The Prophet and the Kings

After the defeat of Israel at the hands of the Philistines, Samuel and Nathan appear in history. Two new interlocutors chosen by God to retie the thread of the Covenant, and to give a king to the Chosen People

BY GIUSEPPE FRANGI

Picture a small patch of land measuring just a few square miles, inhabited by tribes out of touch with each other and impotent in the face of the united forces of the enemy, the Philistines, who had them under siege. This was Israel around the year 1050 B.C. Shilo, a small village between Samaria and Judah, was its small, poor, religious capital. Here the Ark of the Covenant was kept, in the custody of the last of the Judges, Eli, a figure fatally destined to defeat. He was not a political authority; his role was to be the religious referent. Thus when the Philistines struck their blow, the resistance of the tribes of Israel crumbled. The enemies who had disembarked on the Gaza Strip, pushed out of Egypt by the Pharaoh, arrived in Shilo. They destroyed the temple, captured the Ark, and effected an immense massacre among the troops of the poor Israelites in disarray. Indeed, without the unforeseen intervention of another factor, the history of the tribes of Moses might have been as good as over. Instead, that other factor intervened at the last minute, as it had before, as the uniting thread of this history. And the way this came about echoes the method used even earlier in history, as well: a barren woman, like Sarah and Rachel before her, went to the temple to ask Yahweh for grace, vowing to offer the fruit of her womb for the priesthood. The woman was Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, a Levite, which gave legitimacy to the priestly path on which she would put her son if one were born. Yahweh granted her request, and Hannah kept her word. And Samuel, the child, would become the one with whom God would pick up again the dialogue with His people: a new prophet.

A mere child
No matter how improbable it might seem in the eyes of men, that child–brought to God in the temple of a village besieged by silence and devastation (“In those days it was rare for Yahweh to speak; visions were uncommon,” says the Bible)–initiated an astonishing chapter in the history of Israel. The way Samuel found out he was the chosen recipient of Yahweh’s communications is one of the most moving passages in the Bible: a voice calls him in the night and he gets up from the blankets where he is lying and goes to the elderly, discouraged Eli. But Eli denies that he has called him. This happens three times, until the old man intuits whose voice this might be, and tells the boy to answer the next call when it comes: “Speak, Yahweh, for your servant is listening.”(I Sam 3:10)
God had started once again to make Himself present in order to put the history of His Chosen People back on track. And the means He chose was a prophet. As the Bible once again says (I Sam 3:19), “Yahweh was with him and did not let a single word fall to the ground of all that he had told him.” Samuel, although a religious authority, understood that what the tribes brought by Joshua into the promised land were lacking was a political leader. For a while, with the help of his two sons, he tried to fill this void himself. Wrapped in his linen ephod, he repeated to Israel the promises he had received from Yahweh: “Set your heart on Yahweh and serve him alone, and he will deliver you from the power of the Philistines.” He called the people to battle at Mizpah, then remained to pray on the mountain, as all the Israelites had begged him to do. And finally, for the first time, the Philistines retreated. “Samuel then took a stone and erected it between Mizpah and the Tooth, and gave it the name Ebenezer, saying, ‘Yahweh helped us as far as this.’”

