Tragedy of the Commons: A Christological Companion to the Book of 1 Samuel

By Daniel J. D. Stulac

Tragedy of the Commons invites readers into a fresh exploration of the book of 1 Samuel, which tells the story of Saul, Israel's first monarch and the personification of its chronic sins. Stulac's unique voice combines sensitive exegesis with probing meditations on culture, art, literature, memoir, and Christian spirituality. He cuts deftly through the moralistic reductions of Old Testament stories for which the church too often settles, and in doing so, reveals the life-giving rhetoric of a biblical book aimed squarely at the reader's transformation of mind and heart. "Israel's common tragedy," writes Stulac, "will be solved through a lengthening and a deepening of the tragedy itself. Finding his people up to their eyeballs in sewage, God dives into the polluted abyss, swims to the bottom, and unplugs the pipe below their flailing feet." From Hannah's miracle baby to Saul's suicide, Tragedy helps readers to recognize both their own predilection for idols as well as the surprising ways that 1 Samuel anticipates the gospel of Jesus Christ. "King Saul serves not as a finger-wagging argument for God's disengagement from his people's fate," Stulac claims, "but as the shocking conduit of God's incarnational involvement in their corporate mess."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666781274

Daniel J. D. Stulac

Daniel J. D. Stulac is assistant professor of the Old Testament at Briercrest College in Caronport, Saskatchewan. He is the author of History and Hope: The Agrarian Wisdom of Isaiah 28-35 (2018), Life, Land, and Elijah in the Book of Kings (2021), and Gift of the Grotesque: A Christological Companion to the Book of Judges (Cascade, 2022).

Book preview

Prelude First

In those days, there was no king in Israel; each person did what was right in his own eyes.

Judges 17:6; 21:25

So concludes the book of Judges, the Old Testament’s theological Dark Age in which nothing improves and nothing is gained, a dungeon of idolatry and inhumanity, echoing with the endless suffering of the damned. Assassination, immolation, violation, mutilation, and annihilation. No matter how many times the Israelites cry out for salvation, and no matter how many times they receive it, the vortex dragging at their feet pulls them down into chronic sins and predictable catastrophes from which there is little chance of escape.

Then again, no king in Israel. It’s the slightest chink in Judges’ prison walls, the first handful of Shawshank plaster to crumble unexpectedly into Andy’s considering fingers. From the inside of Israel’s sealed grave, the book gives us less of a clarifying solution to Israel’s plight than it quietly nods toward a new, as-yet-unseen horizon. Anointing the dead, the best we can do while trapped within the soul’s long night is to wonder who, precisely, will roll away the stone.

The tragedy of the book of Judges is the tragedy of a common promise. From its inception, Israel was intended for rest, to become a community of siblings radically open to its Creator and available to a risky, counterintuitive Sabbath, a people rooted and always rooting more deeply into the land for which they had been born. This was true even when the deed to their inheritance remained nothing but a spoken word, even when no hint of the nation had yet appeared in material form, when Israel still lay buried in the bodies of two itinerant shepherds who were, as Paul reminds us, as good as dead (Rom 4:19; see Heb 11:12). So much anticipation, so much time gone by in waiting—for what? For this? Judges reports a teleological disaster in the starkest language imaginable. It is a text saturated with the disappointment of a spoiled vocation. It tells the story of a restless, rootless Israel, a people untethered from their God and from their soil, always in danger of self-imposed exile. The generation after Joshua seems to have had a habit, like every generation since, of trading away the good gifts of the immortal God for a pantheon of smoke and mirrors. Thus, the very real possibility of suicide hangs about its pages like the stench of a moldy basement—temporarily overlooked, perhaps, but utterly inescapable in the end. Israel must perish, or the plot must twist.

The ironic commonality of this biblical tragedy—the fact that all twelve brothers sink or swim together—proves especially poignant because the nation’s corporate misfortune expresses itself through degrees of disunity as the book unfolds. As one tribe strikes out from another, so all the tribes fail to inhabit the land. As one brother strives to achieve salvation on his own, so the whole nation careens into civil war. After all, God’s promises to Ephraim and to Manasseh were never freestanding contracts, somehow binding on their own without reference to God’s promises to Judah and to Benjamin. The Gift of Land was never a deal made with twelve autonomous tribes, as if each had been given the choice to obey or disobey within its own, gated subdivision. Rather, the Gift of Land was always wrapped inside a network of familial responsibilities. Manasseh’s sin signals Ephraim’s doom. Judah’s hope rescues Benjamin. And so on. The Gift can be received by all, or rejected by all; no private property for sale in Canaan.

