Saul, the first king of the Jewish people, was, in his life as in his death, a tragic figure.
Prior to Saul, there had been some weak attempts to assume kingship—as, for instance, by Abimelech, son of Gideon, some generations earlier. However, there was neither divine nor temporal legitimacy to Abimelech’s appointment, and he was not very different from other tyrants of the times who seized power in the absence of genuine opposition. Saul, however, was not only king, the ruler, but also the Chosen One of Israel, the “Lord’s Anointed.” This is extremely important because it formed the essential perspective from which Saul saw himself and the world around him and determined the attitude of others toward him. Even after having lost confidence in Saul’s powers to rule the kingdom and when fleeing from his mad and pointless pursuit, David was still unable to divest himself of his respect and veneration for the anointed of God. This is an aspect of kingship seldom encountered in the history of other rules.
The critical point in Saul’s life had been his meeting with, and subsequent anointing by, the prophet Samuel. The suddenness, the unexpectedness of this meeting had a significance for Saul that went far beyond the ceremonial act of pouring oil over his head. The ritual was intended to open a new dimension of being in Saul, followed as it was by his joining with the band of prophets and, like them, seeing visions and uttering prophecies. Saul’s visions were more than a passing phenomenon. Significantly, he seems to have retained this power, although he never actually became a prophet, as we are informed in I Samuel 19:23. Indeed, it became a sort of saying—“Is Saul also among the prophets?” (I Samuel 10:11)—because he prophesied in a rather strange fashion.
Be that as it may, it is clear that Saul’s prophetic powers resulted from his anointing; and if one permits oneself to speculate a little, it may be possible to see, in the inner transformation of this tall, healthy youth, the beginnings of a psychological development that eventually led to his decline.
The sages have depicted Saul as a combination of extreme shyness and great courage. One of the midrash commentaries hints that Saul belonged to those of the tribe of Benjamin who were supposed to lie in wait and catch a wife from among the daughters of Shiloh, sent to dance in the vineyards (Judges 21:19-23). According to this commentary, Saul was too bashful to catch one of the maidens, and she had to run after him. This may be part of the background to that oddly phrased, derisive rebuke by Saul of his son Jonathan: “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman” (I Samuel 20:30)—that is, son of the woman who had dared to pursue him.
In the Midrash, we find the description of Saul as he first appears: a heroic youth, tall and slender, confused, but normal and healthy in every way. It is the meeting with Samuel that creates the deep fissure in his soul and that, together with the prophetic experience that follows it, seems to have dramatically unsettled him. From this point on, he was transformed; he was no longer an ordinary private person—Saul, son of Kish—but the anointed of the Lord, with all the attendant expansion of his faculties, making him a vessel of wisdom and courage. His sensitivity and vulnerability also increased. The slightest touch became an injury to his pride, and he was visited by an evil spirit (described as coming from God,) which weakened and ultimately destroyed him.
A fascinating parallel to the story of Saul is that of his son Jonathan. In many ways, Jonathan was Saul’s double, revealing his wholly sympathetic and likable aspect. Jonathan was what Saul might have been had the latter not had to undergo the trauma of kingship, of being taken so suddenly from his flocks to be made King of Israel, the Chosen of the Lord.
Saul’s whole life—indeed, his very personality—is tragic. Much has been written in the attempt to probe his soul, to describe his inner struggles and his baleful influence on the people closest to him. Are we, in fact, confronted here with a single personality? Is there one factor common to the whole of this complex and divided life? Or do we have here a split personality: on the one hand, strong and sane, the good king who did his utmost for the welfare of the nation; and on the other hand, the man obsessed by fears and doubts who pursued the people around him with imaginings so wild they were little short of madness.
The Bible tends to view its heroes and, indeed, all men as fallible. They are not artificial constructs of definable parts or ideal oneness; they are almost always shown from different angles. Even the most beloved biblical heroes have their faults as well as their virtues. David, one of the outstanding figures in Jewish history, is revealed not only in his greatness and splendor but also in his weakness, even in his sin.
How, then, are we to view the story of Saul’s decline and fall? Does it indicate an inner sickness, or is it just one of those terribly truthful descriptions of a hero? Was Saul a pitiful creature tormented by uncontrollable fits of paranoia, or was there a profound inner order and logic to his life? To answer the question, let us look at a certain aspect of Saul’s personality that may prove to be the key to much else in the biblical story. It is that aspect which reveals both what was finest in the man and what caused him to make his worst mistakes. Saul was a man who allowed his heart to control his head. Feeling and sentiment governed all his thoughts and actions, and he was unable to digress from their prescribed course. Subjectively speaking, these sentiments were genuine, but they did not permit him to act rationally. That was Saul’s dominating characteristic, especially when we compare him with David. In everything that David did, from the greatest to the smallest of his actions, he seemed to present an element of sobriety, of clear-headedness. Even when he got himself entangled in sin or folly, that element of lucidity, the power to control his feelings, was never quite lost. One may compare David’s superficial attack of madness with Saul’s obsessiveness and note the contrast between Saul’s fits, which left him helpless, and David’s calculated play acting.
