Commentary Compass

Few biblical narratives are as compelling as Samuel, and few become more complicated the more carefully they are read. Hannah’s private anguish somehow opens into the emergence of prophecy and monarchy; the ark disappears and returns; Israel asks for a king even while YHWH remains its true king; Saul is chosen by God and then rejected; David is chosen in Saul’s place but eventually commits acts more morally disturbing than some of Saul’s failures; God promises David an enduring dynasty just before David’s own household begins to disintegrate; and the same narrative that repeatedly affirms God’s providence often shows that providence operating almost invisibly through political ambition, military force, family conflict, sexual desire, courage, fear, loyalty, and betrayal.

The best Samuel scholarship does not make these tensions disappear. V. Philips Long, David Firth, David Tsumura, Dale Ralph Davis, Robert Chisholm, A. Graeme Auld, Walter Brueggemann, Keith Bodner, Craig Morrison, Stephen Chapman, and many others illuminate different parts of this extraordinary narrative. The recently examined volumes by Antony F. Campbell and John Goldingay reinforce something fundamental: Samuel becomes less, not more, intelligible when it is made too tidy. Its theology emerges through competing voices, morally complicated characters, divine promises, human initiatives, political realities, and narratives that frequently leave readers responsible for judging what they have seen.

1. 1 and 2 Samuel are fundamentally one book, and David is its gravitational centre without being its uncomplicated hero

The division between 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel is useful for finding passages but can distort interpretation. First Samuel certainly possesses a meaningful arc from Samuel’s birth to Saul’s death, yet the narrative movement has not reached its goal when Saul falls on Mount Gilboa. Samuel has anointed another king, David remains outside the throne, and the political struggle through which that prophetic designation becomes historical reality continues for several chapters into 2 Samuel. The larger story moves from the old order at Shiloh through Samuel and Saul toward the establishment, success, failure, and continuing dynasty of David.

Antony Campbell makes this particularly clear by structuring 1–2 Samuel around the emergence of stable monarchy. The first movement contains the prophetic preparation for David, the second the political struggle by which David actually becomes king, and the third the testing of monarchy from within David’s own reign. John Goldingay reaches a similar conclusion from a theological direction: if one had to attach one human name to the whole book, David would be the most obvious candidate. Yet this does not mean Samuel is hagiography about David. The same book that presents David as YHWH’s chosen king also subjects his use of power, his sexuality, his family, his administration, and even his relationship with God to extraordinarily searching scrutiny.

This distinction is crucial. David is the narrative centre, not the moral answer to every problem raised by the narrative. Samuel tells how Israel came to have the Davidic monarchy and why that monarchy became the bearer of remarkable divine promise, while simultaneously demonstrating that even the chosen king can become a source of immense suffering. The reader must therefore keep divine election and moral evaluation distinct.

2. Hannah’s song is not a devotional interlude; it is the theological overture to the entire story

Hannah begins as a socially vulnerable woman whose infertility places her in anguish within her own household. Yet when her prayer is answered, her song in 1 Samuel 2 expands far beyond her personal circumstances. YHWH breaks the bows of the mighty and strengthens the feeble; the full become hungry while the hungry are fed; the barren woman bears children while the fertile languishes; the poor are raised from the dust; and finally YHWH gives strength to his king and exalts the horn of his anointed. The astonishing feature is that Israel does not yet have a king.

Hannah’s song therefore teaches readers what kind of story they are about to hear. Human appearances will repeatedly be reversed. Eli’s powerful priestly house will fall while the boy Samuel rises. Saul will look physically suited to kingship while the overlooked youngest son of Jesse will eventually replace him. Goliath will possess the obvious instruments of military superiority while David appears almost absurdly under-equipped. David himself will rise from fugitive to king, only to discover that political supremacy cannot protect him from the consequences of his own wrongdoing.

Goldingay is particularly helpful here because he treats Hannah’s song as a theology of divine power and reversal that reaches forward into kingship. Hannah’s personal deliverance becomes a window onto YHWH’s much larger activity in Israel. The woman at the margins consequently provides the theological vocabulary through which the careers of Israel’s most powerful men should be assessed. Samuel begins by allowing Hannah to tell us how to read Saul and David before either man appears.