For this reason, Israel’s self-constructed misfortune in the book of Judges resembles the phenomenon popularly known as the tragedy of the commons. Respecting the fact that many communities manage jointly-held resources in a sustainable fashion, the phrase nevertheless refers to that familiar experience of finding garbage strewn about a municipal park. If each local resident would never dream of leaving his or her living room in such a condition, why does the space held in common deteriorate so predictably? Such prosaic realities have lifted the phrase from its origins in economic theory to a well-established position within the public vernacular. Seas become polluted while our swimming pools are clean. Forests fall silent though our birdfeeders are full. Prairie tilth collapses and yet our lawns remain as plump as Persian rugs. Likewise, the Israelites’ collective destiny in Judges spirals nearer and nearer to its exilic terminus while each brother tries to solve the problem for himself. In those days, each person did what was right in his own eyes, for indeed, Israel had no king.

Some readers may be tempted at this point to race ahead into political analogies, either to support or denounce what they perceive to be Judges’ implicitly monarchical and patrilineal interests. This impulse derives, in my opinion, from deep confusion generated by centuries of historicist interpretation in the post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment West. As a result, theological conservatives and theological liberals alike often appear unable to register the degree to which their notions of good reading depend upon artificial reconstructions of a text’s hypothetical background. For example, where scholars have reverse-engineered the canonical books of Joshua–2 Kings, they have adduced historical propaganda of two, competing types: a pro-monarchical strand composed in phases throughout Israel’s preexilic period, overlaid with an anti-monarchical strand crafted sometime later, in light of the Davidic dynasty’s eventual failures and the nation’s deportation to Babylon. If one’s interpretive program relies primarily on the idea of drawing up analogies between what was actually happening back then and what is happening now, then the reader (having gravitated toward his or her preferred historical circumstances on which to preach his or her ethical imperatives) will tend to imagine these rhetorical filaments as existing in an uncoiled, pre-biblical form. In the face of such hermeneutical incoherence, small wonder that, as Brent Strawn observes, The Old Testament is dying.¹ By contrast, the Bible in its received form engages its readers in a holistic, interpretive synthesis—modern historical reconstruction in reverse. Woven of deep longing for a world-made-right and an unflinching appraisal of human sin, the book of 1 Samuel suggests that the solution to Israel’s common tragedy—the missing king/King of Judg 21:25—is a theological topic far richer than either set of historians usually admits.

One of the Bible’s central clues to the deep complexity of its royal theology appears precisely here, in the tension between the evaluation of a nation unhinged by idolatry in the book of Judges and the depiction of monarchy that unfolds in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel.² If the people really do need dynastic governance, as Judges seems to imply, why does 1 Samuel 8 portray their demand for that institution as just another form of idolatrous syncretism, in lockstep with the patterns of apostasy Judges so luridly describes (1 Sam 8:5–8)? Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and thus the answer to this question may at first seem obvious: the book of Judges never did propose the need for a lowercase king, since such individuals suffer from all sorts of human foibles that make them inadequate to the task (witness Gideon and Abimelech). Judges always wanted an uppercase King instead; hence, the next scroll goes out of its way to describe God as making exactly this point to the prophet Samuel in 1 Sam 8:7–8. And yet, if 1 Samuel’s depiction of human monarchy functions merely as a rhetorical foil for something better, a badly drawn caricature of the Real Thing in order to alert Israel to its sin, why on earth does God double down on his people’s poor decisions? Why does God bother to replace Saul instead of simply destroying him? In a word, if lowercase kingship is so bad, why David?

The solution to Israel’s common tragedy, its chronic failure to inhabit the Land of Promise, turns out to be less of an institutional fix than one might surmise when first reading through a book so rife with courtly intrigue. The key to 1 Samuel’s rhetoric, in other words, is not a political injunction pertaining to monarchy, as if the book were a textual artifact built of different forms of ancient propaganda, each one struggling for supremacy over the other. In canonical view, Israel always was and always will be a theocracy. Counterintuitively to the modern mind, however (perhaps even scandalously), this ultimate horizon brightens in the reader’s heart through his or her conceptual submission to Israel’s troubled kings rather than in spite of them. To say the same thing in explicitly Christian terms, Jesus cannot be your King if you do not first kneel before David, and David cannot be your king if you do not first bend to Saul. And that is a terrifying prospect indeed. For if the book of Judges presents its reader with an astonishing tempest of brutality, feces, slaughter, assassinations, conspiracy, genocide, child sacrifice, rage, betrayal, mass graves, gang-rape, corpse mutilation, kidnapping, and civil war,³ 1 Samuel advances that storyline by means of a king who crashes through basic disobedience into jealousy, demon possession, paranoia, deception, mass murder, divination, and suicide. And yet this tortured soul remains the Lord’s Anointed, even to his beheading and public shame in 1 Samuel 31. In this way King Saul serves not as a finger-wagging argument for God’s disengagement from his people’s fate, but as the shocking conduit of God’s incarnational involvement in their corporate mess. Thus, the prophetic book of 1 Samuel proclaims this message to the world: Israel’s common tragedy in the book of Judges will be addressed neither by a miraculous airlift from heaven on high nor by human improvements to the earth below. Rather, Israel’s common tragedy will be solved through a lengthening and a deepening of the tragedy itself. Finding his people up to their eyeballs in sewage, God dives into the polluted abyss, swims to the bottom, and unplugs the pipe below their flailing feet. The vortex drags, the plot twists, and down the drain we go.