This characteristic of impulsive emotionalism and the absence of adequate thought or planning was the expression of Saul’s personality and dictated the form of his life. In its positive aspect, it gave his life a certain tone, a certain nobility, a genuine sincerity. Saul remained a person who was spared any doubts concerning his innermost feelings and who retained, until the last, a vast amount of enviable innocence and simplicity.
In contrast to many other neurotic people, Saul’s major personality trait was not complex or knotty, although it caused intricate problems. Saul was simply extreme in allowing his feelings to dominate his reason. In this, he showed unusual unity and wholeness which caused the sages to declare that he was unblemished by wickedness or deviousness. They maintained that this was precisely the reason the kingship did not stem from Saul: without participating in the faults of men, a man cannot rule. David, for instance, was a man of many faults, but these did not bring about his downfall.
Coming as Saul did from an ancient line of a small, long-suffering tribe which had preserved for itself a special place in Israel, he personified the best of the rural aristocracy. With his forthright manner, his loyalty and simplicity, he was the honest, simple man brought from behind the plow to become king.
With penetrating psychological insight, the sages have noted, concerning Saul’s straightforward character that he who is merciful to the cruel will end up by being cruel to the merciful. At first glance, this may seem to be a contradictory pronouncement. The point is that, although these qualities of cruelty and mercifulness are contradictory, they do express an element of Saul’s psyche: the inability to maintain equilibrium within any framework. Such a one is always a captive of his own impulses and is carried along by them from one extreme to the other. Hence, this King Saul who could not bring himself to kill the Amalekites—even though, under divine command, he had gone to war to do so—was the same man who could give the order to kill all the people of the city of priests: men, women, and children. The same person who was merciful to the worst of his enemies was also extravagantly cruel toward completely innocent people. In Saul, these tendencies of compassion and cruelty were not always contradictory. Both expressed his inability to control his feelings, whether of revenge against the priests, or compassion for the enemy, or hostility to David.
When we examine the whole personality of Saul, without lingering on its emotional aspects, what we have is not a shifty, unstable soul but a man who simply never grew up. Therefore, in all of Saul’s sins—those of mercy and those of cruelty, those of indecision and those of impulse—we find that element which gives them the dimension of tragedy: in almost everything he did, even in his worst deeds, Saul was unfalteringly, naively committed to what he believed to be the right course of action.
There is the impression in the biblical story that Saul was not always aware when he was sinning, but acted always under the illusion that what he was doing was right. Even when pursuing David, he was convinced that he was doing so in the interests of the kingdom, and not out of personal resentment. Saul still loved David, even when he tried to kill him—as one must realize in order to understand the complexity of their relationship. Saul was obsessed by the belief that his kingdom was threatened and he felt that, at all costs, he had to transfer the legacy of kingship in orderly fashion. Although he saw David as a danger to this orderly transfer, his love for him was not affected and in calling him “my son,” Saul spoke impulsively and with duplicity.
Saul’s strange relationship with David reflects the chief difference in their personalities. David’s attitude to Saul was made up of an undisguised fear for his own life and a sense of profound awe for the “anointed of God.” David was the personification of mind in control of heart. This sense of thoughtful reckoning and duty was always far ahead of his own personal inclinations. This kind of personality is obviously preferable when it comes to running a country.
On the fall of Saul’s kingdom the sages have commented that indeed Saul had no blemish; his sins were not sins of degradation, of lust for women, or even of personal hatred—the vices of the kings of Judah. At the same time, this very purity made it impossible for him to govern. To direct the destiny of a nation requires a man who knows his own failings and has intimate knowledge of the failings of humankind. He must be a man who can withstand insult and injury, and who has a keen grasp of political actualities—always the product of specific times, men and circumstances. These qualities are what David possessed almost to perfection; while Saul, with his simple forthright personality, his naïve sense of being the anointed of God and therefore in touch with higher worlds, was caught in a web of events which defeated him. In a sense, his failure is the failure of the better man, the failure of one chosen for a task that did not need a better man, only a wiser and more capable one.
Saul’s simplicity of soul, his inability to vanquish his own heart and feelings for the sake of diplomacy and political reality, his very spontaneity of expression, whether of pity or of anger, are all part of a distinctive personality, one both noble and gracious. In the end, it was these very traits that destroyed Saul and brought to the throne of lsrael the man more suited to the task.
Biblical Images: Men and Women of the Bible [Jerusalem, Israel: Maggid Books, 2010], pp. 115-120
Reprinted with permission of the author
This book can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/Biblical-Images-Adin-Steinsaltz/dp/1592642942
