All right, so in this first lesson, we want to go through the general introductory remarks and comments on these books, first and second, Samuel. I think it's always important to spend a little bit of time to lay that foundation and to do the groundwork about what the book is. So that way it's just going to benefit your reading and interpretation of the book itself as well as within the larger context of salvation history, because this book has been given to us within a tradition. It really has Jewish tradition and Christian tradition has received that in the Church authority the Magisterium has deemed it as canonical and inspired.
And there's a lot to say about that. I don't know why I'm mentioning that right now. But basically it's, I think my point is simply to just really appreciate these points that a lot of people skip over, like title, authorship and dating and the chronological historical context, the structure, the main themes, things like this, it's really going to benefit our time. So that's what we're dedicating this first lesson, this first hour to is understanding the books of Samuel.
Now I want to spend a little less time on title and authorship dating, all this kind of stuff to jump into the main themes and the typological connections between this book and Jesus and the gospels. But nevertheless, there's always going to be some good stuff to learn. So without further ado, let's just dive straight in here. On the first page of your notes, if you happen to have them in front of you, let's look at the title.
Now, surprise, surprise, it is named after Samuel, who is one of the most important, not the, but one of the probably the second most important character in this entire book. So the original Hebrew manuscript was one continuous long scroll, right? It was one long book. First and second Samuel was really just Samuel, right?
It was named after the individual Samuel, whose name means his name is God. So Shem U L, Shem is name and L is God. One way to remember this, especially listen to my Bible studies on Genesis and salvation history, and you can get this content in a lot of other places, but the word Shem means name. And the word Shem or name is a very important motif and theme in the book of Genesis with those individuals who call upon the Shem of the Lord, the name of the Lord.
You've got Tower of Battle people are building a name for themselves. The first born, righteous, first born son of Noah, his name is Shem. So his name is name is name. There's all kinds of themes here.
So I'm just only telling you that right now for you to kind of hook your brain and your memory onto something that you already know, presumably, hopefully, and that you can know that Shem U L means his name is God or the name of God. We'll talk about the why he's named that way in the next lesson. So it was originally one continuous book named after Samuel himself, because he's a very important figure in salvation history. He's a very special man, a very godly man, a very righteous man, and he's going to be the hinge of the transitional person between two big eras here.
So as you're going to see the story of Samuel, next lesson is going to be dedicated to the first seven chapters of the first Samuel, we dedicated to his life and obviously he doesn't stop in the narrative at the end of chapter seven. We'll talk a lot more about him later on, but the way in which he comes into this world miraculously for the love of his parents and the faith of Hannah, he's just so, so important here. And so you're going to see him as not just a figurehead, but he really truly is a priest, a prophet, a seer, a seer, another name for prophet, a covenant mediator. He is a judge.
You could argue that as the last judge, he is the most significant and the most righteous of all the judges. I mean, if you go back and read the book of judges, I'm going to review this a little bit later on. If you go back and review the book of judges, that's not saying much. I mean, not too many of these judges were very righteous.
Only the first few of them. But he is a judge and he's arguably the greatest of all the judges. But he's also a kingmaker and that's what makes him this transitional figure here because he has got one foot in the era of the judges and then one foot in the era of the monarchy. And he is the guy that God uses to anoint Saul and to anoint David.
So we're going to see all of this play out in his story. He's very, very important and he's very godly. I think there's so many great things to say about Samuel. So he's the key transitional figure, but I see the word transitional because as I want to share with you later on, David is the most important figure in the book and Samuel is just second to David.
All right. So if it was all one Hebrew and Hebrew, if it was all one continuous book, one long story here, how did it get split into two? Well, here's a little bit of Bible trivia for you and all the recommended resources that I share with you will talk about this. But it was actually the Jews who split it into two books.
It was the Jewish translators of the Greek Old Testament. We call that the Septuagint. Probably heard this before, certainly from my Bible studies for this Septuagint in Latin is lxxx. That's just the Roman neurology there.
So there are 70 translators as the story goes. I can't get into the whole story, but somewhere around the year 200 BC in Alexandria, Egypt, the king wanted to have the Jewish scriptures in his library. And so 70 individuals come together and they translate it separately, but it turns out it's the exact same translation. So there's this miracle of translation.
