Today’s
Scripture Reading (February 23, 2019): 1 Samuel 9
Power is fickle. Where it exists today, it might not
exist tomorrow. Where it is absent today, it might inhabit tomorrow. And the
problem is that we struggle to identify the change. Just ask President Jeb Bush
or President Hilary Clinton. At one point in 2016, the assumption was that one
of those two people would hold that title. Few, if anyone, early in 2016 saw
President Donald Trump as a possibility. Oops.
Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1972, defeating the
Democratic Candidate George McGovern, by one of the largest electoral
landslides in the history of American politics. No one in 1972 would have
predicted that two years later he would make history by being the only
President to resign from the office. The most powerful man in the world in 1972
had experienced a severe power outage by 1974.
Power, or the lack of it, presents us a struggle with
the elevation of Saul, the son of Kish, to the position of King. If we take the
events in the book of Judges as telling us a story that is in chronological
order, then the almost absolute destruction of the Tribe of Benjamin happened
during the lifetime of Samuel and the judgeship of Eli. If that is true, there does
not seem to be enough time for Benjamin to recover to the point where they
would have a man of standing, Kish, who would have a son who could be
considered to be King. And even if there were
such a family, the political backlash from the nation would have been
significant. Why should Israel follow the son of the dishonored tribe? There is forgiveness in the close of the tale of
Israel’s first civil war, but a king from their defeated numbers? It just doesn’t
seem possible.
We should not underestimate the tragedy and power of
the story told in Judges 19 through 21. The Tribe of Benjamin was soundly
defeated. The Book of Judges seems to indicate that maybe 600 warriors of
Benjamin survived in hiding after the war took place. But “the
men of Israel went back to Benjamin and put all the towns to the sword,
including the animals and everything else they found. All the towns they came
across they set on fire” (Judges 20:48). The rout of Benjamin was complete.
At the end of the story in Judges 20, the tribe of
Benjamin was not just weak; it was decimated.
It would take some compassionate thinking on behalf of the rest of Israel if
the tribe were even to survive. Israel gathered at the end of the war with the
task of finding wives for the Benjamite women in an attempt to try to
repopulate the tribe. It is one reason why we place the events of the first Israelite Civil War at the beginning of
the period of the Judges, rather than at the end.
But the reality of the rise of Saul, the son of Kish,
to the position of King is that God had restored Benjamin to power. The tribe
that had almost been written off of the
pages of history now became the tribe
that would offer one of their sons as the first King of the nation. Benjamin
was once again a tribe of power within the nation of Israel.
Tomorrow’s
Scripture Reading: 1 Samuel 10
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