King Saul's Asking

Abstract

King Saul's Asking, by Barbara Green, O.P. Interfaces. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003. Pp. xxii + 129. $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0814651097. Barbara Green offers a brief narrative commentary on 1 Sam 1- 2 Sam 1 that focuses on the character Saul (not to the exclusion, but certainly much lighter treatment of other characters). In 2003, Green also published another book on Saul of close to five hundred pages (How Are the Mighty Fallen? A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel [JSOTSup 365; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press]). But King Saul's Asking is far from being a mere condensation. It belongs to a very interesting Liturgical Press series on biblical characters, entitled Interfaces, in which two other volumes have already been published (Gina Hens-Piazza, Nameless, Blameless, and Without Shame [on the cannibal mothers in 2 Kgs 6]; John Kaltner, Inquiring of Joseph [comparing the biblical the Quranic Joseph]), as well as a companion survey booklet (From Earth's Creation to John's Revelation, by Green and others). A reader wishing to know what makes this book tick should turn first to the conclusion. There Green asserts the fundamental aims of her book (and the Interfaces series), namely, to write students and the classroom setting in view and to persuade undergraduates that biblical texts are worth reading. She engages the students' religious and theological interests: the Bible is one of the most privileged places for God's self-disclosure. But she prepares them for difficulties in reading: The storyteller does not make it easy for us. She states as her main thesis that the character Saul embodies Israel's whole experience kings. Perhaps best of all, she tells in an autobiographical way what drew her to Saul (the human enigma). I was impressed throughout the palpable presence of students as the implicit addressees of the book. When she speaks of sharing our scholarly passions with students, she means it. She repeatedly checks on the students' sense of engagement the story. She reminds them that they will have to decide the difficult questions for themselves, for example, the not always admirable or comprehensible attitudes of the character God. Yet she does not talk down; when she introduces difficult concepts (like those of Mikhail Bakhtin), she introduces them as difficult concepts before showing how they can be useful. This is a book to be put confidence in the hands of undergraduates or seminarians. In a way that is both respectful and challenging, it will get them into deep issues in the current debate over biblical interpretation, and it will invite them develop their own positions. I finished the book feeling (and I intend this in the most positive way) that I had read only the teacher's class notes, which needed to be filled out a transcript of what actually happened in the classroom. This book is too short (as the guidelines for the series compel it to be) to provide an adequate introduction to any kind of narrative theory. It teaches about Bakhtin much more by the Bakhtinian way in which Green proceeds than by the brief paragraphs on particular Bakhtinian terms. Students who want to go deeper have available Green's own Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000) and Robert Polzin's Moses and the Deuteronomist: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges (Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History 1; New York: Seabury, 1980). In terms of narratology generally, as well as in her use of Bakhtin, Green mostly follows Polzin (especially Samuel and the Deuteronomist [New York: Harper & Row, 1989]). Among her many valuable insights into the reading of biblical narrative, I highlight a few: the consistent interrogation of the text's manifold references to sons-e.g., Samuel, Hannah's son but also Eli's (1 Sam 3:6, etc.)-as potential pointers to the hereditary character of kingship; the interest in Saul's inner dialogue (talking to himself) and the observation that the narrator takes us inside Saul much more than David (p. …