3. The ark narrative teaches that God’s presence cannot be possessed, manipulated, or weaponised

Israel’s decision to carry the ark into battle in 1 Samuel 4 initially looks religious. The people have suffered defeat and bring the great symbol of YHWH’s presence from Shiloh, expecting that its arrival will secure victory. The Philistines themselves panic because they interpret the ark similarly: Israel’s God has entered the battlefield. Yet Israel loses again, the ark is captured, Eli’s sons die, and Shiloh’s priestly world collapses.

The theological lesson is much more profound than “Israel lacked enough faith.” The problem is the assumption that divine presence can be converted into religious technology. Israel possesses the ark, but Israel does not possess YHWH. God does not need Israel’s army to rescue him either. Once the ark enters Philistine territory, Dagon falls, Philistine cities suffer, and Israel contributes virtually nothing to YHWH’s vindication. The supposed captive turns out to be the only truly free actor in the story.

Campbell’s macro-reading makes the ark’s disappearance especially suggestive. The old symbol of divine presence recedes from Israel’s centre while Samuel and the new institution of monarchy emerge, and the ark does not return to the national centre until David brings it to Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 6. Even then Uzzah’s death prevents David from domesticating sacred presence. The God who chooses to dwell among Israel remains the God whom Israel cannot control.

4. Samuel is intentionally ambivalent about monarchy: kingship is simultaneously answer, danger, gift, concession, and divine purpose

Readers often try to decide whether 1 Samuel 8–12 is “for” or “against” monarchy. The text refuses such simplicity. Israel’s desire to become like the surrounding nations is criticized, Samuel warns that kings will take sons, daughters, fields, servants, produce, and flocks, and YHWH interprets the request as rejection of his kingship. Yet YHWH also chooses Saul, empowers him, gives him victory, instructs Samuel to anoint him, and establishes procedures through which monarchy may function faithfully.

Goldingay names this one of Samuel’s central theological paradoxes: YHWH himself appears ambivalent about the introduction of monarchy. That is more illuminating than trying to harmonize every strand into either an enthusiastic royal theology or an anti-monarchical tract. Kingship answers real needs. The Philistine threat is real, fragmented tribal leadership has failed catastrophically by the end of Judges, and centralized authority can bring stability. Yet monarchy immediately concentrates power in ways that create new forms of danger.

Samuel therefore asks a more interesting question than whether political institutions are inherently good or bad. It asks whether a human institution can become an instrument of divine purpose without pretending to replace divine kingship. The answer is yes—but only under the word of God, and the entire subsequent story shows how precarious that arrangement becomes. Saul’s tragedy and David’s later abuse of power are not unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise simple institution; they expose the theological problem built into entrusting extraordinary power to ordinary human beings.

5. Prophets do not serve kings in Samuel; they stand over kings and judge them by the word of YHWH

Samuel does not arise merely to provide Israel with religious encouragement before Saul appears. He designates Saul, rebukes Saul, announces Saul’s rejection, and anoints David. Nathan later confronts David after the killing of Uriah and mediates the promise of David’s dynasty. Gad appears within David’s later reign. Prophetic authority therefore helps establish monarchy while simultaneously preventing monarchy from becoming absolute.

Campbell’s formulation is particularly useful: the prophet possesses authority not only to participate in the designation and dismissal of kings but ultimately to exercise control over the conscience of the king. That is precisely what occurs in the movement from Saul to David. Saul may command armies, but Samuel can declare that his dynasty will not continue. David may command Joab and the machinery of royal government, but Nathan can stand before him and announce, in effect, “You are the man.”

This creates one of Samuel’s enduring political-theological insights. The biblical king is never the final interpreter of his own success. Military victory, popularity, administrative competence, and territorial expansion cannot establish that a ruler is right before God. The prophetic word provides a criterion external to royal self-justification. Samuel therefore places revelation over power from the moment monarchy begins.

