**Selections from Robert Alter's Commentary on the Anointing of Saul:** > 1. Anointment is the biblical ritual of conferring kingship, like coronation in the later European tradition. [...] > > 2. _When you go away from me today_. This elaborate set of instructions and predictions is, as Robert Polzin has argued, a strategy for asserting continued control over the man Samuel has just anointed. Every predictive step manifests Samuel’s superior knowledge as prophet, and all the instructions reduce the new king to Samuel’s puppet. > > _Rachel’s Tomb_. The burial site of the mother of Benjamin, the eponymous founder of the tribe, underscores Saul’s own tribal affiliation. > > _your father has put aside the matter of the asses and is worrying about you_. According to the fixed procedure of verbal recycling in biblical narrative, the predicted words of the two men are nearly identical with Saul’s first words to his servant. [...] > > 3. [...] _the Terebinth of Tabor_. Evidently, a cultic site. > > _three men . . . three kids . . . three loaves of bread_. The triple three is a folktale pattern. It also manifests a mysterious design clearly grasped by Samuel, who annunciates this whole prediction, and into which Saul is thrust unwittingly. The three men bear meat (or animals that can be turned into meat), bread, and wine—the three symbolic staffs of life. They will offer Saul the primary of the three, bread... > > _the Philistine prefect_. This glancing reference to a Philistine garrison deep within Benjaminite territory is still another indication of the Philistines’ military ascendancy. [...] > > **_a band of prophets_. These are professional ecstatics who would whip themselves into a frenzy with the insistent rhythms of the musical instruments mentioned—a phenomenon familiar in enthusiastic religious sects worldwide—and then would “prophesy,” become caught up in ecstatic behavior, which could involve glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”), dancing, writhing, and the like. The chief connection between these figures and the later literary prophets is the idea that both are involuntarily inhabited by an overpowering divine spirit.** > >6. _you shall turn into another man_. The drastic nature of this process is surely meant by Samuel to be startling: nothing less will do in order to transform this diffident farmer’s son into a king than to be devastated by the divine spirit, violently compelled to radical metamorphosis. [...] > > 7. _do what your hand finds_. The biblical idiom means do whatever is within your power. > > 9. _God gave him another heart and all these signs came to pass_. These words are a kind of proleptic headnote for the narrative report that follows, and it is not implied that the transformation and the signs occurred the very moment Saul turned to go. > > 10. **_the spirit of the LORD seized him_. This same phrase, or a slight variant of it, is repeatedly used in the Book of Judges to indicate the inception of the judge’s enterprise as charismatic military leader. There is some overlap with Saul’s taking on the kingship, which will also involve military leadership, but the report of ecstasy or “prophesying” is a new element, with its more radical implication that the new leader must become “another man.”** > > 12. _Is Saul, too, among the prophets?_ This evidently proverbial question, its full origins scarcely remembered, is the perplexity that generates the etiological tale. The question seems to be proverbial of a case of extreme incongruity (like the English “bull in a china shop”)—what on earth is a man like Saul doing among the prophets? The tale then comes to explain how the saying arose. But the etiological tale, together with its antithetical counterpart in chapter 19, figures significantly in the literary design of the Saul story. Even the characterizing theme of Saul’s repeated exclusion from predictive knowledge is inscribed in the question “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?” The people ask their question about Saul in a line of poetry (consisting of two parallel versets). The verse form explains why Saul is first referred to as “son of Kish” because in poetry based on parallelism, it is the fixed procedure for treating proper names to use the given name in one verset and, in lieu of a synonym, the patronymic in the other. Thus, the claim made by some scholars that “son of Kish” is derogatory has no basis. > > 1. _who is their father?_ The reference is obscure. The least convoluted explanation makes the prophets the antecedent of “their.” The meaning then would be that unlike Saul, whose father is Kish, a landholder and a man of substance, the ecstatics are a breed apart, with no father anyone can name (the leader of a band of prophets was called idiomatically their father). **The prevalent attitude toward such prophets was ambivalent: they were at once viewed as vehicles of a powerful and dangerous divine spirit, and as crazies (compare Hosea 9:7).**