Three Men Who Did Not Want to Be Chosen and Were Chosen Anyway

There is a pattern in Jewish mythology that runs through three of the most significant figures in the Hebrew Bible. Moses argued with God at the burning bush for so long, proposing every possible reason he was the wrong choice, that God eventually became frustrated. Joseph did not choose to go to Egypt. He was thrown into a pit by his brothers and sold. Saul, when the prophet Samuel announced him as king before the entire assembly of Israel, was found hiding among the baggage. The rabbis noticed this pattern and treated it as a principle: God selects the person who is not seeking the position.

Moses at the Burning Bush

The Legends of the Jews records that when God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses did not immediately comply. He argued, proposed his brother Aaron as a better candidate, raised his limitations, recalled his stutter, noted his years away from Egypt, and in general did everything possible to redirect the divine commission toward someone more qualified. The text preserves God's response as a combination of patience and mild exasperation. Moses was chosen precisely because he was a shepherd who had spent forty years in the wilderness caring for animals that could not speak for themselves. The quality that made him reluctant was the same quality that made him right.

The Ginzberg tradition also notes that God spoke to Moses in the voice of his father Amram, who had died years before. The choice of voice was deliberate: not terrifying, not overwhelming, but familiar. The divine call to extraordinary service came disguised as something a person might already trust.

Joseph in the Pit

Joseph did not volunteer for Egypt. He was sent by his father to check on his brothers in the fields, and his brothers threw him in a pit and then sold him to a passing caravan (Genesis 37:24-28). The Legends of the Jews records that his years in Egypt required resisting one temptation after another, refusing Zuleika's advances, enduring false accusation, surviving the prison, waiting for the dream that would finally bring him before Pharaoh.

None of this was chosen. Every step was compelled. And yet the tradition consistently frames Joseph's compelled journey as the mechanism through which Israel survived. The pit was not a detour from his purpose. It was the route. He could not have become the savior of his family by any road that started with his own ambition, because the point was not that he wanted power but that he had none and used what came to him anyway.

Saul Among the Baggage

The specific detail of Saul hiding among the baggage when Samuel announced him as king before the entire assembly of Israel is preserved in both the biblical text (1 Samuel 10:22) and extensively in the rabbinic elaborations. The Legends of the Jews describes Saul's first act as king as immediately impressive: he led an army to rescue the Gileadites from Nahash the Ammonite, who had demanded that the right eye of every man in Jabesh-Gilead be gouged out as a condition of surrender. Saul's response was swift, righteous, and decisive.

But between the announcement and the victory, he hid. The man who would command armies was found behind the supplies. The tradition does not treat this as cowardice. It treats it as the appropriate response of someone who genuinely did not consider himself ready. The Legends explain why the kingdom was ultimately transferred to David: not because Saul was wicked but because he made specific errors of judgment, specifically sparing the Amalekite king Agag when God had commanded otherwise, and assuming sacrificial duties that belonged to Samuel. His fall was not the fall of a corrupt man but of a humble man who began to overestimate his own authority.

What the Three Have in Common

The rabbis who assembled the Legends of the Jews and the related midrashic traditions were not constructing a simple moral about humility. They were observing something in the text itself. The person who is actively pursuing leadership carries a set of incentives that corrupts the exercise of it. The person who is brought to it against their will, who argued, who was thrown, who hid, carries a different set. They owe nothing to ambition. They cannot attribute what happened to their own seeking. Whatever authority they exercise is, from the beginning, something they received rather than something they took.

Moses became the lawgiver of Israel. Joseph became its preserver. Saul became its first king, and despite his fall from grace, the tradition records that he died a hero and a saint, his remorse over his errors securing him pardon in the world to come. Three men, three centuries, three different kinds of compelled greatness. The pattern the rabbis traced across them is one of the most consistent threads in the entire fabric of Jewish mythological tradition.

The Ghost of Samuel Confirms It

At the end of Saul's life, Samuel's ghost returned from the dead to speak to him. Samuel was not pleased to be roused. He had things to say about being disturbed from his eternal rest. But what he said to Saul in their final exchange was not condemnation. It was prophecy: tomorrow you and your sons will be with me. They would be together. In the world to come, Saul would stand beside his prophet. The man who hid among the baggage and the man who had pulled him out of it would occupy the same place in the end.