6. Saul is a tragic chosen king, not a cardboard villain inserted merely to make David look good

Saul receives one of the most psychologically painful portrayals in biblical narrative. He is genuinely chosen, genuinely empowered by the Spirit, genuinely victorious against Israel’s enemies, and initially capable of remarkable restraint toward people who despise him. Yet fear, insecurity, jealousy, impulsiveness, religious confusion, and resistance to prophetic authority gradually consume him. By the end he seeks guidance from a medium because the God whose word he repeatedly resisted no longer answers him.

It is easy to turn this into a neat moral story: Saul disobeys, David obeys, and God therefore replaces one with the other. The narrative itself is harder. Campbell provocatively argues that Saul receives a remarkably severe judgment very early and even calls the charge in 1 Samuel 13 unfair. I would not make that Campbell’s conclusion my own, because the final narrative clearly intends Saul’s relationship to YHWH’s command to matter. Yet Campbell correctly alerts readers to how quickly Saul is rejected and how complicated the contrast with David becomes once David himself commits adultery, arranges a killing, mishandles his household, and causes serious suffering.

Goldingay offers a better category: both Saul and David are religiously and morally ambiguous figures whom YHWH nevertheless chooses. Saul’s tragedy should therefore evoke something more serious than contempt. His story demonstrates how divine gifting, public calling, psychological vulnerability, disobedience, fear, and political pressure can coexist within one person. Samuel’s characters are compelling precisely because the narrator refuses to flatten them into illustrations.

7. David’s rise is one of Scripture’s great studies of providence working through ordinary and morally complicated politics

Samuel repeatedly tells us that YHWH is with David, yet God rarely intervenes for him in the spectacular manner seen in the ark narrative. David’s rise occurs through military competence, popular affection, Jonathan’s loyalty, Michal’s assistance, Abigail’s intervention, Saul’s increasingly self-destructive decisions, David’s political calculation, the deaths of rivals, negotiations with Israel’s elders, and the brutal actions of military men such as Joab and Abner. The theological claim and the political mechanism are narrated together.

Campbell is especially valuable here because he refuses to choose simplistically between theology and politics. The David traditions present his eventual kingship as YHWH’s doing, but they also spend chapter after chapter narrating the human actions through which that divine purpose is realized. Campbell also recognizes that some of these traditions may function partly as a defence of David, repeatedly distancing him from the suspiciously convenient deaths of Saul, Abner, and Ishbaal.

That does not mean the stories are merely propaganda, nor does the affirmation of providence require pretending that political motives are absent. The deeper insight is that Samuel understands providence as capable of operating through messy history without rendering that history morally transparent. David can benefit from events he did not initiate, exercise impressive restraint on some occasions, act strategically on others, and still be the beneficiary of YHWH’s purpose. Divine sovereignty in Samuel frequently works behind the scenes rather than replacing human causation.

8. The promise of 2 Samuel 7 is unconditional grace, but it is not moral immunity for David or his dynasty

Second Samuel 7 is the theological hinge of the David narrative. David proposes to build a house for YHWH, and YHWH reverses the initiative: David will not secure God’s future by constructing a temple; God will build David a “house,” a dynasty. The promise reaches beyond David’s immediate achievement and establishes the theological significance of his line for the remainder of the Old Testament and, eventually, Christian messianic interpretation.

Yet the placement of this promise is crucial. It comes before David’s worst recorded sins. God’s covenant commitment therefore cannot be interpreted as a reward granted because David will continue to behave impeccably. Nor can David’s subsequent wrongdoing revoke the promise as though covenant were simply a contract maintained by royal performance. The promise and the failure must be held together.

This is what makes Samuel’s Davidic theology so powerful. Election does not equal endorsement of everything the elected person does. Grace does not prevent discipline, and divine commitment does not protect victims from the consequences of a ruler’s wrongdoing. The dynasty can remain within God’s purpose while its individual representatives stand under severe moral judgment. Second Samuel 7 tells us why David’s house matters; chapters 11–20 tell us why the existence of David’s house cannot itself be the final solution to Israel’s problem.

