God Humbles Samuel at the House of Jesse

The Prophet Arrives With Certainty

Samuel came to Bethlehem carrying a horn of oil and the absolute confidence of a man who had been right about everything for decades. He had anointed Saul. He had spoken for God in the wilderness years. He was ha-ro'eh, the seer, and in using that title he had grown, in some small and unexamined way, attached to his own gifts.

God knew this. And God, rather than correcting it with a word, arranged for an education.

When Samuel entered the house of Jesse and laid eyes on Eliab, the eldest son, something moved in him with the certainty of prophecy. Tall. Broad. The bearing of command. Surely this was the man. Surely what he was feeling was the same recognition he had felt when Saul first walked toward him out of the fields years ago. He had done this before. He knew what anointing felt like.

God said: "no."

Why God Let Samuel Be Deceived

The word God uses in the tradition, as Ginzberg's compilation preserves it, is pointed. God did not merely correct Samuel's first impression. God had allowed the impression to form in the first place. The deception was intentional. The prophet who called himself ha-ro'eh, the seer, was being given a demonstration of exactly how much he could not see without divine assistance.

Jesse brought Abinadab. "Not this one," God said. Then Shammah. Then four more sons, one by one down the line, each one presenting himself before the greatest prophet of the generation, and each one turned away. Seven rejections. Seven times Samuel's internal sense said: perhaps this one, and God said: "you are looking at the outside of a vessel you cannot open on your own."

The rebuke is embedded in how the tradition describes God's instruction: man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. Samuel's eyes had done their honest work. His error was to mistake the looking for the seeing.

The One Who Was Not Brought

When all seven were done, Samuel asked Jesse: "is this all your sons?" The question is almost awkward, because the answer was obviously no. There was one more. But Jesse had not brought David before the prophet. The youngest was out with the sheep. He was not, in Jesse's reckoning, the kind of son one presents first.

Or perhaps Jesse was not certain David was his to present in the full ordinary sense. The tradition around David's birth is complicated, and Jesse's hesitation about his youngest son is part of the story the texts preserve. Whatever the reason, David was absent.

Samuel would not move. "Bring him. We will not sit down, we will not eat, we will not proceed until he stands before us."

The Moment the Oil Moved

David came in from the fields, flushed, smelling of the outdoors, red-cheeked from the sun. Nothing about him announced kingship to anyone watching. He was a boy doing a laborer's job. And then God said to Samuel: "arise and anoint him, for this is the one."

The oil from the horn moved without being poured, some versions of the tradition say. It leaped toward David. This is the tradition's way of insisting that the anointing was not a human decision that God ratified, but a divine choice that Samuel's hand only confirmed. The prophet who called himself a seer was, at this moment, not the one choosing. He was the instrument of someone else's sight.

There is a further tradition in which even the gatekeepers of the divine court challenged the anointing, asking why a descendant of Ruth the Moabite was permitted to enter. The answer came back with finality: "a different law applies to the women of Moab than to the men of Moab." Ruth had been admitted. Her great-grandson would be king. The gates opened.