Samuel

When the elders come to Samuel at Ramah and ask for a king to judge them like all the nations, the reason they give is that his own sons take bribes and pervert judgment, which is awkward, because it is true. He is displeased and prays, and is told that the people have not rejected him but God, and to warn them and then do as they ask.

The warning is a description of a state. A king will take your sons for his chariots and to run before them, and to plough his ground and reap his harvest and make his weapons. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks and bakers. He will take your fields and vineyards and olive groves, the best of them, and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your seed and of your flocks, and you shall be his servants, and you shall cry out in that day because of the king you have chosen, and God will not hear you.

It is a list of taxation, conscription and land seizure, delivered before any of it happens, and everything in it is enacted in the books that follow.

Readers have long noticed that the books of Samuel contain both this and passages that treat the monarchy as a gift, and there are three separate accounts of how Saul was made king. Critical scholarship generally reads the material as combining sources with different attitudes to kingship. The editors did not smooth them out, and the result is a founding narrative for the monarchy that carries its own most damaging objection inside it.

Samuel's last appearance happens after his death. Saul, facing the Philistine army and getting no answer by dream, by the sacred lots or by prophets, asks his servants to find a woman who consults the dead. He has himself expelled such practitioners from the land, and he goes in disguise.

The woman at Endor asks whom she should bring up. When Samuel appears she screams, because she has recognised her visitor. Samuel is described as an old man covered with a mantle, and he is irritated: why have you disturbed me. He then repeats the judgment he gave in life and adds that tomorrow Saul and his sons will be with him. Saul falls full length on the ground, and the woman, who has been told nothing about what happens to mediums under this king, insists that he eat before he goes back out.

The passage put later readers in difficulty, because the Torah prohibits consulting the dead absolutely, and here the consultation works. The narrator raises no doubt at all: it says Samuel, and gives him a speech. Ben Sira, writing in the second century BCE, refers to the prophet prophesying after his death without embarrassment. Later Jewish and Christian commentators were less comfortable and produced the alternatives that have circulated since: that the figure was a demonic counterfeit, that God overrode the ritual and sent the real Samuel, or that the whole thing was fraud.

The story is one of the very few places in the Hebrew Bible where a forbidden practice is shown being performed and shown succeeding, which is why it has never stopped being argued about.