1. Me has the LORD sent. Samuel, by placing the accusative first-person pronoun at the beginning of his speech (normal Hebrew usage would simply attach an accusative suffix to the verb), once again highlights his own centrality to this whole process: it is only because he, as God’s unique delegate, has anointed Saul that Saul can claim to be king. In this way, Samuel sets the stage rhetorically for the prerogative of canceling Saul’s kingship that he will exercise later in this episode.

heed the voice of the words of the LORD. This redundant phrasing is a little odd, but it is dictated by the pressure of the thematically fraught key phrase, “heed [or listen to] the voice,” that defines the entire episode. Saul fails to listen as he fails to see.

2. reckoning of what Amalek did to Israel. After Amalek massacred the Israelite stragglers (see Deuteronomy 25:18), Israel was commanded to destroy all remnants of the Amalekites.

set against him. This phrase may be an ellipsis for “set ambushes against him.”

3. put under the ban everything that he has. The verb here is in the plural, evidently including the troops together with Saul, though the subsequent verbs in this verse are in the singular. The “ban” (ḥerem), one of the cruelest practices of ancient Near Eastern warfare, is an injunction of total destruction—of all living things—of the enemy. Amalek is, of course, the archetypal implacable enemy of Israel, but it should be said that here, as throughout the Samuel story, there is at least some margin of ambiguity as to whether the real source of this ferocious imperative is God or the prophet who claims to speak on His behalf.

you shall not spare him. The Hebrew verb ḥamal straddles two senses, to feel mercy for and to allow to survive, and the ambiguity between the emotional and the pragmatic sense is exploited throughout the story.

4. summoned the troops. The word for “summoned” (there are several more common terms for mustering troops in the Bible) is quite rare, and literally means “made them listen.” The same verb as “to listen” in a different conjugation, it continues to call attention to this thematically weighted activity.

two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand men of Judah. The troops from Judah are presumably also foot soldiers, and so an ellipsis is probable: “and another ten thousand foot soldiers from the men of Judah.”

6. Go, turn away, come down from amidst. These overlapping imperative verbs are obviously meant to underscore the urgency of the command. The Kenites appear to have been a tribe of migratory metalsmiths (the meaning of their name) somehow allied with Israel (compare Judges 4–5), although the nature of the “kindness” they did for Israel is not known.

9. And Saul, and the troops with him, spared Agag. The Hebrew says simply “Saul and the troops spared Agag,” but because a singular verb is used with the plural subject, it signals to the audience that Saul is the principal actor and the troops only accessories. (This highlighting of the first-mentioned agent through a singular verb for a plural subject is a general feature of biblical usage.) When confronted by Samuel, Saul will turn the responsibility for the action on its head. “Spared” momentarily sounds as though it could mean “had mercy on,” but then it is also attached to cattle and sheep. There is a morally scandalous pairing in the selective massacre Saul and his troops perpetrate: they kill all the defective animals and every man, woman, child, and infant, while sparing the good, edible animals and the king (perhaps with the idea that some further profit can be extracted from him).

the fat ones. The Masoretic Text has mishnim (two-year-olds?), but, in a reversal of consonants, the Syriac and the Targum reflect shmenim, fat ones.

11. Samuel was incensed. The reasons for his rage are wonderfully unspecified, or perhaps overdetermined. He may well be incensed with Saul, or with the people who coerced him into this whole distasteful monarchic business in the first place, or even with God for making him heed the people.

12. Carmel. This is not the Carmel near Haifa but a town in the tribal territory of Judah, in the general vicinity of Hebron.

he has put up a monument for himself. This would be a victory marker, probably in the form of a stele.

14. this sound of sheep . . . and the sound of cattle. “Sound” and “voice” are the same word in Hebrew (qol), and so the thematic key word of the episode comes to the fore: Saul had been enjoined to listen to the voice of the LORD; now Samuel tells him that all that can be heard (the same verb as “listen” in Hebrew) is the bleating and mooing “voice” of the very flocks which, according to God’s word, should have been destroyed.

15. they have brought them. Saul first uses a vague third-person plural, entirely shifting the responsibility to unnamed others who have done the bringing.

the troops spared the best of the sheep and the cattle. In verse 9, of course, it was expressly reported that Saul, with the troops as accessories, spared the flocks.

in order to sacrifice to the LORD your God. This pious justification for the act was nowhere in evidence in the narrator’s initial account of it (verses 8–9). Although it is common enough in biblical usage when addressing a holy man to say “the LORD your God,” that locution, invoked twice in this story by Saul, stresses the distance between him and God and his sense that it is Samuel who has proprietary claims on the divinity.

17. Though you may be small in your own eyes. Samuel is obviously harking back to Saul’s initial expression of unworthiness for the throne (“from the smallest of the tribes of Israel,” 9:21), as if to say, Well, you may not really amount to much, as you yourself said at the outset, but you nevertheless have taken upon yourself the solemn responsibility of king.

