This week we launch our new series on 1 and 2 Samuel. I decided to do this series while digging at Shiloh this summer. The Associates for Biblical Research organized the excavations. Dr. Scott Stripling led our team. First Samuel feels so alive at the site. Everyone digging or sifting half-daydreams about where Hannah uttered her prayer. We imagine where Samuel heard God’s voice or where Eli fell over and broke his neck. One day, I only moved rock tumble from our square over to the dump pile. Mundane tasks on digs give you a lot of time to think. I felt convicted that not everyone has the time or resources to make a trip to Israel. Most cannot spend a week at a dig site with Iranian missiles flying overhead. I set a goal to bring Israel to you, or at least to your headphones.
The books of Samuel are historical epics. They chronicle a monumental turning point in ancient Israel. The narrative captures the transition from the decentralized chaos of the Judges to a centralized dynastic monarchy under the house of David. In the final chapters of Judges, the narrator repeats a specific phrase. He says, “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” He geared the audience up for the next stage in Israel’s story: the selection of a king. As the books of Samuel unfold, one thing becomes very clear. Human kings do not solve all of Israel’s problems. Israel’s true sovereign can only be, and has always been, God.
Authorship and Date of Composition
Although the books bear Samuel’s name, the text is anonymous. It lacks a superscription directly attributing authorship to anyone. In fact, Samuel dies halfway through the narrative. According to Jewish tradition, Samuel wrote the first half of the book. He recorded the events he witnessed. When Samuel died, the prophets Nathan and Gad finished the record. This tradition appears in the Babylonian Talmud. It derives from a verse in 1 Chronicles. That verse identifies Samuel, Nathan, and Gad as the men who recorded King David’s life and reign (1 Chron. 29:29).
Many biblical scholars believe a long, careful process of historical recollection and literary compilation produced the books of Samuel. The twentieth-century German scholar Martin Noth proposed that Samuel is a core part of the Deuteronomistic History. The Deuteronomistic history theory holds that the same editor, or school of scribes, produced a unified historical narrative in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. They brought together diverse ancient sources. They evaluated Israel’s leaders through Deuteronomy’s theological lens. From the period of the conquest until the Babylonian exile, the editor judged every king by his loyalty to the covenant with God. The central theme insists that obedience to God’s covenant brings blessing. Conversely, national disobedience brings ruin.
The editor likely wove several ancient sources into the narrative. These include the Samuel cycle, the Saul cycle, the History of David’s Rise, the Succession Narrative, and possibly a separate record of the Ark of the Covenant. He integrated these original independent sources with oral traditions, royal poems, and court annals to form one composite book. The result is a single sophisticated literary work. The final editor wrote with a masterful flair for dialogue, plot building, and scene setting. He had a keen understanding of patriarchal narratives, covenant law, and the Levitical priesthood. In bringing the independent sources together, he added important transitional narratives. These additions enriched the book’s theological takeaways.
The author wrote the narrative with a retrospective viewpoint. Fourteen times across 1 and 2 Samuel, the narrator steps out of the story. He refers to certain things that persist “to this day.” In these instances, he explains to readers why a monument, place name, boundary, or ritual still exists in his own time. For example, he points out that the funerary pillar Absalom erected in the King’s Valley bears his name “to this day” (2 Sam. 18:18). He also notes that the great stone where the Ark once rested is still visible “to this day” (1 Sam. 6:18). He does not claim to be a contemporary eyewitness to the recorded events.
Conservative biblical scholars often date the book’s composition to the tenth century BCE. This means the author wrote it shortly after the actual events took place. The text preserves intimate knowledge of historical conditions unique to the early Iron Age. One example is the Philistines’ short-lived blacksmithing monopoly described in 1 Samuel 13. The Philistines soon lost this metallurgical advantage. By King David’s reign, the Israelites manufactured their own iron weapons and agricultural tools. That same passage mentions the exact price to sharpen a plowshare. The cost was one pim. A pim is a stone weight equal to two-thirds of a shekel. That specific unit of measurement fell out of use so completely that later Greek translators did not recognize the word. The narrative also accurately reflects geopolitical changes in the Negev.
Linguistically, the Hebrew in Samuel is preexilic, rather than the late Hebrew of the post-exilic era. It contains none of the Persian loanwords or heavy Aramaic grammar found in books like Ezra, Nehemiah, or Daniel. Embedded poems like Hannah’s Song and David’s Lament over Saul preserve some of the oldest Hebrew forms.
When we examine the work’s literary structure, we recognize that the original authors never meant 1 and 2 Samuel to be two books. In the original Hebrew canon, they formed a single, continuous scroll. Jewish scholars divided the text into two only when they translated the scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE—the translation known as the Septuagint. The story was too long to fit on a standard papyrus scroll. The translators split it into two parts. We do not have a problem with scroll length anymore, but our modern Bibles keep the two-part book convention.