9. David and Bathsheba is not simply one great man’s private moral failure; it becomes the pattern for the violence that tears his house apart

Second Samuel 11–12 marks one of the sharpest narrative turns in Scripture. David sees, desires, summons, takes, attempts to conceal, and finally arranges Uriah’s death. Nathan’s parable strips away royal self-justification and identifies David as the powerful man who takes what belongs to someone with less power. The issue is therefore larger than sexual immorality considered privately. Royal power has enabled desire to become possession and concealment to become killing.

Campbell’s re-description of 2 Samuel 11–20 as the Stories of David’s Middle Years produces a particularly important insight. Instead of reading these chapters principally as a “Succession Narrative” concerned with who will inherit the throne, he sees David’s behaviour in chapters 11–12 as a model for destructive behaviour that follows. David wants and takes; Amnon wants and takes. David removes Uriah; Absalom removes Amnon. Violence concealed within the king’s household becomes violence performed publicly across the kingdom.

Goldingay follows the same theological movement from another direction when he treats the later material under the heading “the sword never departs.” Nathan’s judgement is not merely an externally imposed punishment disconnected from David’s behaviour. David’s abuse of power has generated a household and political world in which taking, manipulation, sexual violence, revenge, killing, and rebellion reproduce themselves. The consequence fits the character of the sin because the king’s way of exercising power becomes contagious.

10. Samuel’s women and victims are not secondary characters; they repeatedly reveal truths about power that kings cannot see

Hannah stands at the opening of the book, and her prayer gives the theological vocabulary through which later power will be judged. Abigail sees the danger in David’s anger more clearly than David does and prevents him from unnecessary bloodshed. Michal participates in David’s survival and later becomes entangled in the political cost of his rise. Bathsheba bears the consequences of David’s royal initiative. Tamar names Amnon’s action as outrageous and then exposes David’s inability to secure justice within his own household. Rizpah’s astonishing vigil in 2 Samuel 21 forces public attention upon bodies that political settlement has treated instrumentally.

Goldingay is particularly valuable because he deliberately refuses to make Samuel, Saul, and David the only theological subjects of Samuel. His theology includes Hannah, Michal, Bathsheba, Tamar, families, victims, women, love, grief, ambition, and loss. That does not mean every female character possesses the same narrative role or that a single modern ideological framework explains them all. It means Samuel itself continually locates theological truth outside the palace and outside the men who formally control Israel’s institutions.

This matters especially for evaluating David. A king may understand his own action as necessary, politically astute, or personally desirable while the narrative shifts attention toward the people whose lives absorb its cost. Samuel’s theology of power is therefore inseparable from its attention to the vulnerable. One of the best ways to read the monarchy is to keep asking what the narrative looks like from the perspective of the people over whom the king exercises power.

11. Samuel is best read as theological interpretation of Israel’s remembered experience, not as either modern history-writing or free-floating fiction

Samuel unmistakably makes claims about Israel’s past, but it does not behave like modern critical historiography. It can preserve variant accounts, jump across long periods without explanation, devote enormous narrative detail to private conversations, place theological interpretation alongside political causation, and leave tensions unresolved. At the same time, the stories are deeply anchored in the emergence of monarchy, Philistine pressure, Saulide and Davidic politics, Jerusalem, warfare, dynastic succession, and remembered institutions.

Campbell pushes strongly toward describing Samuel as theological articulation of experience rather than historiography. His language can sometimes be sharper than I would use, because it risks creating an unnecessary contrast between meaningful theological narrative and ancient historical representation. Goldingay offers a more satisfying formulation when he describes Samuel as something like dramatized or visionary history: the book concerns a real remembered past but uses the techniques of narrative art to disclose what that past means.

This distinction protects the reader from two opposite mistakes. One is treating every narrated speech or private detail as though Samuel were a stenographic transcript from the eleventh or tenth century BCE. The other is assuming that literary artistry removes the narrative from meaningful relationship with Israel’s past. Theologically, Samuel is concerned less with furnishing a neutral archive than with helping Israel understand what happened when monarchy emerged among the people of YHWH and what that transformation revealed about God and humanity.

