As I mentioned in my introductory post, I am working on a character study of Saul. Of course, when I say Saul, I don't mean the Saul of the New Testament who also went by "Paul." I mean the Old Testament Saul from the book of 1 Samuel. . . the one who was king and tried to harpoon David in the thorax more than once. I've always found Saul to be an interesting person, and lately I've wondered if the source of Saul's eventual downfall as a king and a person wasn't about pride and arrogance as I've often been told, but rather his own personal insecurities. So let's begin!
This is not an unusual introduction for a person in the Old Testament. In ancient cultures, geneaologies were very important. To know one's father and one's father's father, helps us get a better understanding of the son, grandson, and everyone else descending from that family tree. Some who come from difficult family situations today might shudder to think that anyone would draw any conclusions about them based on the history of their fathers or grandfathers. But such is the life of the ancient person. Family, ancestry, and history were important in understanding the person. I think we underestimate the significance of ancestry in modern life. We may not notice the size of it's generational ripples or the effects that one's father's mistakes may have on our own lives, but the ancients tended to have broader understanding of all of this.
So Saul's family history is the first thing that we learn about Saul. We don't know much about the majority of the cast (Abiel, Zeror, Becorath,and Aphiah . . . this is the first and last time they are mentioned in the Bible), but we have become intimately aquainted with the Saul's tribe, tribe of Benjamin, in Scripture. The name-sake for the tribe was one of the sons of Jacob (also called Israel). He was the youngest of the sons, and presumably the smallest. When Jacob's sons went to Egypt to buy grain because of the famine, Jacob refused to send Benjamin along because he was afraid harm might come to him (Gen. 42:3). Even still, by the end of Genesis (ch. 49), when Jacob gathers his sons to tell them what is ahead in their ancestor's futures, this is what he has to say about Benjamin: "Benjamin is a ravenous wolf; in the morning he devours the prey, in the evening he divides the plunder" (Gen. 49:27)
Perhaps the first example of this predatory prediction coming to fruition appears in the book of Judges in the bizarre story of the Levite and the Concubine (Judg. 19). A Levite and his concubine, while passing through the town of Gibeah in the land of Benjamin, stopped to rest. A non-Benjaminite man took the two in for the night, but the people of the town, the Benjaminite people, surrounded the man's home and demanded that they bring out the Levite so that they can rape him . . . Soddom and Gomorrah style. In the end, the levite was never homosexually raped by the Benjaminite men, but they gang-raped his concubine instead until she lie dead on the porch (the Levite in the story was certainly no hero either). This event triggered a battle pitting the tribe of Benjamin against all of the tribes of Israel. Benjamin suffered a tremendous loss, and the tribe suffered shame.
This is Saul's family. So when the writer of 1 Samuel acknowledges that Saul's father was a "man of standing" and in the same breath says he was a Benjaminite, everyone must recognize a sense of irony. There was shame associated with Benjamin at this time. Thus, when Samuel presents the possibility that Saul may be chosen as the hope and desire of Israel, Saul responds, "But am I not a Benjamite . . ?"
And here, I think we uncover the first layer of Saul's insecurities . . . Saul's ancestry and ethnicity. Saul was carrying around not only his own burdens and deficiencies, but also the burdens, deficiences, or bad choices of his fathers. Whether we realize it or not, I think every single one of us carries around some generational baggage in one form or another. Most people who've been raised African American, or Native American, or in another ethnic minority group are keenly aware of the extra burden they carry as a result of their disadvantaged ancestry. While African Americans may be over a hundred years removed from the abolition of slavery, the impact of slavery, injustice, racism, and segregation can still be felt in the deepest sensitivities of African Americans living today. There are generational insecurities that develop in people.
As a personal example, a few years ago I took a week trip with a dozen seminary students to the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota. It was a great trip and an incredible learning experience. At the same time, i don't think I had ever been so keenly aware of my being white as I was on that trip. Every person I encountered on the reservation, every conversation we had, was met with a certain level of skepticism and suspicion because I was white. And I felt insecure. Not necessarily because of anything I had done, but because of things that had been done by my white ancestors to the Native American people. I knew that I carried that burden and I felt the fear of being rejected and judged. My white-ness had created a deep insecurity within me that related to the way white ancesters of mine had historically treated Native Americans.
Such is the case, I believe, with Saul. Saul is from the smallest tribe, the one with the worst reputation, the one stained with scandal. And this insecurity has formed the bedrock in Saul's psyche on which he will eventually build the makings of his own self-destruction.
Comments