18. mission. Literally, “a way.”

till you destroy them all. The Masoretic Text, illogically, has “till they destroy them all,” but the second-person suffix is supplied in some of the ancient versions.

19. why did you not heed the voice of the LORD. Samuel hammers home the thematic point of the whole confrontation: Saul, actually the initiator, proclaims he has listened to the voice of the people (verse 24)—as, ironically, Samuel himself was enjoined by God to do in chapter 8—instead of to the voice of God. This antithesis is more pointed in the Hebrew because the more general meaning of the word for “troops,” ʿam, is “people.”

you pounced on the booty. Samuel uses the same verb for greedy predation that was used to describe the orgy of meat eating after the breaking of the vow of fasting in chapter 14.

21. the troops took. Once again, Saul shifts the responsibility for the act from himself to his troops.

22. Does the LORD take delight in burnt offerings. Samuel caps his prophetic denunciation with the declamation of a prophetic poem. The theme that God requires obedience, not rote performance of the cult, is a common one among the later “literary” prophets, though in their poetry obedience to God means refraining from acts of exploitation rather than carrying out a program of extermination.

heeding the voice of the LORD. The thematic phrase is now placed in the foreground of the prophetic poem, reinforced by “heeding [or listening] is better than sacrifice” and “hearkening” in the next lines.

23. the diviner’s offense is rebellion. That is, rebellion is as great a sin as divination or sorcery. The choice of the comparison is not accidental, considering Saul’s repeated futile attempts to divine the future.

the transgression of idols—defiance. The first phrase in the Hebrew is literally “transgression and idols,” but is readily construed as a hendiadys (two words for a single concept) without emending the text. The gist of this parallel verset: defiance is as great a sin as the worship of idols (teraphim).

24. I have transgressed the utterance of the LORD, and your word. The Hebrew is literally “the mouth of the LORD.” There is a kind of hesitation in Saul’s words: I have violated God’s command, and yours as well. Is there a difference between the two? Though there may well be, Saul is in no position to argue that Samuel’s words are not God’s.

25. turn back with me, that I may bow down. It would have been Samuel’s function to offer the sacrifice. For Samuel not to accompany Saul to the altar would be a manifest public humiliation, a gesture of abandonment.

27. Saul grasped the skirt of his cloak, and it tore. The “little cloak” that Hannah would bring each year for the child Samuel has now become the prophet’s flowing robe. Samuel, who never misses a cue to express his implacability toward Saul, immediately converts the tearing of the cloak into a dramatic symbol of Saul’s lost kingdom. The Saul story, as we shall see, will return to cloaks and to their torn or cut skirts.

29. Israel’s Eternal does not deceive and does not repent. Samuel’s use of the verb “repent” strikes a peculiar dissonance. We in fact have been told that God repented that He made Saul king. What Samuel says here is that God will not change His mind about changing His mind. But might not this verbal contradiction cast some doubt on Samuel’s reliability as a source for what God does and doesn’t want? There even remains a shadow of a doubt as to whether the election of Saul in the first place was God’s, or whether it was merely Samuel’s all-too-human mistake.

30. show me honor. Saul reverts to the recurrent term kabed—“honor” or “glory” (as in “glory is exiled from Israel”). Knowing that Samuel has rejected him, he implores the prophet at least to help him save face in offering the sacrifice.

31. Samuel turned back from Saul. All English versions render this, erroneously, to indicate that Samuel nevertheless accompanied Saul to the sacrifice. But the expression “turn back with” (shuv ʿim), as in verse 30, and “turn back from [literally, after]” (shuv ʾaḥarei) are antonyms, the latter meaning unambiguously “to abandon.” (It is precisely the latter idiom that we see in God’s condemnation of Saul in verse 11.) Samuel is completing his rejection of Saul here by refusing to accompany him in the cult, shaming him by forcing him to offer the sacrifice without the officiating of the man of God.

32. with mincing steps. The Hebrew adverbial term maʿadanot is much disputed. Some interpret it as “stumbling,” others, by a reversal of consonants, read it as “in fetters.” But the root of the word seems to point with the least strain to ʿ-d-n—“pleasure,” “delicate thing.” That makes sense if one construes Agag’s words (the meaning of which is also in dispute) as the expression of a last illusion: I have been spared in the general massacre, and now I am brought to parlay with the chief holy man of the Hebrews for some important purpose; so surely they will not kill me.

33. Samuel cut him apart before the LORD. There is a long-standing consensus that the unique verb used here means something to this effect. The ghastly idea seems to be a kind of ritual butchering.

34. Ramah . . . Gibeath-Saul. Each returns to his hometown. Their relationship is to all intents and purposes finished.

35. Samuel was grieved about Saul. Or is it over the fact that he made the mistake of first choosing Saul? As J. P. Fokkelman notes, this sentence includes both death (mot) and grieving or mourning (ʾabel), even though Saul is still alive: “we realize that Saul as king is dead; no stronger expression of the termination of his monarchy can be imagined.”