Another king
Pressure from the people to have a king was becoming greater and greater. So Samuel starting thinking that the moment had come for Israel as well, like all the other peoples around them, to have a monarch. But how could they have another king when Yahweh was so manifestly their king? Samuel, by now an old man, tried to resist. It would be better to suffer further defeat than to betray the One God. And too, where could he find a king? What human criterion would ever be adequate for making a choice of this import, for giving a king to a people who already had God as its king!? The notion was unthinkable. The Bible tells how God Himself, with almost heart-rending tact, pulls Samuel out of his dilemma. You are right, He says, the people are wrong to demand a king. But you, for now, give them what they want. I authorize you to do it. Indeed, I shall indicate to you who should be anointed.
In a word, Yahweh steps aside and even has the delicacy to avoid wounding the faithfulness of his old servant, Samuel. He shows him the candidate: A tall, handsome boy, the son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin, who would come to Samuel in Ramah looking for his father’s lost asses. His name was Saul, or Sha’ul, “asked of God.” He had an impetuous personality, generous but also very proud, courageous but a little too confident in his own strength. Samuel recognized him as the one God had indicated and anointed him “prince” of Israel in a private ceremony. Saul was not yet king; the prophet still wanted to test him.
His chance soon came, around the year 1040 B.C. The Philistines, who had set up their own governor in Geba, had to be expelled. Saul first sent his son Jonathan to kill the governor, then accepted open war and won. Samuel then renounced the judgeship and remained only the religious head of Israel. Saul was now king, but Samuel kept an eye on him. He saw Saul torn between his fidelity to his office and the flaring up of his pride. First he caught him red-handed, when because of his hurry to go to battle Saul himself made the sacrifice without waiting for Samuel. Then came Saul’s act of rebellion, when he refused to follow Yahweh’s orders to kill Agag, King of the Amalekites. Samuel took it upon himself to carry out God’s will, but this marked his definitive break with the king. He would never see him again “until his dying day,” says the Bible.

David, the successor
The aged Samuel knew that a successor was needed. Once again he found the right person by mysterious ways. This was the youngest of the seven sons of Jesse, whose family was one of the most important in Bethlehem of the tribe of Judah. He anointed him without Saul’s knowledge, introduced him with his lyre to the court, and unleashed in Saul’s heart the terrible demon of jealousy. David, the youth who was able to defeat Goliath, the Philistine giant; David, who won over the hearts and affections of Saul’s two sons; David, who brought the king the two hundred foreskins of Philistine soldiers that he had requested in exchange for his daughter’s hand. And yet David was too openly the Lord’s chosen one not to shatter Saul’s psychological equilibrium. So the King Saul declared open war on him, forcing him to go over to the enemy’s side and to take refuge in Ramah, under the protection of the old man, Samuel.
Saul’s pursuit of David was destined to failure, because by entrusting himself to Samuel, David was really putting himself in the hands of God. So Saul fell on his own sword in his final battle, and David could come out into the open. He would be the king who made a great kingdom out of that little patch of land around Shilo. Samuel could die in peace, without having to open his eyes to other small betrayals by his king. To watch over David and his transgressions, another–very severe–prophet would come along, Nathan. He would be the one to inflict tremendous punishment on David, guilty of adultery with the beautiful Bathsheba, but above all guilty of sending her husband Uriah to his death. But first and foremost, Nathan would put limits on David, keeping him from becoming the prisoner of his own glory. David would not be the one to complete the great temple in Jerusalem, just as Moses had been prevented from crossing over into the Promised Land with his people. Through His prophets, Yahweh is constantly watching; He alone is the friend and protector of His people. As Nathan announced to David, David would build a “house” for Yahweh, but Yahweh would build for David a House, that is, a dynasty, a kingdom.

