Saul and the Six Pillars Holding Up Creation

A verse from the Song of Songs becomes, in the hands of the rabbis, the architecture of creation. “His calves are pillars of marble” (Song of Songs 5:15). Not love poetry. Not metaphor for a beloved's physical beauty. According to Vayikra Rabbah 25:8, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, this verse is a blueprint.

Saul Among the Heavenly Host records the interpretation. The word for “calves” in the Hebrew, shokav, the Midrash reads as a reference to the world itself, to its centers and marketplaces. The “pillars of marble,” amudei shesh, hide the Hebrew word for six. The world stands on six pillars. And those six pillars are the six days of creation, as it says: “For in six days God made” (Exodus 20:11).

So far, so cosmic. But the verse continues: these pillars are “set on sockets of fine gold.” What are the golden sockets? Torah. “They are more desirable than gold, than much fine gold” (Psalms 19:11). The structure the Midrash is building is exact: the world rests on the days of creation, and the days of creation rest on Torah. Remove Torah, and the six pillars have nothing underneath them.

Rav Huna, in the name of bar Kappara, sharpens this with an analogy about pillars themselves. A pillar has a base at the bottom and a capital at the top. You cannot understand the pillar without seeing what it connects to. Torah passages are the same. They have what comes before and what comes after, and you can only read them rightly when you see both.

The Midrash then demonstrates this with a sequence from Leviticus that at first looks unrelated. The laws about planting fruit trees (Leviticus 19:23) sit next to laws about relations with servants (Leviticus 19:20). Why? The rabbis say: familiarity breeds temptation. A man who is constantly in someone else's house, spending time with that household, may find himself tempted by the maidservant. The juxtaposition is a warning. Rabbi Yudan, in the name of Rabbi Levi, delivers it with startling force: those who take liberties with maidservants are destined to be hanged in the future (Psalms 68:22).

Then comes King Saul.

The Midrash connects Leviticus 19:26, the prohibition against eating blood, to a battle scene from the Book of Samuel. During a campaign against the Philistines, Saul's troops were hungry. They began slaughtering animals and eating the flesh before the blood had drained properly. Saul saw what was happening and intervened. He showed the people exactly how long a knife was needed for proper slaughter, fourteen fingerbreadths by the rabbinic calculation, and made them do it right.

But the story has a turn. Later in the same battle, Saul and his son Jonathan were reportedly the only ones with swords (I Samuel 13:22). Rabbi Hagai, in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak, says an angel provided the weapons. Others say God provided them directly. Either way, the Midrash makes the connection explicit: Saul's insistence on doing the slaughter correctly, his refusal to allow blood-eating even under battle pressure, resulted in divine provision. He built an altar. He acted with integrity under circumstances that made integrity difficult. And the six pillars held.

The passage ends with Rabbi Shimon ben Lakonya looking forward. In this world, he says, one person builds and another uses the building. One plants and another eats the fruit. That is the injustice woven into ordinary time. But Isaiah promises something different (Isaiah 65:22-23): in the age that is coming, they will not build for others to inhabit, they will not plant for others to eat. Labor will be rewarded. Lineage will be recognized among the nations.

Saul in this Midrash is a minor figure in the great argument. He appears to show that the Torah's prohibition about blood was not theoretical. Armies in the field, hungry and victorious, still had obligations. The pillars of creation the Midrash Rabbah describes are not held up by mystical forces alone. They are held up by kings who make soldiers wait, by ordinary people who keep the law when it is inconvenient, by the golden sockets of Torah pressed under the weight of a world that would prefer to skip to the eating.