The Reading
The Summary
Shemuel Alef Chapter 31
The Jews are defeated in their conflict with the Pelishtim. The three sons of Shaul are slain on the battlefield and Shaul is critically wounded by enemy archers. He asks his armor-bearer to put him out of his misery by killing him quickly, but the armor-bearer refuses to oblige. Therefore, Shaul falls upon his own sword to end his life, and his reluctant assistant does the same. When the Jews living in the Transjordan observed that Israel had lost the war, they abandoned their cities out of fear of the Pelishtim, who promptly captured those locations for themselves and settled in them.
When the Pelishtim return to scavenge the bodies of the fallen, they discover the corpse of Shaul, decapitate it, and remove his armor. They send the lifeless body of Shaul around to their various cities and houses of idol worship to celebrate their victory, eventually placing the armor of Shaul in one of their idolatrous shrines and hanging his corpse up for display on a wall in Bet Shan.
When the citizens of Yavesh Gilead heard that Shaul’s body had been found by the Pelishtim and was being desecrated, they carried out a recovery mission to retrieve it and laid his bones and the bones of his sons to rest in a proper burial ground. As a sign of mourning they fasted for seven days after this.
There are a couple of points to highlight in this brief concluding chapter. First, we see that the tragic loss of the Jews in this battle essentially places them in the same position – or a worse one – than they found themselves in when Shaul first became king. Even more territory has been ceded to the Pelishtim and whatever traces remained of the religious renaissance orchestrated by Shemuel seem to have been erased. The king and his subjects have, for all intents and purposes, reverted to the superstitious and unreflective mentality that dominated them in the era of Eli and his sons, with only David and his followers holding fast to the true principles of Torah (as far as we can tell).
Shemuel’s prediction that the benefit of the king to the nation would be dependent on his faithfulness to Hashem has been demonstrated clearly. The distance between Shaul and the Almighty, which is manifest most clearly and obviously in his consultation with the medium at Ein Dor, explains the disastrous end of his political and military career.
At the same time, however, the chapter informs us that Shaul’s legacy was by no means a homogeneous one. The citizens of Yavesh Gilead were the first beneficiaries of Shaul’s leadership when he rallied the Jewish people to war for the purpose of liberating them from Nahash the Amonite. This battle, which provided the evidence of Shaul’s talent that secured his claim to the kingdom, had never been forgotten by the inhabitants of Yavesh Gilead who repay his kindness and concern for them by ensuring that he receives the dignity of a proper burial and mourning period.
The Sages comment that the Jewish people at the time Shaul died were at fault for their failure to eulogize Shaul properly. Memories of his later years, tarnished by his paranoia, emotional turmoil, poor management, ineffective leadership, and military losses overshadowed any recollection of the heroic and admirable deeds that marked the beginning of his career. The unfortunate but perhaps inevitable tendency to allow more recent events to dominate our view of a person affected Shaul’s standing in the eyes of the people.
Aside from the citizens of Yavesh Gilead, the nation of Israel neglected to memorialize their first monarch in a balanced and nuanced way that would have honored the significant positive contributions he made to the country during his tenure, notwithstanding his flaws and errors. Human beings are not easily labeled as “good” or “bad” unless we limit ourselves to very superficial and simplistic black-and-white thinking. The Torah expects us to be able to respect and cherish the positive qualities of another person even when we are compelled to acknowledge the less than stellar aspects of his or her behavior and character.
As was mentioned in the beginning of our study of Shemuel Alef, this is not really the conclusion of a book…We have merely completed the first half of the Book of Shemuel, which was subdivided for convenience’s sake due to its large size. Nevertheless, the division is not an illogical one; we certainly are witness to a significant turning point here, as we read of the tragic end of Shaul’s Kingdom and we are prepared to study the story of the rise of David to his rightful place as King of Israel.