, how Eli’s priesthood was over, how his sons were doomed, how his family had no place in the ongoing life of Israel. He spared nothing; he spoke with the harshness of the voice that had spoken to him. He was no longer pupil, no longer student. He was now the master, and the old master was deposed and rejected by the mouth of the new master. Eli reeled under the blows of Samuel’s words, uttered without pity. He lay quietly for a time on his bed.

Finally he said with as much dignity as he could muster, “It is surely YHWH who does whatever YHWH wishes to do.” He had now named the God as the YHWH he had loved and served all his life.

Eli had never said anything more true. Samuel knew he was right, and also knew that he would stake his prophetic life on that truth; YHWH did whatever YHWH wanted to do. He remembered the poem his mother had sung right after his birth; she had sung it to him often enough when he was a child. “YHWH kills and brings to life, sends to Sheol and brings up from there.” This God acts in ways only this God could act, and there was nothing for it but to be YHWH’s messenger in the world. And so Samuel had resolved that day to be.

But that was then, and this was now, and Saul, the powerful one YHWH had demanded for ruler, stood before him. Why was it that YHWH had chosen this one when Samuel was still fully capable of leading the people and the land? Surely YHWH would not cast him away from the leadership of Israel after all these years! He was old, but his mind remained clear, his body slower but still useful, his experience unmatched, his devotion undimmed! YHWH had deposed the vastly diminished Eli but Samuel, while somewhat old, retained his vigor, his voice, his ability to interpret what the mighty YHWH wanted for the people. I am no feeble and doddering Eli, he thought, and God would surely not reject me yet from service!

He must think! He must ponder again the thing YHWH had called him to do.

“Stay here, boy. I will return soon.”

Samuel left the square and sought a shady spot, out of Saul’s sight, where he could think undisturbed. There must be a way to avoid this day! Samuel hoped to find the way, as he again plunged down the well of the past.