“Welcome, my brothers. I trust my servants have offered you appropriate hospitality. I would not want it said that Ramah was a latter-day Sodom!”
He said this attempt at a joke rather too loudly and laughed rather too loudly at the jest. He noted that few smiles lighted the faces of the men of Beer Sheba.
“Come, you have travelled such a distance. How many days is it to your home?”
No one replied to Samuel’s jocularity. Their faces were hard, determined. They were on a definite mission. Samuel ceased his banter and waited for one of them to speak. Finally, one who appeared the eldest among them, stepped forward, looked at Samuel without a trace of apprehension, and began.
“Samuel, you are old, and your sons are not anything like you. They are bribe-takers, extortionate lovers of too much wine and too much food and too much intimacy with too many women. Since they came to our home, our lives are a misery, our pockets lighter by half at least, our girls unsafe, our neighbors suspicious one of another. We demand that you act. First, remove your cankered sons from us; lance them like the foul boils that they are! Second, choose a king who will rule over us, like the Philistines have, like all other powerful and successful nations have.”
The man was brutally blunt, and the demands of these people were equally clear. Depose his sons and choose a king. Samuel was speechless. His rheumy eyes opened wider as the man talked, the veins in his neck, now folded and refolded like the discarded skin of a snake, bulged red as he listened. His tangled beard shook briefly as he attempted to assimilate what this madman wanted. Reject his own sons? Choose a king? A king in Israel? Like the other nations around, all those pagan nations? Slowly he turned his back on the group and said nothing. Time stopped as the wall torches sputtered their intermittent flames. Finally, the men of Beer Sheba quietly left, not knowing what the priest would do, how he would respond to their demands. But they were prepared to wait in Ramah until the old man did something; they had had their bellies full of Joel and Abijah, and since Samuel would surely die soon, there seemed no alternative to a king. They dreaded the horrific possibility that one of the prophet’s sons would claim his mantel of leadership. Samuel the great prophet of YHWH could use his near-divine power and anoint a king for them now before that monstrous possibility could occur. Anything was better than this slow death and humiliation at the hands of his offensive sons!
Samuel did not notice that he was alone again in his room. A king? A king! The idea was perverse, an abomination, ultimate blasphemy against YHWH who was the only king Israel would ever need, and the only one they would ever have, as long as Samuel was the one in charge. Old, was he? They would see how old he was, ungrateful wretches! He had poured out his life for the people in the service of YHWH, nearly all sixty springs of it, and the reward was this insane demand for a king from a rabble of hicks from the desert who knew nothing about service of God, nothing about the unceasing demands of that service, nothing about the demands that the God placed upon chosen servants? Their demand for a king was nothing but a repudiation of his whole life, of his hopes for a future of leadership for his family and their families and their families after that, for a future with YHWH as king of a land ruled in justice and right, as that was defined by Samuel and his countless heirs after him.
The more he thought of the demands he had heard, the more he felt they were directed at him personally, at his sons. Perhaps they were not as talented or as committed as he had been, but they were good boys deep down who knew God and who wanted to serve God with their whole hearts. Yes, he was old, but he had some good years left, and however many or few those years would be, his sons were waiting, and now experienced, to keep the flame of YHWH alive in the land. There could be no king in Israel. There would be no king in Israel! And with that thought resounding in his head, Samuel had headed back to the temple.
Samuel needed time with his God. He had fallen prone in front of YHWH’s rough altar, his face nearly touching the blood stained earth, and he had shouted at his God.
“YHWH! Your people have rejected me and my family from leadership! They want a king instead, an earthly king who is just like all the other earthly kings around them, a human king puffed with power, swollen with false authority, claiming to do what only you, O YHWH, can do. But they have rejected me, me, who has poured out his life in your service and theirs, who has led them from the altar and the justice seat and the place of the prophetic word for sixty years, sixty years, longer than most of your people have ever lived since the hallowed days of the patriarchs and matriarchs of your people. YHWH, I cannot make them a king. I refuse to make them a king! Only you are king over us. Only you can ever be king over us!”
And Samuel’s furious words stopped as he could think of nothing more to say to his God. He was quite overwhelmed with his feelings of betrayal and rejection and denial. He felt shunted aside, deposed, denied, thrown away, discarded. He felt like the ancient worthy Job, sitting alone on his heap of ashes, deposited like an orange peel on a pile of refuse outside the walls of human habitation. He felt like the concubine of the Levite in that horrible old story, tossed out to a raging mob to be abused and tortured and finally forgotten, left for dead, awaiting the carving knife to end his life as it had ended hers.
The temple was silent; there was no sound save the scuttling of creatures in the shadows, the far-away hooting of a hunting owl, the triumphant baying of a coyote with a fresh kill. Samuel never felt so alone, never so old. What was he to do? He briefly thought that he would ask YHWH to end his life, to ask some chosen woman to drop a millstone on his head, like that fool would-be king, Abimelech. Or maybe God could chose an Israelite murderer, a latter-day Cain, who would ask Samuel to go out with him to some field and fell him with a large stone. Sixty years! Sixty years! Enough, he thought; more than enough!
But from some distant place in his brain, he heard again that voice that had spoken to him all those years ago in Shiloh, that voice that called him to service in the first place. But the voice spoke words that Samuel did not want to hear.
“Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you, Samuel. They have not rejected you at all; they have in fact rejected me from being their king, just as they have done from the very days when I brought them out of Egypt and into this land. They are forever serving other gods and rejecting me. You are just now getting a tiny taste of that rejection that I have swallowed for centuries. I repeat: listen to their voice. Make them a king! That’s right; you heard me. Anoint for them a king! But warn them, Samuel. Warn them about kings; tell them clearly what kings are like.”
Yes, thought Samuel, that’s it! YHWH is king and does not really want a king for the people. But he wants me to anoint one anyway! So I know what I am to do. But, most important of all, I am to tell them about kings, warn them about kings, tell them about the practice of kings, how they operate, how they rule. YHWH and I agree completely as we always do! God hates kings as much as I. YHWH wants me to describe kings as YHWH would describe them. So, they want a king, do they? Well, after I get through with them, they will certainly not want one. I may be old, but YHWH’s words are my words, YHWH’s thoughts my thoughts! YHWH said for me to listen to their foolish demands for a king, but YHWH also said for me to warn them. This means that YHWH really does not want a king at all. And neither do I!
Thus armed with divine certainty, Samuel commanded that the delegation from Beer Sheba join him and the rest of the people of Ramah at the field in front of the temple immediately. The sun was just coming up as the city awoke and responded to the command of their trusted leader. Samuel felt just as he had felt all those years ago when the voice of YHWH had called him to the prophetic work. He knew precisely what he had to do, and he stood in front of his people, YHWH’s people, and told them what he was convinced YHWH had told him to say. The men from Beer Sheba expected Samuel to announce his search for a king, after he had admitted that his two sons were failures at their appointed tasks. The citizens of Ramah, as well as any visitors to the city, assembled with curiosity, many having no idea what Samuel was about to say, but ever ready to listen to the one who had led them for so long. He was more stooped than some remembered, his beard more gray and frayed, his fantastically