1 Sam 15-20 - For tonight's performance, the role of Samuel will be played by Sir Ian McKellen

The readings - Days 90 & 91 - 1 Samuel 15-20

We're rapidly approaching what is (now that we're out of the drudgery of Leviticus/Numbers) becoming one of the hardest types of passage to write about - the "all-too-familiar" story.

Within these five chapters, we encounter what is quite possibly the most famous story in the entire Old Testament: David and Goliath. Its message is one of faith, hope and triumph against seemingly hopeless odds, and two out of three of those have been gladly co-opted by modern society, almost ad nauseum (guess which one tends to get left out?), and with good cause. It's a great story - you've got the enormous, lifelong-trained warrior (a whopping nine-and-a-half feet of him at that) against the puny talks-big-for-his-britches shepherd boy who has rocks and a strip of leather, and the 'underdog' wins. Perfect.



It's worth noting, however, precisely because the story's non-faith elements (which if you really look at it are, to put it mildly, pretty important to the whole narrative flow of the thing) are glommed on to so eagerly, that this is not a story about beating the odds, triumphing over serious adversity or any of that other "stick-up-for-yourself-and-you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to" crap.

This is a story about faith. Audacious, unrelenting, empowering, triumphant faith. Nothing about the story involves David beating Goliath man-to-man, as it were, and David would have been the first person to point that out. He was, in fact. Everything he did and said surrounded the fact that he was completely incredulous that the rest of the Israelite army wasn't willing to make good on the fact that odds were hugely stacked, but hugely stacked in their favour. In David's mind, any one of them could have stepped up and beating Goliath down without breaking a sweat - since nobody else was doing it, he figured he might as well go ahead. So he did, and he won, like he knew that he would.

Along the way, he comes up with one of the cooler bad-ass lines in the Bible, roughly paraphrased as "No, Goliath, I'm going to kill you, and then I'm going to chop off your head, and litter the ground with the bodies of your compatriots."

Yeah, sort of like that...

Now, this all happens, inconveniently enough, right after Saul makes God really mad by - of all things - keeping an enemy king alive, and making off with some war booty, despite a direct order not to do either of those things.

Before God's spirit officially leaves Saul (once Samuel anoints David), something... unexpected happens. Samuel cuts a guy into pieces. That king that Saul kept alive? It ended up on Samuel to make him not alive anymore, so he "hewed him to pieces."

How I now picture Samuel

So Saul becomes more and more unhinged, David gets more and more famous, things get tense (despite David being a proven music-soothes-the-savage-beast harp-related therapist for the king) and then Saul cracks a "cunning" plan to marry David to his oldest daughter, which will somehow end up with David dead. David says "I don't like that one, this other guy can have her," so that happens. Then the one that David does like turns out to like him back (do we sound like Grade 7 yet?) so they get married, but only after David delivers a dowry to her father, Saul, consisting of a bag of 200 Philistine foreskins.


Yeah. Saul is, by this point, sufficiently off his rocker to ask, in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage, 200 penis parts in a bag.

So many questions. Not enough time.

Anyway, so David marries Saul's daughter, who saves his life from her father, and becomes BFF with Saul's son, who saves him repeatedly from his father. Then David runs away.