The traditional Hebrew text handed down through centuries of Jewish scribes, known as the Masoretic Text, is notoriously difficult in Samuel. For reasons scholars still debate, the manuscript of Samuel suffered more from scribal wear and copying mistakes than almost any other book in the Hebrew Bible. Scribes accidentally skipped lines because of identical word endings, dropped letters, or inherited damaged scrolls. A famous example appears in 1 Samuel 13:1. The Hebrew text literally says Saul was one year old when he began to reign and that he reigned for two years over Israel. This is an obvious case where scribes lost numbers in transmission.
For centuries, scholars relied on the ancient Greek Septuagint translation to guess what the original Hebrew text said. Everything changed with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Cave 4, archaeologists unearthed ancient manuscript fragments of Samuel, known to scholars as 4QSam, dating back to the third through first centuries BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that the Greek Septuagint was closer to the original manuscript than the Masoretic version. Throughout this series, I will give you examples of how the Dead Sea Scrolls clarified confusion.
Outline of the book
In the larger story of biblical Judah and Israel, Samuel is a transition book. It oversees Israel’s evolution from a poor federation of tribes with occasional judges to a wealthy monarchy with centralized religious worship.
The narrative opens with the fall of Eli’s priestly house. God raises Samuel, the last judge. Samuel is the first of three key figures in the book. All three overlap in succession. Samuel leads and guides the upstart nation with supernatural wisdom. The people ask Samuel for a king so they can be like all the other nations. He reluctantly grants this request when God pushes him to submit to their shallow desires. God assures Samuel it is not a rejection of him as judge but of their covenant with God. From there, the narrative shifts to the tragic reign of Saul, the people’s king. David is the central character, but the text does not introduce him until 1 Samuel 16. For sixteen chapters, Saul and David’s stories overlap.
During Saul’s political and mental decline, the most memorable events play out. Samuel secretly anoints David as a boy. David slays the giant Goliath and wins the love of the nation. An increasingly paranoid King Saul then hunts him down. Second Samuel narrates King David’s golden era. He unites all twelve tribes, defeats the Philistines, captures Jerusalem as his capital, brings the Ark of the Covenant into the city, and receives God’s eternal covenant promise.
Even during this high point, David makes choices that reinforce the dangers of human kingship. The narrator is brutally honest, especially by the standards of royal court writings elsewhere in antiquity. Ancient royal narratives usually operated as heavy-handed propaganda. They painted their pharaoh, king, or emperor as flawless. The book of Samuel does the opposite. It refuses to sanitize the records of either Saul or David. Side characters often show more wisdom and righteousness than David or anyone in the royal house. Nathan the prophet holds David to account for infidelity and murder. That makes sense because Nathan speaks for the Lord. Even Uriah the Hittite—a non-Israelite pagan—demonstrated more nobility, sacrifice, and courage than David could muster. Jonathan had a rightful claim to his father’s throne. Yet he was such a loyal friend that he supported David’s path to kingship.
2 Samuel 7 is the theological climax. God promises David an eternal dynasty and an enduring throne. Although God never takes back his covenantal promise to David, he lets him experience the consequences of his sin with Bathsheba. From that moment forward, the narrative becomes an agonizing study of domestic unraveling and palace intrigue.
Two poetic bookends frame the entire double-book and disclose its overarching message. The story opens with Hannah’s Song. This prayer of thanksgiving praises the God who shatters the bows of the mighty, lifts the needy from the ash heap, and promises to strengthen his anointed king. Near the end of the work, in 2 Samuel 22, David sings his own grand psalm of thanksgiving. He echoes Hannah’s exact themes. He says, “You deliver a humble people, but your eyes are upon the haughty to bring them down” (2 Sam. 22:28). These twin poems form the theological archway through which readers must interpret the entire epic. God continually humbles those who exalt themselves, and he exalts those who walk in humility and trust.
For millennia, readers, artists, and thinkers have returned to these books. We see this in Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of David with his sling. We hear it in Leonard Cohen’s lyrics portraying David as the “baffled king” whose faith was strong, but who needed proof. The book of Samuel is a compilation of deeply human tales. It deals with mental illness, power, lust, murder, and witchcraft. God hovers over it all. He lets humans exercise their free will and then face its consequences. He hears their cries, like Hannah’s prayer and David’s sobs. Each episode and plot twist exposes that worldly power is fragile and corruptible. At the end of his life, David, Israel’s greatest leader, confesses that horses, walls, and crowns never saved anyone: “The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer” (2 Sam. 22:2).
I look forward to reading the book of Samuel with all of you. My goal is to bring the stories to life. I want you to feel like you are breathing the air of the hill country of Samaria. I want your nail beds and nostrils filled with Shiloh’s dirt. I hope you become so familiar with the characters—their strengths and flaws—that you walk away grateful to have known them all.
That is it for this week. Join me next week for 1 Samuel 1. You can find Bible Fiber wherever you listen to your podcasts (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube). Share the podcast with a friend so you can read Samuel together!
Shabbat Shalom