The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  “Warriors!” sneered the Ammonites. “Warriors that can’t aim an arrow or stab with the right hand! Pass by. Pass by. What harm can half a soldier do? Ha ha ha!”

  Their heads bent in humiliation, the three men of Jabesh continued running down the riverbed. They stumbled often, for the lack of an eye. They clung to one another in order to ford the Jordan, its current swift here, but shallow. They cut through dense vegetation on the western side, willow and cane in a soft marsh, reeds as tall as a man. Wild beasts roamed these thickets. Lions, leopards, jackals. But even to a one-eyed man, animals were nothing next to the Ammonites that besieged his city.

  King Nahash had heard of the weaknesses of Israel. He knew that Philistines had attacked and routed their armies at Ebenezer and pursued them as far east as Shiloh, where they destroyed the Tabernacle, that ancient sacred tent which Israel had brought from the desert two hundred years ago. Nahash knew that even the most holy shrine of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant, had been captured by the Philistines and carried back to their own cities. Only recently had it been returned.

  Therefore, Nahash of Ammon had mustered his armies and attacked the tribes of Reuben and Gad, finally laying siege to Jabesh-Gilead. He intended to make a reputation for himself.

  When the elders of Jabesh offered tribute in exchange for a treaty of peace, King Nahash clapped his hands in delight. “On this condition will I make a treaty with you,” he said. “That I gouge out all your right eyes.”

  The elders took counsel together and replied, “Give us seven days respite, that we may beg Israel for help. If none comes, we will give ourselves to you.”

  “Yes, yes, beg Israel,” Nahash said. “Let that mighty nation come to save you. The greater the number of eyeballs plucked, the greater the disgrace of my neighbor!”

  Because Israel seemed everywhere to be in tatters, King Nahash felt confident of a final victory. Therefore he picked three men, gouged their eyes as a sign of his threat, and gave them safe passage over Jordan.

  IT WAS LATE in the day. The men of Jabesh had climbed the western side of the Jordan valley, a dry, crumbling clay, that tore their knees and elbows, and were running south on the ridge route. They had passed Shechem an hour ago. Below them on the left and the right the hills were lost in an evening shadow. All three were exhausted, but they did not stop. They were going to Gibeah. The elders of Jabesh had sent them to find Saul the son of Kish who lived at Gibeah of Benjamin. If anyone could save them, it would be Saul.

  The city of Gibeah was the place where Jabesh virgins had been taken several generations ago, by whom the men of Benjamin rebuilt their families after Israel had slaughtered their wives and children. There was kinship between Saul of Gibeah and the blind messengers of Jabesh.

  Moreover, Saul himself had fought in Moab, south of the Ammonites. He had raised his own force, had struck according to his own designs, proving himself beholden to no one! He himself had laid a foundation for a fortress at Gibeah and had acquired his own smith in spite of the Philistine monopoly. Saul fought, therefore, with weapons of iron, sharper, more durable, and more deadly than the bronze the rest of Israel had to use.

  At noon on the second day of their journey, the messengers of Jabesh-Gilead arrived in Gibeah. Immediately, though they were tired and filthy, they stood in the gate of the city and reported the threats of Nahash. When the people of Gibeah saw the empty eyesockets of their cousins, and when they heard what horrors might befall the rest of the city, they began to weep aloud.

  At that same time a man was coming in from the fields behind a team of oxen. He was tall and strong across the chest. His hair flowed down to his shoulders. His eyes were dark and his hearing quick. “What’s wrong?” he called as he approached the gate. “Why are you crying?”

  The one-eyed messengers stepped forward and said, “King Nahash has surrounded Jabesh-Gilead. What he’s done to us he promises to do to all the city. So we’ve come looking for Saul the son of—”

  Even before the request was finished, the handsome man’s eyes crackled and blazed a black fire. His face grew dark. He seized an iron sword, whirled it over his head and slew his oxen where they stood, then he began to cut their carcasses into huge pieces of meat and bone.