12. Samuel’s deepest theology lies in paradox: God’s purpose advances through people who remain genuinely free, politically motivated, morally ambiguous, and sometimes devastatingly destructive

Goldingay’s three paradoxes provide perhaps the best short synthesis of the entire book. YHWH is ambivalent about monarchy even while bringing it into existence. Events arise simultaneously through divine activity and human initiative. And the first two kings YHWH chooses are both morally and religiously complicated. None of those tensions is an incidental problem waiting for a commentator to tidy it away.

That is why Samuel can affirm that YHWH is with David while describing David’s shrewd political behaviour. It can preserve an enduring divine promise while narrating rape, murder, family breakdown, and rebellion within the promised dynasty. It can make Saul genuinely chosen without making his tragedy meaningless, and David genuinely chosen without making his victims irrelevant. It can portray God as merciful and providential while preserving texts such as 2 Samuel 24 in which the relationship among divine incitement, human responsibility, judgement, and mercy remains profoundly difficult.

Even the closing chapters resist a neat heroic conclusion. Famine, Rizpah, David’s song, his last words, warrior traditions, the census, judgement, divine relenting, and the altar at Araunah’s threshing floor form a theological collection rather than the chronological climax of a triumphant reign. David remains the chosen king and bearer of promise, but the reader has learned too much to confuse election with innocence.

Samuel’s great theological achievement is therefore not to give us ideal human beings but to show God pursuing his purpose amid the full ambiguity of human life. That makes the book both unsettling and extraordinarily durable. Its God is not absent from politics, family, sexuality, ambition, warfare, grief, and moral failure; neither does divine involvement make any of those spheres simple.

What the Recently Attached Volumes Add

Antony F. Campbell —

1 Samuel

(Forms of the Old Testament Literature)

Campbell’s 1 Samuel substantially sharpens the first half of this post because he refuses the old choice between a purely diachronic commentary interested in hypothetical sources and a purely synchronic commentary treating the final text as though it had no developmental history. His repeated categories of structure, genre, setting, and meaning are meant to make literary form serve interpretation. Large units are analysed before their components are discussed, and the question behind the method is consistently not merely “Where did this material come from?” but “What kind of text is this, how is it structured, and what meaning does that structure generate?”

His most distinctive large-scale insight is to orient 1 Samuel more directly toward David. Samuel’s emergence, the ark’s departure, the controversial beginning of monarchy, Saul’s selection and rejection, and David’s anointing become stages in a narrative whose major long-term concern is the establishment of the Davidic monarchy. That does not mean Saul becomes irrelevant; in fact Campbell’s sympathy for Saul sometimes produces some of the commentary’s most provocative judgments. His statement that Saul’s rejection in 1 Samuel 13 rests upon an “unfair charge” goes farther than I would follow him and illustrates the danger that a proposed compositional history may begin adjudicating the theology of the final narrative rather than merely illuminating it. Yet the question he forces upon the reader is valuable: how deliberately has Samuel’s story been shaped retrospectively by the eventual importance of David?

The commentary is therefore most useful beside a different kind of interpreter. Tsumura can test Campbell’s textual and linguistic assumptions, Firth can offer a more consistently final-form reading, and Long can provide a more balanced historiographical perspective. Campbell contributes the structural and form-critical questions that those works may pursue less systematically. Even when his answers provoke disagreement, the result is often a richer understanding of what 1 Samuel is trying to do.

Antony F. Campbell —

2 Samuel

(Forms of the Old Testament Literature)

The 2 Samuel volume develops the method in ways that become especially fruitful once David is securely on the throne. Campbell’s treatment of 2 Samuel 11–20 is the most important contribution for this post. He rejects the standard “Succession Narrative” designation as too prejudicial and argues that the distinctive literary unit is better understood simply as the Stories of David’s Middle Years. Succession certainly appears within the material, but it is not the controlling subject. Royal wrongdoing, sexual violence, murder, family disintegration, rebellion, political survival, and the exercise of power better describe what occupies the narrative.