And they first translated the Torah of the books of Moses and gradually over the next century, they translated the rest of the books. We don't exactly know the timetable there, but you're going to be broadly speaking, you've got from 200 to 100 BC, you've got the translation of the Old Testament into Greek. And when they get to Samuel, they broke down that one continuous Hebrew manuscript into two books, naming them first and second kingdoms, Basile on alpha, Basile on delta, or better excuse me, so alpha, by the way, you didn't know that we get to alphabet from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, it's kind of a fun little factoid there. But in case Samuel becomes one of the second kingdoms and what we call first and second kings becomes third and fourth kingdoms.
So in the Greek Old Testament, you've got one, two, three, four kingdoms, the books of Samuel and kings like that. And then so when it comes into the Christian era, in the Latin ball gate, Jerome translates, obviously, the Old Testament. He's consulting all of his resources and he kept that tradition. So in his collection, he has the books of kings, Lieber Regum.
So the Lieber Regum is the first, second, fourth, first, second, third, fourth kings. And you have to be very careful about this because if you have the Duet-Rheem translation, which is very beautiful, kind of old English style is kind of the counterpart to the King James Bible. It's super beautiful. The Duet-Rheem was the translation of the Latin ball gate.
And so they kept that tradition of one, two, three, four kings. So I mean, if I teach various classes and live classes and students will come up to me and say, we're talking about Samuel and they say, my Bible's broken. My Bible's broken. It doesn't work.
I don't have first Samuel in here. I can't find first Samuel. I only find first kings. What's the problem?
The Duet-Rheem's. Most modern translations do keep the tradition of naming it Samuel, but they divide it into two halves. So it's a very interesting development over history how that happened. So depending on what Bible you're reading, Duet-Rheem's or New American Bible or King James, if you happen to have a Protestant Bible, but hopefully not, hopefully it's a Catholic one, you have to be aware of that.
So if you've got first, second Samuel, you're going to be following the Hebrew tradition there. If you have first, second, third, fourth kings, then you're following the Duet-Rheem's and the Latin ball gate tradition. So I find that very, very interesting. But your Bible's not broken.
There's just a different story behind why it does not call it first and second Samuel. All right. If you have that, I'm kind of exaggerating, but it's broken. I got to return to the manufacturer.
No, that's not the case. So that's the story about the title of this book. So authorship and dating. There are these two concepts are very much linked to each other.
You can't talk about authorship without talking about dating, obviously. So we talk about authorship. It's named after Samuel because Samuel is tradition, Jewish tradition, and Christian tradition holds. Samuel was the first author of this book, at least up to chapter 25.
In first Samuel, chapter 25, he dies. So typically speaking, it is a safe generalization to say that once someone dies, they do not keep writing. So Samuel writes the bulk of first Samuel, chapter 1 through 25. After he dies, the prophets Nathan and Gad continue to author the rest of it.
You'll remember, especially Nathan, because Nathan is the famous prophet who confronts David about his double wanny, mortal sin of adultery and murder. So because it's really just one book, they just continued the story of Samuel, right? The great prophet, priest, mediator, judge, kingmaker. They're just continuing the story leading up to the end of David's reign.
And you kind of see a little bit about this. So tradition holds out to be the case. But there is internal evidence that it is so if you look at a place like 1st Chronicles 29, which says now the acts of King David from 1st to last are written in the Chronicles of Samuel, the seer, and in the Chronicles of Nathan, the prophet, and in the Chronicles of Gad, the seer. So there's speculation, but I mean, it's safe speculation that 1st and 2nd Samuel would be the sources that 1st Chronicles is talking about right here.
Okay. All right, then one more little tidbit internally, at least that Samuel did write stuff and write them down for the sake of Israel reading it and staying faithful to God. This found in 1st Samuel, chapter 10, 25. When it says right after Saul is made king, it says, Samuel told the people the right to do the kingship and he wrote them in a book and laid it out before the Lord.
That's very much an echo of Moses, by the way. We'll talk about this when we get there. Moses does the same thing. He writes the book of the law and then places it next to the ark.
So it seems that Samuel is doing the same thing. He's writing all the rights and duties of the king. He writes them down for Israel to receive and to retain and to read. And then he laid it up before the Lord, presumably in the tabernacle near the ark.
So really interesting parallels there. I'm ahead of myself. We'll talk about that when we get to chapter 10. The main point here is that Samuel did write stuff down.
