From Saul's failure to David's reckoning, 'Human Kingship' examines the dangers of power - review

Nathan the prophet walks into David’s palace, tells the king to his face that he has murdered a man and taken his wife, and walks out again, leaving him on the throne. Punishment follows, and it is severe. The child dies. The sword, David is told, will never depart from his house. But nothing touches his hold on the office, because no tribunal stands over him and no procedure exists to remove him. The Torah never wrote one.

Instead, it supplies a list of prohibitions.

The king may not keep many horses, may not take many wives, and may not amass silver and gold to excess.

On what the job consists of, and on what is to be done if the man holding it fails, Deuteronomy says nothing at all.

Human Kingship: Studies in the Book of Samuel works that silence for all its worth. It calls itself a book of studies rather than a commentary and means it, running no continuous line and asking that you reread the Book of Samuel first. Forty years of teaching Samuel stand behind it, most of them at Drisha, the New York institute he founded in 1979, when a house of study organized around women learning Talmud was close to unheard of. 

Nobody in the book is ever put out of office.

Eli, the priest at Shiloh whose two sons were seizing the people’s offerings by force, is told his house is finished and dies on the job.

Samuel tells Saul at Gilgal, after Saul offers a sacrifice without waiting for him, that his dynasty is over, and Saul reigns for years afterward.

Punishment lands on sons and houses, never on tenure, which is why Rabbi Silber’s book asks the question it does.

With no procedure to stop a king, what stands between the office and disaster?

If no procedure exists to stop a king, the only thing between the office and disaster is whether the man in it still knows what he is. The standard he measures them against is fixed and biblical: tzedek u’mishpat, justice and righteousness.

God tells Samuel three times to heed the people, and Samuel heeds, though he disagrees. Rabbi Silber fences the criticism before he makes it, noting that Samuel “is depicted in a critical light when the issue of monarchy comes to the fore” and not otherwise. On that question, what he shows is a prophet who would not let the arrangement work.

Asked to describe how a king behaves, Samuel produces a catalog of confiscation meant to talk the nation out of it. He also has an interest he never discloses, since the elders came to him because his own sons were on the take from the bench, and what stung him was not the comparison to other nations but the word “judge.” Nobody ever asks him about any of it.

On the day of his coronation, the lot falls to Saul, and he cannot be found. Of the explanations Rabbi Silber weighs for the hiding place, the one that stays is evasion, the refusal to stand and answer, for which he reaches back to Eden and Adam, the first man, hiding in the garden.

Saul is the man the system breaks, and the book never lets you forget he did not ask for it. Whether a man can hold the office and still understand himself as mortal and accountable and no more than that is the question the whole book is asking.

In a chapter where Rabbi Silber’s method is most worth watching, at Ein Gedi, Saul walks into a cave alone, unaware that the men hunting him are farther inside, and comes out again with only a piece missing from his robe. Ralbag, the French Provençal commentator Levi ben Gershon, thought David had swung to kill Saul and missed. Abrabanel, writing after the Spanish expulsion, took the remorse afterward as a scruple so fine that damaging the royal garment registered as an attack on the crown.

Rabbi Silber will have neither. David is the best soldier in the book; his target is unarmed in an enclosed space, and men like that do not miss. He sends the reader instead back to the moment Saul tore Samuel’s cloak and was told the kingdom had been torn away in the same motion.

A king’s garments are his standing, so cutting the corner off Saul’s cloak is a public statement that its owner no longer reigns. That is exactly the permission David’s men were waiting for. In this reading, the scene is not about mercy. David is telling them they may finish it themselves, and he calls them back only when he grasps what he has just authorized.

Not every link holds that well.

A book built on accumulation asks you to accept each reading before the next one lands, and while the cloak is unanswerable, others rest on shared letters or a repeated verb and buckle under the weight. The absence of an index does not help in a book that works by sending you to another chapter.

None of which makes it the wrong book, only the wrong first one. This is not a volume for a reader meeting Samuel for the first time and does not pretend to be. It is for someone who has already read the book and came away suspecting there was a great deal in it he had walked past.

The answer, when it comes, is a sentence at a threshing floor, and Rabbi Silber gives the last quarter of the book to reading it against Abraham. Seeing the angel striking down his people, David tells God the guilt is his alone and asks that the blow fall on him instead. Nothing in the book compels him to say it.

Someone once asked for such a man, before there was an office to ask about. The book opens with a barren woman at Shiloh, praying in the same corrupted sanctuary Eli’s sons were running, and she ends her prayer by asking God to give strength to a king who does not yet exist. Hannah wanted justice to have someone to carry it.

Rabbi Silber’s closing position is that it remains possible, and it has not been claimed again since.

HUMAN KINGSHIP: STUDIES IN THE BOOK OF SAMUEL 
By Rabbi David Silber 
Translated by Ilana Kurshan 
Koren/Maggid Books 
228 pages; $30