  The messengers from Jabesh-Gilead fell silent. They had found the man whom they were seeking. Saul the son of Kish handed twelve hunks of bloody meat to his servants, saying, “Take these to the tribes of Israel. Declare that whoever does not come to follow Saul in battle, even so shall it be done to his oxen! Tell the fighting men to meet me at Bezek! In four days! By dusk on the fourth day I shall be waiting with a sword and a helmet and a coat of mail. Go!”

  To the three men from Jabesh he said, “No king shall gouge the right eyes of your brothers. Return and say to the elders of Jabesh-Gilead that in five days, by the time the sun is hot on that day, they shall have deliverance.”

  So the order and the cry went forth from Gibeah.

  Saul the son of Kish was a fire in Israel. Several thousand warriors came to Bezek directly west of the Jordan from Jabesh-Gilead. So sudden was the muster of this army that no warning ever reached Nahash.

  But three one-eyed messengers slipped back into the city with the pledge of Saul. So on the sixth day of their respite, the elders of Jabesh sent a written capitulation to King Nahash: Tomorrow we will give ourselves up to you, and you may do to us whatever seems good to you.

  That night Saul drove his armies in a remarkable march through darkness east of Bezek, over roadless hills, down treacherous scrabble, the loose clay and gypsum of the western descent into the Jordan valley. They crossed the waters quietly, then climbed up the east side, through vineyards and orchards, creeping like cats, thousands of warriors from Israel and Judah.

  At a checkpoint every man passed Saul, where with silent gestures he divided them into three companies and pointed each in its own direction, till the camps of the Ammonites were altogether surrounded.

  Exactly at sunrise, Saul let out a yell of rage and ringing delight, releasing all his warriors into the midst of the camps of Nahash. Spearheads and arrows roused the Ammonite army and laid them quickly down again. Israel slaughtered Ammonites until the heat of the day, and those who survived were so scattered that no two of them were left together.

  II

  THE DRAMATIC SALVATION of Jabesh-Gilead by Saul the son of Kish transformed the governance of Israel forever. It would no longer be a loose association of tribes—a single God, a common history, but each with its own inherited territory and every tribe independent of the others.

  For more than forty years the people had been beseeching the Lord to anoint a king in Israel. But God, through his priest, Samuel, had denied them. Samuel said, “God is your king.”

  Now, the judgment of Samuel was powerful in the land. He spoke for God. Even from his birth he had been dedicated unto the Lord; as a child he had served in the Tabernacle at Shiloh—and he became a priest because the Lord God himself had called him.

  The word of the Lord was rare in those days. There was no frequent vision. Therefore, this divine appointment was extraordinary. Samuel! the Lord called to a young lad in the dead of night: Samuel! And the boy had answered, “Here I am.” And God said, Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel at which the two ears of every one that hears it will tingle.

  When Samuel was a young man, the lords of the Philistines invaded Israel with terrible devastations. They destroyed Shiloh. They burned the beautiful Tabernacle of the Lord. They captured the Ark of the Covenant and carried it into their own cities.

  It was as if the hands and the feet of the people had been cut off. They despaired, and they said to Samuel, “We need a king.”

  As Samuel grew older, the Philistines had cut the land nearly in two, dividing the hill country of Manasseh and all tribes north from the hill country of Ephraim and all tribes south. They controlled the trade routes, choking off Israel’s exchange of goods. They smelted the iron for tools and weapons, but there was
not a smith in all Israel! This enemy was entrenched, unlike any Israel had encountered before.

  When Samuel had grown old, the elders of the twelve tribes came to him in a formal body and stated their request as an absolute, unanimous demand. “Appoint a king to govern us like all the nations,” they said.

  But the very concept still troubled Samuel. “You have a king,” he said. “You have had a king since Egypt! Who else but the Lord sent Moses to bring your fathers through the wilderness to this place? Yes, and it was the Lord who raised for you deliverers here, Barak and Deborah, Gideon and Jephthah. How can you say ‘A king shall reign over us,’ when the Lord your God is your king?”

  But this time the elders were prepared for the priest’s refusal. “Samuel, you are a good man and a righteous judge,” they said. “Israel hasn’t seen a priest like you for hundreds of years. But you are old, now—and your sons do not walk in your ways.”