Israel’s common tragedy will be solved through a lengthening and a deepening of the tragedy itself.

1 Strawn, The Old Testament Is Dying.

2 For a coherent articulation of the choice to read

1

 Samuel as a distinct book, see Chapman,

1

 Samuel as Christian Scripture,

21

–

67

.

3 Stulac, Gift of the Grotesque,

14

.

Prelude Second

If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

Matthew 5:29–30

Gouge it out. Cut it off. A quick survey of efforts to make sense of these arresting imperatives, which appear in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and again in Matthew 18:8–9, suggests two dominant trends among contemporary interpreters. First is a tendency toward allegory. Here the eye stands in for lust and the hand for greed, the idea being that these sins rather than the actual body parts to which Jesus refers must be chopped away from the Christian’s life. Second is a tendency to see Jesus’s command as hyperbole designed to shake his disciples from their complacency. After all, followers of Jesus must be willing to endure hardships. Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head (Matt 8:20; Luke 9:58).

No reconstruction of Jesus’s authorial intent can account fully for the incisiveness of the words themselves—something always goes missing in exegesis. And indeed, to their credit, both strategies identified above correctly perceive that the text supports neither religious flagellation nor a draconian form of pseudo-justice. Nevertheless, when considered in view of our market-driven culture, the widespread propensity to disavow the passage’s literality as quickly as possible suggests a red herring. Rather than selling everything (Mark 10:21; Luke 18:22), Jesus meant only that we should be willing to sell everything, right? Likely our riches will be returned to us in the end, so no need to dispose of them in the first place. In the same way, our patient, loving Lord could not have meant that we should actually blind and maim ourselves, could he? And yet, if I take Jesus’s words seriously, I find that I cannot weasel out from under their severity simply by resolving to get tough on sin. Sell, sever, and scoop it out. Jesus does not explain.

The excavation and replacement of one’s heart (whatever that may finally mean) therefore turns out to be a surgery no less literal, no less dramatic and painful, than any other form of bodily dismemberment, whether it be my foot, your eye, or Saul’s head.

The key to this hermeneutical dilemma lies in realizing that Jesus of Nazareth aims in his New Testament sermon to accomplish precisely what the Old Testament identifies as Israel’s ultimate good: a broken, transformed heart (Deut 30:1–10). If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. But does the hand really ever do this? If your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out. But should we assign that level of agency to the body’s lamp (Matt 6:22)? The more I ponder his words, the more I am convinced that neither of these appendages does what Jesus suggests that it hypothetically does, and thus I am led by the bare ferocity of his rhetoric into a deeper awareness of my need. A different body part must go. Clogged with pasteurized cream and refined sugar, it must be cut from my chest to make room for raw milk and local honey. And while this explanation may seem at first like a metaphorical crib tantamount to swapping eye for lust and hand for greed, a subtle but crucial distinction obtains between the two. From the perspective of modern anthropology, humans are animate chemical-bags who commit infractions against whatever ethical codes they may invent. The science of the material body, in other words, never overlaps with abstractions such as sin except where an individual’s psychology is concerned. According to biblical anthropology, however, we are integrated body-spirits. We are souls, the handiwork of a good, gracious, and sometimes terrifying God. The excavation and replacement of one’s heart (whatever that may finally mean) therefore turns out to be a surgery no less literal, no less dramatic and painful, than any other form of bodily dismemberment, whether it be my foot, your eye, or Saul’s head. Rest assured, I cannot comply with the Rabbi’s command, and neither can you. For as Moses declared, the Lord alone remains Israel’s one and only Physician.

Throughout the Bible’s reception history, readers have recognized that the books of Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings are closely linked to Moses’s farewell doubling of divine law, crafted of a Deuteronomistic lexicon and shot through with familiar dichotomies of blessing and curse, life and death, inhabitation and exile. Correspondingly, these texts (known as the Former Prophets in Jewish tradition) are best conceptualized as narrative prophecy rather than proto-modern histories of the Greco-Roman type. But what exactly is narrative prophecy, and how does it communicate? In what way, for example, might an oblique story about the Philistines capturing the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 4–6) accomplish an outcome comparable to that of the book of Isaiah, which begins by driving a stake through its reader’s ego: "Your whole head is sick; your