1. Anointment is the biblical ritual of conferring kingship, like coronation in the later European tradition. Samuel carries out this act secretly, on the outskirts of the town, conferring on Saul, in keeping with the term God has used, the title nagid, “prince,” rather than “king.”

2. When you go away from me today. This elaborate set of instructions and predictions is, as Robert Polzin has argued, a strategy for asserting continued control over the man Samuel has just anointed. Every predictive step manifests Samuel’s superior knowledge as prophet, and all the instructions reduce the new king to Samuel’s puppet.

Rachel’s Tomb. The burial site of the mother of Benjamin, the eponymous founder of the tribe, underscores Saul’s own tribal affiliation.

at Zelzah. This otherwise unattested name may not be a place-name but an error in transcription in the Masoretic Text.

your father has put aside the matter of the asses and is worrying about you. According to the fixed procedure of verbal recycling in biblical narrative, the predicted words of the two men are nearly identical with Saul’s first words to his servant. One should note that in the scenario Samuel lays out for him, Saul has no opportunity to respond to his father’s concern for his absence: on the contrary, his new regal obligations rush him onward toward a daunting rite of initiation.

3. slip onward. The Hebrew verb ḥalaf suggests passing through a medium and may well indicate the clandestine nature of Saul’s movements.

the Terebinth of Tabor. Evidently, a cultic site.

three men . . . three kids . . . three loaves of bread. The triple three is a folktale pattern. It also manifests a mysterious design clearly grasped by Samuel, who annunciates this whole prediction, and into which Saul is thrust unwittingly. The three men bear meat (or animals that can be turned into meat), bread, and wine—the three symbolic staffs of life. They will offer Saul the primary of the three, bread (in counterpoint to the “worthless fellows” at the end of the episode who give the new king no tribute).

5. Gibeath-Elohim. The name means Hill of God, but it would seem to be the same as the Gibeah of Judges 19, in which the Benjaminites perpetrate a lethal gang-rape, and is also known as Gibeath-Benjamin and Gibeath-Saul.

the Philistine prefect. This glancing reference to a Philistine garrison deep within Benjaminite territory is still another indication of the Philistines’ military ascendancy. That might be another reason for keeping the anointment secret, at least until the new king can consolidate military force around him. The Masoretic Text has a plural “prefects,” but three different ancient translations reflect a singular.

a band of prophets. These are professional ecstatics who would whip themselves into a frenzy with the insistent rhythms of the musical instruments mentioned—a phenomenon familiar in enthusiastic religious sects worldwide—and then would “prophesy,” become caught up in ecstatic behavior, which could involve glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”), dancing, writhing, and the like. The chief connection between these figures and the later literary prophets is the idea that both are involuntarily inhabited by an overpowering divine spirit.

lute. The Hebrew word for this instrument, nevel, is identical with the word for “jug” used at the end of verse 3 (the homonymity may be explained by a perceived lyre shape in the jug). It is a fairly common procedure in biblical narrative to link segments in immediate sequence by using this sort of pun as a linchpin. Here it has the effect of intimating an uncanny link between the first and second stages of the script Samuel is designing for Saul.

6. you shall turn into another man. The drastic nature of this process is surely meant by Samuel to be startling: nothing less will do in order to transform this diffident farmer’s son into a king than to be devastated by the divine spirit, violently compelled to radical metamorphosis. This whole story of Saul among the prophets is repeated, with very significant changes, in chapter 19, near the end of his tortuous career. As we shall have occasion to see, the seeming repetition, far from being a regrettable “doublet” produced in redaction, is entirely purposeful: the same etiological tale is rotated 180 degrees to show us first Saul being invested with the spirit, and with the monarchy, and then divested of the monarchy by the spirit.

7. do what your hand finds. The biblical idiom means do whatever is within your power.

8. you shall go down before me to Gilgal . . . Seven days shall you wait. The third stage in the set of predictions/instructions that Samuel announces to Saul is in fact not carried out until much later. Saul’s divergence from the prophet’s script adumbrates his future failures of obedience in relation to Samuel. Polzin has made the shrewd argument that the unfulfilled prediction also reflects Samuel’s failure as a prophet, and that he has actually placed Saul in a double bind by telling him that he may do whatever he wants because God is with him and yet “has paradoxically commanded strict royal dependence upon prophetic direction.” Samuel, in other words, seems to want both a king and a puppet.

9. as he turned his back. The Hebrew shekhem is also the word for “shoulder,” and so reminds us of Saul’s regal stature, head and shoulders above all the people.

God gave him another heart and all these signs came to pass. These words are a kind of proleptic headnote for the narrative report that follows, and it is not implied that the transformation and the signs occurred the very moment Saul turned to go.

10. And they came there to Gibeah. There is no report of the first of Samuel’s predicted encounters, with the three men bearing kids, bread, and wine. It is unclear whether this reflects merely a narrative ellipsis or whether this, too, is an unfulfilled prophecy. The report of the meeting with the two men who announce that the asses have been found is also omitted. In any case, the transformative meeting with the band of ecstatics is obviously the chief focus of the writer’s attention.

the spirit of the LORD seized him. This same phrase, or a slight variant of it, is repeatedly used in the Book of Judges to indicate the inception of the judge’s enterprise as charismatic military leader. There is some overlap with Saul’s taking on the kingship, which will also involve military leadership, but the report of ecstasy or “prophesying” is a new element, with its more radical implication that the new leader must become “another man.”