His insight about modelling is particularly illuminating. David is not being presented as a model king in chapters 11–12; rather, his behaviour becomes a pattern reproduced in the stories that follow. David wants and takes Bathsheba, then removes Uriah. Amnon wants and takes Tamar. Absalom wants Amnon dead and later seeks David’s throne. The sword that Nathan says will not depart from David’s house is therefore not merely an arbitrary sentence attached to an isolated sin but an apt description of the violent world the king’s behaviour has helped generate.

Campbell is also willing to let difficult texts remain genuinely difficult. His treatment of 2 Samuel 24 emphasizes the disturbing logic of YHWH inciting David toward an act for which David then bears responsibility. I would not follow Campbell when his commentary begins declaring that the passage “does not speak well of God,” because the interpretive task should continue asking what the canonical narrative itself is doing with the tension. Yet his refusal to sanitize the passage has real value. Samuel is not helped when commentators make its difficult theology disappear before readers have felt the force of the problem.

John Goldingay —

The Theology of the Book of Samuel

Goldingay’s 2024 volume changes this post most at the level of theological synthesis. Instead of extracting doctrines from the narrative and organising them independently, he works through Samuel sequentially and allows theological topics to arise from particular stories. God, monarchy, prayer, family, vocation, war, love, ambition, failure, victims, kingship, sanctuary, divine response, and politics therefore remain connected to the narrative situations that generate them.

His three theological paradoxes are exceptionally useful: YHWH is ambivalent about monarchy; divine action and human initiative operate together; and both Saul and David remain morally and religiously ambiguous despite divine election. Those three observations explain an enormous amount of Samuel. They prevent Saul from being turned into a mere failed prototype, prevent David from becoming a sanitized messianic hero, and prevent providence from being imagined as though God acts only when the narrative describes visible supernatural intervention.

Goldingay is also particularly valuable for widening the theological field beyond the famous men. Hannah, Michal, Bathsheba, Tamar, family, prayer, sexuality, victims, and the costs of monarchy receive sustained attention. His chapter structure eventually moves from David’s establishment to “Yahweh who watches a king,” with the later narrative organised around David’s victims, God’s response to wrongdoing, and the sword that does not depart. This allows Samuel’s theology to emerge as a theology of human life under God rather than merely a theology of institutions.

The book is not a substitute for a commentary. It cannot resolve Samuel’s notorious textual problems and is not intended to give detailed philological adjudication. Its usefulness begins precisely after those tasks have been undertaken. Once the passage has been established, Goldingay repeatedly asks the larger question that makes the exegesis worthwhile: what kind of God, what kind of human beings, and what kind of kingship does this story actually invite us to contemplate?

Bringing the Twelve Insights Together

The great transformation produced by the best scholarship on Samuel is that the book ceases to be a simple succession of character studies about Hannah, Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, and David. The narratives become a sustained theological exploration of what happens when Israel moves from tribal existence into centralized monarchy while still confessing that YHWH is king. Prophecy, ark, king, dynasty, family, military power, sexuality, political legitimacy, prayer, and worship are all ways of asking how divine purpose and human institutions can inhabit the same history.

Samuel begins with an apparently powerless woman praying in anguish and ends with the most powerful man in Israel facing the devastating consequences of a royal decision. Between those scenes Samuel repeatedly overturns appearances. Priestly power collapses; the ark survives captivity without Israel’s help; the king who looks ideal fails; the younger son becomes king; the chosen David becomes victimizer as well as deliverer; and an unconditional dynasty promise coexists with extraordinary household devastation.

Campbell helps us see how carefully those materials have been structured and how different forms and traditions have been woven into a theological whole. Goldingay helps us see why the resulting whole should not be simplified. Together with the best technical, literary, and theological commentaries, they make the deepest insight of Samuel increasingly clear: God’s faithfulness is not demonstrated by giving Israel uncomplicated leaders or uncomplicated history, but by pursuing divine purposes through a human world whose freedom, ambition, love, weakness, violence, faith, failure, and repentance remain entirely real.