1. And there was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish. The formulaic phrasing—“there was a man,” followed by name, home region, and genealogy—signals to the audience that we are beginning a discrete new story within the larger narrative. (Compare the beginning of Hannah’s story in 1:1–2.)

2. head and shoulders taller than all the people. The Hebrew says literally “from his shoulders taller than all the people.” Saul’s looming size, together with his good looks, seems to be an outward token of his capacity for leadership, but as the story unfolds with David displacing Saul, his physical stature becomes associated with a basic human misperception of what constitutes fitness to command.

5. They were just coming . . . when. This relatively infrequent indication of simultaneous actions occurs four times in this single episode. The writer seems to want to highlight a crucial series of temporal intersections and concatenations as Saul moves unwitting toward his destiny as king.

Zuf. This is, of course, Samuel’s home region.

Come, let us turn back. According to the general principle of biblical narrative that the first reported speech of a character is a defining moment of characterization, Saul’s first utterance reveals him as a young man uncertain about pursuing his way, and quite concerned about his father. This concern, especially in light of the attention devoted to tense relations between fathers and sons in the ensuing narrative, is touching, and suggests that the young Saul is a sensitive person—an attribute that will be woefully submerged by his experience of political power. But as this first dialogue unfolds, it is Saul’s uncertainty that comes to the fore because at every step he has to be prodded and directed by his own servant.

6. there is a man of God in this town . . . whatever he says will surely come to pass. The fact that neither Saul nor his servant seems to have heard of Samuel by name (and the town, too, is left unnamed) has led many scholars to conclude that this story comes from a different source. But, as Robert Polzin has vigorously argued, the palpable shift between chapter 8 and chapter 9 may rather reflect “the varying play of perspectives (between narrator and reader, between reader and character, and between character and character) that forms the stuff of sophisticated narrative.” Saul’s entire story, until the night before his death on the battlefield, is a story about the futile quest for knowledge of an inveterately ignorant man. Samuel may have been presented before as the spiritual leader of all the tribes, but this particular Benjaminite farm boy knows nothing of him, and Saul’s servant, who presumably has also spent all his time on the farm, has picked up merely a local rumor of his activity but not his name. From the rural-popular perspective of both, and in keeping with the themes of knowledge and prediction of this story, Samuel is not a judge and political leader but a “man of God” and a “seer” (compare verse 9) who can predict the future.

he will tell us of our way on which we have gone. The Hebrew verb clearly indicates some sort of past action and not, as one might expect, “on which we should go.” Perhaps they feel so lost that they need the seer to tell them where they have been heading. In the event, it is toward a kingdom, not toward lost asses.

7. But look, if we are to go, what shall we bring. The diffident Saul is on the point of quitting before the encounter. He needs the counsel, and the provident quarter-shekel, of his servant in order to move forward and make the portentous connection with Samuel.

bread. As in general biblical usage, this is a synecdoche for food.

9. In former times in Israel. This terminological notice simultaneously alerts the audience to the gap between the time of the story (the eleventh century B.C.E.) and the audience’s own time (at the very least, two or three generations later) and underscores the ambiguity of Samuel’s transitional role as leader: he is variously called judge, man of God, seer, and prophet, and he also performs priestly functions.

to inquire of God. The idiom means to inquire of an oracle.

10. What you say is good. Saul the future leader follows someone else’s lead—here, a slave’s.

11. they met some young women going out to draw water. The wells would have typically been outside the walls of the city. The encounter between a young man in foreign territory with young women (neʿarot) drawing water seems to signal the beginning of a betrothal type-scene (compare Rebekah, Rachel, and Zipporah at their respective wells). But the betrothal scene is aborted. Instead of a betrothal feast, there will be a sacrificial feast that adumbrates a rite of coronation. The destiny of kingship to which Saul proceeds will lead to grimmer consequences than those that follow in the repeated story of a hero who finds this future bride at a well.

12–13. The reply of the young women is notable for its garrulousness. One talmudic sage sought to explain this trait with a simple misogynistic formula: “women are talkative” (Berakhot 48b), whereas, more amusingly, the Midrash proposes that the young women kept repeating themselves because they were so smitten by Saul’s beauty. The clues in the immediately preceding narrative context suggest a less fanciful explanation: seeing the evident signs of confusion and incomprehension in Saul’s face, the women take elaborate measures to spell out where Samuel is to be found and what Saul should do in order to be sure not to miss him. In all this, it is noteworthy, as Polzin has observed, that Samuel, having agreed to find a king for Israel, has made no move whatever toward that purpose. Instead, the future king “finds” him.

the high place. The bamah was an elevated place, a kind of open-air natural altar, perhaps sometimes with a structure erected alongside it (see the “hall” in verse 22), where sacrifices were generally offered in the period before the centralization of the cult in Jerusalem. The kind of sacrifice involved here is one in which parts of the animal would be burned on the altar and the rest eaten in a ceremonial feast.

