Is Saul among the prophets?

On I Samuel

There was an old saying among the Israelis: "Is Saul among the prophets?"

This is surely an ancient witticism and idiom which is invoked to indicate a person being out of character or showing a change of outlook and behavior. It might have even been used to focus on an apparent social contradiction.

However, this clever saying eventually was made literal, as when parables meant to instruct were, over generations, eventually taken to be literal dogma.

It seems quite plausible that two stories about Saul being filled with the Spirit and prophesying -- in one case against his will -- were folk tales meant for campfire entertainment that were handed down orally until eventually being written down on a scroll filled with such yarns. The stories answered the question: "How did the saying 'Is Saul among the prophets?' come about?" The saying itself however was likely originally a shrewd comment that drew on the fact that the worldly king was known to have been at odds with the prophet Samuel. Even if in fact Saul did go into an ecstasy of the Spirit at some point, that fact doesn't seem to be the real origin of the saying.

So then, what we have is that the stories are intertwined with another account of the story of Saul and David. Those returning to Jerusalem under the Persian mandate were required to draw up the religious traditions and codify them to satisfy Persian bureaucracy. It is possible that at this point stories that had circulated in Jerusalem were combined with a more serious account. (Of course there had been other redactions and compilations before the Exile.) At any rate, these stories ("pericopes"), if eliminated along with a few other interpolated pericopes, leave a very plausible account of a rising military star, David, who excited the envy of the king.

As for the story of David the shepherd boy slaying Goliath of Gath, this pericope seems asynchronous with the account of David the military leader. Curiously, at another point, not David but one of his soldiers is credited with killing the giant Goliath (whose height has been estimated at six-feet-nine). It seems likely that this fact was expanded and applied to David because David was the star the campfire crowds wanted to hear about. One can see how it would be, in the beginning, metaphorically true. David was the young commander who rescued tiny Israel from the giant Philistine power through his cunning and daring. He did kill a giant. The giant of Philistine power. Later the Goliath story was woven in.

On Exodus

Quite interesting that the tribe of Levi has many Egyptian names, a fact tending to bolster the idea that the Levites may have been the 6,000 led by Moses from Egypt. Perhaps later they became the priestly tribe -- when the exilics joined with other Hebrew tribes, who already had shares of land. The Levites, who had been border guards in the buffer zone of Goshen, fled Egypt after they were pressed into corvee service for building projects, something the Indian-like tribesmen looked upon as slavery. Having lost their land holdings in Goshen, they were accorded priestly status in an arrangement with the confederation of Hebrew tribes, which all traced their lineage to Jacob/Israel.

Aaron may represent a rival priestly tradition, perhaps one that had existed among those tribes that had not been living in Goshen. When the arrangement was made, it was decided that Aaron should be considered a brother of Moses, so that the two priestly casts could coexist. Later, folk tales about Moses and Aaron were popular entertainment around the campfires and eventually these tales were written down. On the other hand, there seems to be a strong thread of historicity running through the Exodus story. For example, it has been shown that the Egyptian plagues are the sort of natural disasters that would happen in that region, and that the plagues came in the correct order, where one event triggered the next. Even the statement that the last plague killed "the firstborn" may be a metaphorical way of saying that the plague struck down the best and the brightest, the young and the healthy. On occasion, plagues select the young and vibrant -- as in the 1918 influenza pandemic -- because that generation has not been immunized by exposure to related viruses.

I find some of Freud's speculations concerning the Exodus, as told in Moses and Monotheism, to be quite interesting. Especially when it comes to the Egyptian, Moses, insisting that the Hebrew refugees refrain from any form of representation of their god. Moses, thought Freud, was reacting to the traditional representational idolatry of Egypt and wanted a completely stripped down form of worship, where God, as Spirit -- rather than a thing representing a god -- was worshiped.