  “My sons? Why do you mention my sons?”

  “They judge the people in Beer-sheba.”

  “I know where my sons are.”

  “But you don’t know what they do, Samuel! They have turned from God in order to seek gain. Your sons take bribes. They pervert justice. After you, who shall lead us with righteousness? Please, give us a king to govern us.”

  Samuel fixed the elders with his eyes. “Do you understand the ways of any king who would reign over you?” he said. “A king will take your sons and appoint them to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. Your children are free now. How will they be then? A king will command some of them to plow his ground, some to reap his harvest, some to make his weapons. Listen to me! He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and orchards and give them to his servants. Have you considered this? Today you own your goods; you owe nothing to anyone except to the Lord your God. But tomorrow a king will take a tenth of your grain and your grapes, a tenth of all your produce. He will take your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and put them all to his work. You shall be his slaves. In that day you will cry out because of the king whom you have chosen for yourselves—and why, then, should the Lord God answer you?”

  But the elders and the people refused to listen. Again they said, “No! We will have a king like all the nations, a king to govern us and go out before us and fight our battles!”

  In the end Samuel withdrew to a private place and repeated the words of the people in the ears of the Lord.

  And the Lord said, Grant it, Samuel. Anoint a king for them!

  It was just then that Saul the son of Kish led his dramatic attack against Nahash of the Ammonites. It was then that the spirit of the Lord exploded mightily in him for the sake of Jabesh-Gilead.

  The people in a delirium of triumph began to cry, “This is the man! This is the one! Let Saul reign over us!”

  Therefore the Lord said to Samuel, Anoint this man of Benjamin to be prince over my people Israel and to save them from the hand of the Philistines.

  Obediently, Samuel called the tribes of Israel to Gilgal, there to renew the kingdom.

  And joyfully representatives of all twelve tribes arrived.

  Samuel stood up before them and said, “Here, then, is the man whom the Lord chooses to rule over you. Saul son of Kish, step forward!”

  A storm of roaring greeted that name. The noise grew louder and louder as a handsome man strode forward, a dark, passionate man, a man of magnificent height. Saul stood a full head higher than anyone else in Israel. Yet he bowed his great frame down before Samuel, and upon Saul’s head the priest of God poured the oil of his office: King of Israel.

  III

  IMMEDIATELY, SAUL INVITED the stonemasons of Israel to come to Gibeah, there to build a fortress upon the foundation he had already prepared. The men who came were old, but they were filled with new hope and they loved the king who strode among them praising their labors, laughing, and clapping his hands in a bright and boyish delight. Soon they had built a citadel of massive, rough-hewn masonry with four short towers at the corners and a casement wall: two stories high. Unpretentious. There was neither ornament nor beauty in the thing, and very little furniture. All was functional and strong. But Saul embraced every dusty old man as if he had built an Egyptian palace.

  At the same time Saul gathered in Gibeah several hundred young men of vigor and courage; with these he created a new thing in Israel, a standing army.

  NOW, THE PHILISTINES had garrisons stationed in cities west, north, and northeast of Saul, some as close as three miles. They controlled the Beth Horon road westward to the coastal plain, and they could at any time strike across the north-south ridge route, cutting off communication north and south in Israel.

  Saul, therefore, positioned tiny divisions of his new army in central and eastern Benjamin: Michmash, the hill country of Bethel, Gibeah. The soldiers stationed in Gibeah he placed under the command of his own son, Jonathan, who, though he wasn’t as tall as his father, was filled with the same swift daring.

  Saul now planned to wait a while, building his forces and entrenching them quietly in regions beyond the Philistine reach. He wanted to increase his arsenal of iron weapons. There were no chariots in his army, but his soldiers needed more than slings and copper daggers and bronze swords. They needed small shields for quick attack and large shields for the battle line. Saul wanted to craft them properly, curing leather for the wooden frame—but Jonathan took matters into his own hand, and at once Israel was at war.