He did write stuff down. We see that written or testified in 1st Chronicles and 1st Samuel here. So it's no stretch of the imagination. As such an important transitional figure, very well educated, he grew up in the service of the tabernacle.
So certainly he grew up learning how to read and to write. He's so, so significant that he's going to write some of these events down as well. But after Samuel and Nathan and Gad, that doesn't mean that the text as we have it now reached its final form. Most certainly there was in what I can only just imagine to be this mysterious process throughout history of authorship and editing and redaction.
We're not going to know until we get to heaven exactly what happens. But there probably was, in fact, I'm going to read you a quote here from your English Catholic study Bible. It's probably safe to say was a process of editing, especially after the exile. We have no problem with that as Catholics to say, Samuel 1st, Nathan and Gad or the substantial authors, and then afterwards there is a period of writing or editing as well.
When we say the same thing about the Pentateuch, Moses is the substantial author. I think it would be very mistaken to put this nicely and I want to get off on a rabbit trail. It would be mistaken to deny mosaic authorship altogether. Tradition holds this to be the case and there's internal evidence for it as well.
But you don't want the pendulum to swing thus so far the other way and thus you're going to say, oh well, Moses wrote all of it. Every last word and that's I think false as well. The truth is in the middle there. Same thing here.
So let me read this paragraph for you. This little quotation from your English Catholic study Bible introducing these books. Modern scholarship has come to regard first and second Samuel as part of a larger work known as the Deuteronomic History. This is the name given to the biblical account of Israel's life in Canaan, beginning with its entrance into the land and ending with its exile from the land.
Canonically it encompasses all the books from Joshua to 2 Kings except for Ruth. Since these works bear the marks of a common theological outlook based on the book of Deuteronomy, there is reason to think that they're all edited together as a collection. And since the storyline of this collection extends to the Babylonian exile of Judah in the year 586 BC, it is not unreasonable to date the finished canonical books to this time. So you can see the nature's Catholic study Bible is a trusted source and again, there's many other trusted sources that would argue this as well.
When you look at the whole story and structure and the themes of all the books from Joshua down to 2 Samuel, there very much is a literary unity revolving around fidelity or infidelity to the Deuteronomic Covenant. And I have a Bible study in the audio library where you can listen to all the stuff in Deuteronomy, the Covenant that Moses makes with the people and the blessings and the curses and fidelity and fidelity. All this stuff that Moses gives to them and prophesies their initial obedience and ultimately their disobedience and their exile. It's all one continuous theme.
So not to belabor the point here, but Samuel, Nathan and Gad write the substance of it and the time goes on throughout the United and divided Kingdom periods through exile and the return from exile. Let's say somebody like Ezra, Ezra is a typical name that comes up. Ezra is the great priest and scribe. He is a Moses figure, a Samuel figure.
He brings it all together and edits it as one continuous theme of the story of Israel. That makes total sense here. Okay. So that in terms of dating, what that means then is we're talking approximately 1,000 to 5,000 BC.
It's hard to get really, really specific because we just don't know. You could say, I think I'm going to provide another quotation for you later. Samuel is born around the year 1100 and then the return from exile and the rebuilding of the temple is all in the early 500s. But then, depending on when Samuel is writing all this stuff as an elderly man, you're talking 500, a thousand to 500 BC.
And then it's certainly going to be finished by the time the Greek Septuagint is beginning to be translated. So, so there you have it. That's two general detective Sherlock Holmes work there in scholarship to give us a good broad understanding of the authorship and the dating by these characters probably leading up to the end of the exile. All right.
Let's just say. All right. So I think that's plenty to talk about that. In terms of the canonical placements and the literary design, the canonical placement is very simple, especially if you're following all my Bible studies going through the historical books.
We've talked about Joshua in a number of weeks, judges and Ruth. And so now we're continuing that story here. So first and second Samuel is found within the larger literary block of what Christians call the historical books because it's describing in essence the history of Israel in between the conquest of the land and in the exile from the land as well. The overarching theme of the exile is absolutely everywhere.
We talk about this in great depth elsewhere, but this is essentially the historical books talk about from Joshua to second Samuel, the arrival of the land and the departure of the land in chains essentially. Okay. So the historical books just to clarify within Jewish tradition, it is found within the cluster of works called the Nevi Eam, which are the prophets and the former prophets. So the Jewish scriptures places these historical books inside the category of prophets.
