1. he set his sons up as judges for Israel. It is a signal expression of the ambiguity of Samuel’s role as leader that he oversteps his mandate as judge (shofet—both judicial authority and ad hoc political leader) by attempting to inaugurate a kind of dynastic arrangement. The two sons who betray their trust of office are a nice parallel to Eli’s two corrupt sons, who essentially were displaced by Samuel.

2. judges in Beersheba. It is a little puzzling that Samuel should send both his sons from north-central Israel to this city in the south. Josephus evidently was familiar with a tradition in which one son was sent to Bethel in the north and the other to Beersheba, a more plausible deployment.

3. bent on gain . . . twisted justice. The two verbs are different conjugations of the same root, n-t-h, which means to bend off from the straight and narrow.

6. the thing was evil in Samuel’s eyes. Samuel is ideologically opposed to the monarchy because he is committed to the old idea of the ad hoc inspired leader, shofet, who is a kind of direct implementation of God’s rule through the divine spirit over the unique nation of Israel. God appears to agree with him but yields to political necessity. It is noteworthy that when the elders’ words are replayed in this verse from Samuel’s point of view, the very phrase rejecting covenantal status that must especially gall him, “like all the nations,” is suppressed.

8. forsaking Me and serving other gods. Both the locutions used and the preoccupation with cultic loyalty are notably Deuteronomistic, and the coupling of the shift in style with this theme leads one to suspect a seventh-century B.C.E. interpolation here, since there has been no question of idolatry in the immediate context. The elders’ expressed concern has been rather with the breakdown of the institution of the judge in Samuel’s corrupt sons. The grounds for the argument for and against monarchy will shift once again in Samuel’s speech (verses 11–18).

10. asking of him a king. The Hebrew participle shoʾalim takes us back to the verb of asking used in Samuel’s naming and points forward to Sha’ul, Saul.

11. the practice of the king. This whole episode turns repeatedly on an untranslatable pun. Mishpat means “justice,” the very thing that Samuel’s sons have twisted by taking payoffs. Mishpat also means “habitual behavior,” “mode of operation,” or “practice.” As a verb the same root means either “to judge” or “to rule”: it is used (in a verbal noun) in the former sense in verses 1 and 2, in the latter sense in verses 5 and 6. The recurrent scholarly assumption that this whole attack on the encroachments of the monarchy reflects a knowledge of Solomon’s reign or of later Davidic kings is by no means inevitable: all the practices enumerated—military conscription, the corvée, expropriation of lands, taxation of the agricultural output—could easily have been familiar to an early writer from observing the Canaanite city-states or the larger imperial regimes to the east and the south.

who will reign over you. The people had spoken of the king ruling/judging them (the verb shafat); Samuel unambiguously speaks of reigning (malakh, the cognate verb of melekh, king).

Your sons he will take. Samuel’s speech is solidly constructed as a hammering piece of antimonarchic rhetoric. All the cherished possessions to be expropriated by the king are placed emphatically at the beginning of each clause, followed by the verb of which they are objects. “He will take” (one word in the Hebrew, yiqaḥ) is insisted on with anaphoric force. The speech moves systematically from the expropriation of sons and daughters to land and produce to slaves and beasts of burden, ending with the climactic “you will become his slaves.” A modern American reader might easily be reminded of the rhetoric of a radical libertarian inveighing against the evils of big government and the encroachments of its bureaucracies and taxation. In no part of his pragmatic argument does Samuel mention the Deuteronomistic themes of abandoning the LORD or betraying His direct kingship.

12. to plow his ground and reap his harvest. The Hebrew is literally “to plow his plowing and harvest his harvest.”

to make his implements. After conscripting men to fight and men to perform agricultural service, the king will also draft the artisan class for his purpose—ironsmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, and so forth.

his chariots. Samuel’s emphasis from the start on chariots signals the political shift he envisions, for chariots were the instruments of the monarchies with which Israel contended, whereas the Israelites in this early stage did not have this sort of military technology at their disposal, at least according to the Book of Judges.

14. give to his servants. “Servants” in a royal context would be the functionaries of the royal bureaucracy, whose service to the king was in fact often rewarded by land grants.

16. your cattle. The Masoretic Text has “your young men” (baḥureikhem), but the reading of the Septuagint, beqarkhem, “your cattle,” is much more likely, given the fact that the sons and daughters have already been mentioned and that the next term is “your donkeys.”

18. you will cry out . . . and he will not answer you. The language used here in relation to the king is precisely the language used elsewhere in relation to God (compare 7:9, where the people implore Samuel to “cry out” on their behalf to God). Cries to this power will not be answered by God.

19. A king there shall be over us. They do not say, “We will have a king” but “A king shall be over us.”

20. rule us. Again, the people use the ambiguous key verb, shafat, “to rule/judge.”

sally forth before us. This phrase reflects a specific military idiom—the full version of it is, literally, “to go out and come in before us,” that is, to lead in battle, to execute maneuvers. The military power that can accrue to the nation through the king is what is uppermost in the minds of the people.

22. Go every man to his town. Though God has just instructed Samuel to comply with the people’s demand for a monarchy, Samuel’s immediate response instead is to send them back to their homes. His acquiescence remains grudging: he appears to be buying time, perhaps with the claim that he needs to find a suitable candidate. The reluctance will persist, and grow, after he has encountered Saul and anointed him.