  Very early one morning Jonathan led his little division three miles north-northeast and surprised the small Philistine garrison at Geba. He defeated them and sent them running to the garrison at Gibeon. Even while the young man enjoyed his triumph, a message was flying back to the five Philistine cities: There is a king in Israel! He has seized Geba. He has weakened us in Benjamin and broken the eastern branch of the Beth Horon road!

  A king in Israel?

  The armies of the Philistines reacted immediately. They mustered at Aphek, northwest of the new king’s armies, then began by a more northerly route to march toward the hill country of Benjamin, avoiding the Beth Horon road altogether.

  This army was both large and experienced. Horsemen restrained restless mounts; chariots were driven by two men, chariots of wickerwork with cases attached to the dashboards for spears and whips and battle-axes; drovers prodded pack animals; oxen pulled wagons heavy with iron armament and siege equipment: long Philistine divisions raised several miles of a dim red dust.

  When Saul heard of their mighty approach, he blew the horn of war, calling forth fighting men from all twelve tribes in order to augment his standing army. There was a king in Israel! Shepherds responded, leaving their flocks. Farmers dropped their mattocks and picked up swords. Carpenters exchanged hammers for daggers. The common men of the kingdom of Israel ran from their houses to meet Saul at Gilgal, and the king’s hundreds swelled to thousands.

  The armies of the Philistines rolled through Bethel without obstruction and massed on the horizon north of Michmash. Saul’s little garrison in that place broke camp and ran all the way to Gilgal, crying, “The Philistines have covered Michmash with troops as many as sand on the seashore!”

  Indeed, having found high, open fields protected by a deep gorge on the south, the Philistines had begun to dig elaborate installations for their forces. At the same time they sent their raiders galloping through the countryside to seize provisions, food and wood and water. Wherever they rode they burned farmers’ houses, scorched the fields, and slaughtered the sheep so that Saul would find nothing with which to supply his own soldiers.

  The women and children of Israel were terrified. Those too old to fight suffered horrors at the hands of the marauding Philistines. Having no homes, they hid in caves and tombs and cisterns.

  When Saul marched his armies toward Michmash, the soldiers saw no green thing left. The earth was black and stinking, homesteads deserted. Every citizen who ran t
o them for safety had a story to tell, and every story contained a new violence in Israel. The militia, therefore, began to desert. Fathers sneaked home to look for their families. Farmers threw away their swords and escaped over Jordan to the lands of Gad and Gilead.

  By the time Saul arrived at Geba to join his forces with Jonathan’s, they numbered no more than six hundred men between them.

  Israel also encamped on high ground, southwest of Michmash. They, too, used the gorge that ran east and west as protection, since it was a defile too deep for crossing, its walls rocky and steep, its brow covered with thickets. But the south side had a higher vantage than the north, and Israel was able to look down into the Philistine camp.

  Jonathan was fascinated by the view. Morning and evening he lay among the thorns at the edge of the precipice, gazing at the enemy, calculating. He saw that the main camp sat some distance back, but a small tough guard had been positioned immediately at the crest of the canyon wall.

  Early one morning Jonathan withdrew from the thicket grinning exactly like his father: white teeth, flashing black eyes, and a fierce conviction. He slipped through the sleeping army of Israel to his tent.

  “Etam,” he whispered as he entered.

  A youth stirred inside and woke.

  “Etam, I have a plan for the two of us, if you’re willing.”

  Jonathan began to gather his weapons. The lad pulled on a tunic and rushed to help.

  “A plan?”

  “Maybe the Lord will work with us. Why wouldn’t the Lord save Israel?”

  Etam whispered, “I am with you, sir.”

  Jonathan faced the lad and grinned. “Good for you, Etam, armor-bearer! Quickly, now: dress me.” He put out his arms. Etam heaved a coat of mail over his shoulders and while he was tying the cords behind him, Jonathan said, “You and I are going to descend the near side of the gorge. At the bottom we will show ourselves to the Philistine guard on the other side. If they say, ‘Wait till we come down,’ we’ll stand still, right where we are. But if they say, ‘Come up to us,’ that, Etam, is exactly what we’re going to do!”