11. Is Saul, too, among the prophets? This evidently proverbial question, its full origins scarcely remembered, is the perplexity that generates the etiological tale. The question seems to be proverbial of a case of extreme incongruity (like the English “bull in a china shop”)—what on earth is a man like Saul doing among the prophets? The tale then comes to explain how the saying arose. But the etiological tale, together with its antithetical counterpart in chapter 19, figures significantly in the literary design of the Saul story. Even the characterizing theme of Saul’s repeated exclusion from predictive knowledge is inscribed in the question “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?” The people ask their question about Saul in a line of poetry (consisting of two parallel versets). The verse form explains why Saul is first referred to as “son of Kish” because in poetry based on parallelism, it is the fixed procedure for treating proper names to use the given name in one verset and, in lieu of a synonym, the patronymic in the other. Thus, the claim made by some scholars that “son of Kish” is derogatory has no basis.

12. who is their father? The reference is obscure. The least convoluted explanation makes the prophets the antecedent of “their.” The meaning then would be that unlike Saul, whose father is Kish, a landholder and a man of substance, the ecstatics are a breed apart, with no father anyone can name (the leader of a band of prophets was called idiomatically their father). The prevalent attitude toward such prophets was ambivalent: they were at once viewed as vehicles of a powerful and dangerous divine spirit, and as crazies (compare Hosea 9:7).

14. Saul’s uncle. The appearance, without introduction, of an uncle (and not Saul’s father, who after his brief initial appearance is never brought into the narrative proper) is puzzling. It has been proposed that this uncle is Ner the father of Abner, who will become Saul’s commander in chief, but if that is the case, why is he left unnamed here?

16. But the matter of the kingship . . . he told him not. Saul’s studied reticence confirms the clandestine character of his anointment.

17. And Samuel mustered the people. This national assembly is the second of three episodes that inaugurate Saul’s kingship. One should not leap too quickly to the conclusion that these are merely a stitching together of variant sources. From the writer’s viewpoint, the institution of the monarchy, with Saul as first king, is both a difficult and a dubious process, and it cannot happen all at once. First there is the clandestine anointment, followed by an initiatory experience, under the nose of the Philistine prefect. Then there is a public proclamation of the king, at which time sufficient forces can be marshaled to bolster him against the Philistines.

18. Thus said the LORD God of Israel. Samuel begins his speech with the so-called messenger-formula, which is used to initiate prophetic messages. His speech is in fact a kind of prophetic denunciation of the people for having “cast aside” God in demanding a king and so is a reprise of his antimonarchic harangue in chapter 8, even as he implements the choice of a king.

20. the lot fell. The Hebrew verb lakad that is used for the drawing of lots means to be caught or trapped. As both Polzin and McCarter note, the only other biblical instances of such drawing of lots among the tribes are in order to discover a culprit, and so Samuel has chosen a mechanism associated with incrimination and punishment.

22. Has a man come here? This translation reads ʿad halom instead of the Masoretic ʿod halom, which would mean “again here.”

Look, he is hidden among the gear. This detail is virtually a parody of the recurring motif of the prophet-leader’s unwillingness to accept his mission. Saul the diffident farm boy had expressed a sense of unworthiness for the high office Samuel conferred on him. Now, confronted by the assembled tribes and “trapped” by the process of lot drawing, he tries to flee the onus of kingship, farcically hiding in the baggage.

24. there is none like him in all the people. Perhaps especially because Saul has been hauled out from the midst of saddle packs and sundry impedimenta, Samuel now executes a gesture of public relations: look at this strapping, handsome fellow—there is none in Israel who can match him. In the event, he proves wrong about Saul’s fitness for the throne, and one may even wonder whether Samuel’s proclamation that this is the one God has chosen (confirmed by the narrator’s previous report) is not a misperception to justify his own (erring) choice.

Long live the king. The people’s proclamation does not use nagid (prince) but the unambiguous melekh (king).

25. the practice of kingship. The phrase here, mishpat hamelukhah, is close enough to mishpat hamelekh, the term used in chapter 8, and so the reasonable inference is that the content of the speech is a reiteration of the dangers of encroachment of individual rights by the king that Samuel warned of in the assembly at Ramah.

26. stalwart fellows. The translation follows the Qumran Samuel text and the Septuagint in reading giborey haḥayil instead of the Masoretic haḥayil, “the troop.” The phrase, as many commentators have noted, is an obvious antithesis to “worthless fellows” in the next sentence.

27. How will this one rescue us? “This one” (zeh) is contemptuous.

but he pretended to keep his peace. The Masoretic Text has two Hebrew words here, wayehi kemaḥarish, which bear this meaning and have the attraction of indicating the inception of court intrigues and calculations at the very beginning of Saul’s reign—he is aware of political dissidence but chooses for the moment not to react. It must be said, however, that the Qumran Samuel fragment, supported by allied readings in the Septuagint and Josephus, has wayehi kemeḥodesh (the graphemes for r and d are quite similar), “And it happened after about a month,” affixing these two words at the beginning of the next episode rather than at the end of this one.