16. prince. The Hebrew nagid is not used to refer to leaders before this moment in Israelite history and is used only rarely after the very early years of the monarchy. It is a term that suggests the exercise of political power in a designated role of leadership rather than in the manner of the ad hoc charismatic leadership of the shofet, or Judge. But God, in keeping with this transitional moment and perhaps even in deference to Samuel’s keen resentment of the monarchy, pointedly does not use the word “king.”

he shall rescue My people. Again, the previously reported ascendancy over the Philistines seems to have vanished, and God endorses military effectiveness as the rationale for the monarchy.

the plight of My people. The Masoretic Text lacks “the plight of,” though the phrase appears to have been in the version used by the Septuagint translators. It is conceivable that what we have here is not an inadvertent scribal omission but an ellipsis.

17. And Samuel saw Saul. The seer sees the divinely designated object of his sight, and God immediately confirms that this is the man. Or, in the light of subsequent developments, Samuel is persuaded that he has received direct instruction from God. All the knowledge is on Samuel’s side rather than on Saul’s.

18. where is the house of the seer? Addressing the very seer himself, Saul picks up no clues that Samuel is anything but an ordinary passerby. He also assumes that the seer has a house in the town, although the young women have said that the seer has come to town for the sacrifice. (The scholarly assumption that the unnamed town must be Samuel’s hometown, Ramah, is not entirely compelling.)

20. as to the asses. It is at this point that Samuel reveals his access to supernatural knowledge: no one has told him that Saul was looking for asses, but Samuel knows both of the lost animals and where to find them.

whose is all the treasure of Israel? This is a deliberately oblique reference to kingship: if all the choice possessions of Israel are to be yours, why worry about a few asses? Although the Hebrew term ḥemdah can mean “desire,” it more often has the sense of “desired, or valued, thing,” as in the common idiom, kley ḥemdah, “precious objects.”

21. a Benjaminite, from the smallest of the tribes of Israel. The young Saul is no doubt overcome by Samuel’s hint of a throne, but the language is also part of an etiquette of deference. In fact, Benjamin was one of the most powerful tribes, and given Kish’s affluence, his clan would scarcely have been so humble.

all the tribe of Benjamin. The Masoretic Text has “tribes” but the Septuagint reflects the more logical singular. The plural form is in all likelihood a scribal replication of the plural in “tribes of Israel” at the beginning of the verse.

22. a place at the head of the guests. Samuel offers no explanation to the assembled company as to why this signal honor is accorded to the strangers.

23. Set it aside. The Hebrew reads literally “Put it by you.”

24. The text here seems clearly defective at two different points. The phrase “lifted up the thigh” is followed by an anomalously ungrammatical form of “and that which is on it” (weheʿaleyha). It seems best to delete this word, as does the Septuagint. The phrase “as I said to the people” is no more than an interpretive guess about an asyntactic chain of three words in the Hebrew, which literally are “saying the-people I-invited.”

25. they made a bed for Saul on the roof, and he slept. The Masoretic Text has “he spoke with Saul on the roof and they rose early.” The present translation follows the far more plausible reading of the Septuagint: the report of speech on the roof is odd because no content or explanation for it is given, and the rising early is contradicted by the fact that in the next phrase Samuel calls up to Saul on the roof in order to rouse him. Evidently, a scribe substituted the common word wayidaber, “he spoke,” for the more unusual word wayirbedu, “they made a bed” (the same consonants with the order reversed). Wayishkav, “and he slept,” differs from wayashkimu, “and they rose early,” by one consonant in the unvocalized text.

the roof. Presumably, the encounter takes place during the warm season, and the roof would be a cool sleeping place.

27. Tell the lad to pass on before us. Every step that Samuel takes here in conferring the kingship on Saul is clandestine. He speaks to him only after they have reached the outskirts of the town, and he is sure first to get Saul’s servant out of earshot. This course of action is rather puzzling because the people, after all, have already publicly declared to the prophet that they want him to choose a king for them. Samuel’s need to proceed in secrecy may reflect his persistent sense that the monarchy is the wrong path for the people, or it might be an expression of doubt as to whether this strapping young Benjaminite is really the right man for the job, despite the unambiguous indication that the prophet has just received from God.