God’s Genius at Work: the Carnal Genealogy of Jesus

BY ANTONIO SOCCI

A Cain? Even in the best of families. Indeed, in the absolute best of all, the family of Jesus, the holiest family. So much for what the “right-minded” people have to say, with their scathing sarcasm about “good families,” as if these were not precisely the most adventurous and interesting ones. And Cain is not in Jesus’ family by an unforeseen accident of the sort that ends up ruining a reputation. It was the Savior Himself who chose to become incarnate and be born right there, in that family. Because “where sin is abundant, grace is superabundant,” says St. Paul. This is not a generic paradox, suited to today’s news full of horrendous crimes that cause some commentators to evoke the name of Abel’s murderer, the one who brings homicide into human history, this history that becomes a slaughterhouse (according to Hegel’s definition).
The Bible genealogies are much more reliable and real than is often believed. The blood kinship between Cain and Jesus is revealed by a theological treatise on Byzantine liturgy of some 1,836 pages, written by Tommaso Federici, a professor at the Pontificia Università Urbaniana and a respected writer for L’Osservatore Romano. The following is his reconstruction: “In Genesis 15:19, the Kenites are considered an ancient people who, according to the Promise and the covenant (Gen 15:1-18), Abraham’s descendants are called to possess as an integral part of the Promised Land.” In Numbers 24:21, it is said that the Kenites are descendants of Cain, and their land is where Bethlehem would later stand. In a subsequent passage (34:19), the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel gather together with Joshua to divide up the conquered land among them. The head of the tribe of Judah is Caleb, called the Kenite, to whom Joshua assigns a portion of the land of Judah. The Kenites are thus a “sub-tribe of Judah,” and their land is in the “mountainous area,” with Hebron as a capital. It included the Bethlehem of Caleb, through his wife Ephrath. The name Kenites is more explicit in its extended form, Cainites.”
The tribe of Judah is the most important one, the one from whom the Messiah would be born, according to the divine promise. And the promise was made to David, of the tribe of Judah and the sub-tribe of the Cainites. From David, a Bethlehem shepherd, would descend Joseph and Mary (this is why, at the moment of the Roman census, they would have to go to be registered in Bethlehem, the village of their origin, where Joseph still had some small family property). Therefore, “the Davidites are the Kenites or Cainites. We can see into what abyss the Immortal Eternal chose to descend to take on the flesh of sinners. Christ the Lord thus gathers into Himself every Cain of every time, in order to save him,” Federici writes, and Jesus is thus the “mark” that God placed on Cain “so that no one coming across him would kill him.”
Isaiah writes, “Ours were the sufferings he was bearing, ours the sorrows he was carrying… he was being wounded for our rebellions, crushed because of our guilt; the punishment reconciling us fell on him, and we have been healed by his bruises.” Peter’s tears, when he realizes he has been forgiven and embraced by Jesus after his betrayal, is Christianity: the experience of “pardoned” sinners is for all. This is the meaning of this saga. In the same family line of Jesus are brought together “both Israel and Judah, both pagans and the most distant sinners.” “In fact,” Federici explains, “in Bethlehem, Boaz, David’s ancestor, by marrying Ruth the Moabite, thus a pagan and an idolater, brings her fully into the people of God, so that she becomes an ancestor of David.”
The carnal genealogy of Jesus is unsettling because of the sinners and crimes it contains, but above all because of God’s free choice, the gratuitousness of His grace. Indeed, His mysterious preference often falls not on the best, but on sinners. This sometimes makes “right-thinking” people yell “scandal!” Among the sons of Jacob, Judah is chosen, the fourth-born, one of the brothers who sold Joseph. One whose morality openly collapses in his union with his daughter-in-law, Tamar, and yet from this union Jesus would descend. His genealogy includes kings, many of whom were idolaters, immoral, and some even criminal, with just two exceptions. The same thing is true about the period after the Babylonian exile (the faithfulness of David, the greatest of the kings and the one God loved best, is interwoven with horrendous sins and crimes). The women in the genealogy of Jesus, writes Cardinal Van Thuan, “strike us for their personal histories. They are all women who are in some irregular situation and form of moral disorder: Tamar is a sinner who by deceit entered into an incestuous union with her father-in-law Judah; Rahab is the prostitute in Jericho who harbors and hides the two Israelite spies sent by Joshua and is accepted into the Hebrew people; Ruth is a foreigner; the fourth woman, ‘the one who was Uriah’s wife,’ is Bathsheba, David’s partner in adultery.”
And yet the Gospel not only is not silent about this genealogy, but places it right at the beginning, and this too is what amazed the poet Péguy when he wrote, “We have to admit that the carnal genealogy of Jesus is shocking... . This is in part what gives the mystery of the Incarnation all its value, all its depth, all its thrust, its weight of humanity. Of carnality.”
This looks like the portrait of a family in hell. And instead, it is the history of salvation. In the slaughterhouse of history, there is hope.
(Il Foglio, March 1, 2001)