And there's a lot of reason for that because just look at Samuel as one example. Joshua too would fall into this category, but Samuel is a prophet. He is a priest, a prophet, a mediator, seer, judge and all these things that we talked about earlier. And so he doesn't have necessarily a ministry within the dark period of the divided kingdom and the eminence destruction of the northern southern kingdoms because they're infidelity and all this stuff.
So there's a lot of themes where big themes as a matter of fact, as we're going to see moving on in the chapters in the next couple of lessons, there are big themes of Samuel really laying into the people calling him to repentance, calling him to be faithful to God, how he will continue to pray for the people and so on and so forth. So he is a prophet and that's why the Jewish scriptures consider these books as part of the larger category of prophets. And that's the method of the madness as far as that's concerned. From a literary point of view, there's, I mean, it is sacred history.
And I would say just really quickly that we moderns, we write history, we learn to write history in college, even before college and high school colleges were learning how to read and write and all this kind of stuff. We write history in a very specific kind of linear way with all of our footnotes and our sources and all this stuff. Scripture is historical and these books are historical talking about an actual man, David, and all the events that surround his life. They actually did happen, but as you read it, you're going to see sometimes, especially towards the end of second Samuel, some events may be considered to be taken out of their chronological sequence to prove a theological point.
There's still historical events. In fact, I'm going to talk about this in the next page of your notes on the structure. You're going to see this very, very clearly. But they are historical.
That's the overarching literary genre as a historical book using all kinds of other literary devices, prose and poetry and inclusios and all this kind of stuff. It really is a master of work. In fact, on that very point, let me share with you a quote from your Catholic introduction to the Old Testament, which says, from a literary perspective, the books of Samuel stand out as one of the great masterpieces of literature in the Old Testament. Indeed, in all the literature of the ancient Near East, they present a literary, historical and theological masterpiece, a richly textured and realistic, certainly not sanitized account of the workings of God with human beings in which God's plans advance sometimes because of, but more often in spite of, the deeds and characters of those with whom God chooses to work.
I really like that quote. In fact, all the quotes I give to you in my classes are my favorites and kind of curate these quotes for you from these great sources. This is a really, this is a great true statement. It is a literary masterpiece.
And you do have all the various elements of a good story and got conflict and got antagonist and protagonists and dark times and bright times. You want to say and scream at the text like David when he's about this and what are you doing? What are you doing? Stop, right?
It's just fantastic. It's fantastic engagement. So it's a very realistic picture of these great figures of our faith. David is an amazing king and he truly is a man after God's own heart as we're going to see in the text.
He never goes after any other idols. He's faithful to God in terms of his religious worship, his heart clings to God. But then you see his great fall as well. And this is true.
This is one of the points in favor of the fact that this is a historical work. It's not just something made up by the people that came out of exile to try to bolster their national identity and talk about their great, the great king David, the founder of their dynasty. They really do talk about his faults and his failings there in very realistic terms. I mean, typically you would want to sanitize that and say, you know what, politicians today are always covering their rear ends and trying to hide their sins.
Typically, that happens in ancient and eastern cultures as well. Look at Egypt. You may not know this, but Egypt never really talks about their faults and failings. If you go and read ancient, not an expert, there might be an exception or two, but you do hear this from scholars all the time.
The Egyptians didn't really talk about their defeats and failures. But the fact that David, you can see his faults and failures and this double-wanny mortal sin of adultery and murder. And why is that included in there? Well, for us as believers in God and followers and disciples of Jesus, well, it teaches us that if we two were to, we should not send like David, but if we were to send like David, God forbid, we would repent like David.
We would learn to pray and we'll talk about Psalm 51 and all these great things, but we would learn to pray his words, begging the Lord to have mercy on us, not to take his spirit away from us, which is exactly what mortal sin does is we lose the Holy Spirit. So there's a lot to say there, but you get into the story and I'm really excited to go through this with you and take you through these texts. We have a lot of stories that we're very familiar with, like David and Goliath and certainly Bathsheba story, but there's so much here and you can begin to see more and more how God is directing all of these events for his great glory, despite the fact that they're all, in essence, I say this respectfully, a bunch of knuckleheads, right? There are a bunch of knuckleheads and God works with them and brings them closer to himself.
It's really, really beautiful.