Sunday sanctuary, or to one’s rocking chair old age.
This is hardly the only way to tell the story; if it were, it would not be worth telling in the first place. I can only hope that you enjoy the reading of it half as much as I enjoyed the telling. King Saul and his prophetic anointer, Samuel, and his chief rival David are each characters that have never died, though all three are quite dead indeed, and have been in their graves for nearly three millennia. But because they still are very much alive in their story, they remain worth hearing from. I can only hope that I have given them fresh voice once again.
John C. Holbert
February 14, 2014
1. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart Farrer Strauss Giroux: New York 1982, 279.
1
Send in the next one!” Abior reached for the tankard of beer the better to ease the work of the day. It was that time again when the village elders had to review people who wanted to join the community of Gibeah. 12 men sat at the rough table, placed in front of a large and dusty space under a tamarisk tree to provide some shade from the fierce sun that shone, as always, on the hills outside the walls of the town. It was Chislev, the year’s ninth month, and it was still hot. Abior stretched his right hand to grab the front of his best robe to pull it away from his sweating skin. “Best” was of course a relative term. His best was rude and rough, made hastily by his wife—she never was much when it came to the work of the needle, he thought. Pretty good in other ways, though, as a slightly lascivious smile creased his thin lips. Six children in ten years was not bad, he said to himself, as he sat up a bit straighter on the hard bench behind the council table, demonstrating for any who cared to see his obvious virility. He looked down the table at his fellow villagers.
There was Shmuel, too small, still unmarried. How did he ever get on the council, he wondered? Oh, yes, of course. He was rich in flocks and herds, and had just built a fine new house of four rooms, four! Such a palace was the largest in Gibeah; one could hardly deny such a formidable man a seat. But without children, well, there was talk of an unsavory sort. Still, Shmuel’s vast and healthy herds shut many a gossiping mouth.
Next to Shmuel was Carmi. Abior liked Carmi perhaps best of the councilors, because they were so much alike. Carmi had a productive wife, not so beautiful, but a superb mother of seven, including five sons, to insure the future of the village. And Carmi was a magnificent hunter, the village’s best. He went out with Abior regularly and almost never failed to bag a bear or a lion, or at least a deer to flavor the simmering pots that steamed and bubbled every evening. The thought of the pot around his own cooking fire made his mouth fill with spit and sent his stomach on the growl. Carmi’s piercing voice brought Abior back to the council table.
“Well, who is next? These last three candidates were a sorry lot, ill-clad, poorly-spoken, foul-smelling, clearly unacceptable. We need more people for the village, but they need to be respectable, productive in the fields and in the home. Big families, bigger families! Bring us more children, more sons!” It was ever Carmi’s cry when he spoke in council; more sons, more sons! Of course, whenever Carmi made his familiar speech, Shmuel blushed and looked down at his fine leather sandals, knowing that he had not done his bit to keep the community growing. Yet, even he could not disagree. After all, so many women died on the birth stools, and so many children, too. A village always needed children, and especially sons who could harvest and fight and hunt. The rest of the council grunted their agreement. They were generally good men, thought Abior, though the one at the end, Doeg, always sent a chill up Abior’s spine.
Doeg was tall, swarthy, brittle as a stalk of field thistle, and just as useless, said many in the village. He lived in a filthy hut with one disgusting room, surrounded by many children, which spoke well of him, and was tended to by a tiny woman who may or may not have been his wife. No one had seen the two marry, since they themselves had stood before the council many moons ago, having come from no one knew where. Some whispered Edom, but no one was certain. Doeg was elected to council after his heroic stand against some thieves who had threatened Gibeah sometime in the month of Sivan, the third month of the year, just six months before. It surprised the whole village to witness the ferocity of the man whom few had given a second thought to before the attack. But all knew that without Doeg’s courage, many of those who now found life and success would have surely been dead and forgotten and the village destroyed. He had been chosen for the council straight away. But Abior was hardly the only man of the village to keep a wary eye out for the activity of Doeg and his family. His seat on the council had not cleaned his hut or stopped the rumors about his peculiar relationship with the woman who tended his fires. In fact, Abior had cast one of the negative votes when Doeg had asked to join the village. But he was now on the council, and that was just the way it was going to be—at least for now.
The delay in the proceedings was too long. “Well,” shouted Abior, “Get on with it. My stomach is reminding me that council cannot go on all day!” Also, the sun rose higher and hotter in the blue sky; Abior’s very name meant, “My father is light,” which never failed to remind him of the ever-present sun, rather more present than his father who disappeared from the village long ago, never again to be seen. Abior had plainly outstripped that worthless man in every way.
Murmurs of agreement with Abior’s demand for action were whispered and hooted from every council member. Finally, a strapping man of some forty summers stepped forward.
Kish, a Benjaminite, hoped to settle in Gibeah, to him a miniature but pleasant hillside village, a short walk from Ramah, the city of Samuel. Though the history of the tribe of Benjamin was checkered, to say the least, Kish himself was industrious, clever, and ready to put all that concubine madness well behind him. After all, that had happened long before his birth, and he now was a modern man, ready to take his own place on a well-run farm, close to a successful and growing village. He was convinced that he could become a man of stature in the place, even though his ancestors were all complete unknowns as far back as four or five generations. A respected family was very important as a key to success, particularly for one who had come to a new city. If your immediate and even distant ancestors were suspect, well, you were also suspect, not to be trusted, never allowed finally to be one of the group. When Kish first introduced himself to the city elders, his recitation of his forebears impressed the dour elders not at all.
“My father was Abiel, and his father was Zeror, his father Becorath, and his father Aphiah.”
The Gibean elders’ eyes began to glaze over as Kish droned on about ancestors who were unknown nobodies, probably village drudges, certainly hicks without pedigree. Many of the names were not known at all by the men, many of whom could trace their own families back into a past so distant as to be nearly mystical.
“Yes, yes,” Abior interrupted him, “enough of that.” Abior’s faint memory of his own father, and the man’s abandonment of his family still rankled, and he had no intention of listening another minute to a recitation of unknown and useless ancestors. “Tell us about who you are. Have you done anything of value? Are your crops lush? Are your livestock sturdy?” “Tell us of your children!” And he added with a definite sneer, “What do you know of the concubine’s story?” Carmi and Doeg were particularly keen to hear just how far this Kish might have been implicated in the monstrous tale of the concubine and the ancestral Benjaminites’ foul behavior. Every member of the council of Gibeah had proven beyond doubt that they had no connection to the story and found the actions of their forebears in the story repulsive, unacceptable in every way. The thing had happened some time ago, but the memory was so vivid that it seemed like a very modern event. All of them wished to forget, but none of them could.
Anyone who wished to join a community had to first meet with the elders of the place to determine whether or not the newcomer was worthy of a home in or near the village. This screening was doubly important
