Saul Born Into the Wrong Moment and Cursed Without Knowing

There are two ways to read the story of Saul in the rabbinic imagination, and they do not entirely fit together, which is part of what makes them true. In one reading, Saul is the king who failed and whose failure cleared the way for David. In another reading, Saul is an innocent man whose death left a wound in Israel that bled for thirty years, whose memory was so holy that God prosecuted David for speaking against it, even though David never intended to say anything wrong.

The second reading begins with a famine. Three years of drought struck Israel during the reign of David, year after year after year (2 Samuel 21:1). Rabbi Phineas, whose teaching is preserved in the Legends of the Jews tradition assembled by Louis Ginzberg in the early twentieth century from earlier rabbinic sources, explains that the famine arrived thirty years after Saul and his sons had been killed. David investigated for the cause: was there idol worship? He searched and found none. He investigated for other sins and found none. The famine was not punishment for something Israel had recently done. It was a consequence that had been accumulating for three decades, waiting for the right moment to make itself known.

Why then, and not sooner? The question hangs over the story without a direct answer, which is itself an answer. The moral economy of the universe does not always collect its debts promptly. Sometimes the reckoning waits until the right person is alive to address it, or until the wrong that caused it has been sufficiently forgotten that its weight can be felt more clearly. Saul had been dead for thirty years. His sons had been dead for thirty years. And the land still remembered. The land of Israel is described elsewhere in rabbinic literature as particularly sensitive to the moral state of the people who inhabit it, responsive to justice and injustice in ways that other lands are not. The famine was the land's memory asserting itself.

The first reading, from a different stream of midrash, goes back even further, to a moment before the famine, before Saul's death, to a moment when David was praying. The Midrash preserved in the Tanchuma tradition records God speaking to David with a rebuke: why are you cursing My anointed one? God points to Psalm 6:11, where David says all my enemies will be ashamed and terrified, and asks: who are your enemies? Is it not Saul? You yourself named him in Psalm 18 when you said the Lord saved you from the hand of Saul. That psalm was a prayer of gratitude for deliverance. But by naming Saul as the source of the danger, David had, in the divine accounting, spoken against God's chosen king.

David's response is immediate and genuinely frightened. He says: Master of the universe, do not hold my mistakes against me as if they were deliberate sins. He quotes Psalm 19:13, mistakes and errors, who can understand? He is invoking the legal category of the unintentional transgression, the shegagah, and the wordplay in Hebrew between the psalm heading shigayyon and the word for mistake is not accidental. David is saying that he composed the very psalm under a kind of spiritual confusion, that the words came out in ways he did not fully intend. He did not mean to curse Saul. He meant to praise God for deliverance. The two impulses got tangled together in the prayer, and God caught the tangle. The shigayyon heading that opens the psalm is not just a musical term. It is David's own label for the state he was in when he wrote it: confused, passionate, not entirely in control of what he was saying.

What these two moments share is the long reach of Saul's presence into Israel's life after his death. Saul the man was gone. His body was retrieved from the walls of Beit Shean and buried. His sons died with him. But Saul the figure, Saul as God's anointed, as the first king, as the man who was chosen before he was ready, persisted in Israel's memory and in its moral life for decades. The famine came from something connected to his death. The rebuke of David came from something connected to his name. He was not simply a failed king who made room for a better one. He was a presence that Israel could not entirely put down, any more than David could speak a prayer without Saul's name entering it unsummoned. The tradition knows this about first things: they leave marks that outlast the things themselves. Saul was the first king. Whatever came after him carried the impression of his having been first. Even Saul's birth story in the rabbinic tradition is bound up with Israel's moral accounting: the famine that followed his death was the land's long memory of what had been done to God's anointed, and no amount of time had dissolved the debt.