The Sacrifice - 1st Samuel 13:9-23

The troops were leaving to go home and Samuel had not shown up within the 7 days that he promised, so Saul takes matters into his own hands and tells his people to bring him two sacrifices, a burnt offering and a peace offering. Saul knows good and well that only priests were authorized to make the sacrifices and the burnt offering specifically was only authorized to be made by the high priest, Samuel specifically. TB notes that in Gilgal, surely there were priests around who could have made the peace offering, and even if Saul had done that one himself, it wasn’t the super serious burnt offering and at that point was still sometimes being done at home by the oldest sons like had happened before the Levitical priesthood was organized. So it still wouldn’t have been great, but it would have been more understandable. The fact that Saul had the option to chose the one that was less serious but instead chose the very serious sacrifice that was explicitly commanded only for the high priest, is very telling about his state of mind. He offers the sacrifice himself, unauthorized, and as soon as he does, Samuel shows up.

Samuel was like “what did you do?” And Saul said that the Philistines were going to come at any moment and he “forced myself” to do the sacrifice alone. The irony here is that in Judges, Gideon only had 300 men and they killed 135,000 enemy soldiers, and Samson killed 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. So obviously it doesn’t matter how many troops there are or what kinds of weapons they have, as long as God is with them, they were going to win and having God’s favor was more important to their victory than how many soldiers stayed with Saul. Even though Saul started off strong and hasn’t even ruled for that long, apparently there has been enough, or maybe even this one incident is enough to where Samuel tells Saul that his kingdom will not continue, and “the Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee.” TB says that the “your kingdom will not continue,” means that his son will not be king and this will not be a dynastic thing like Saul wants and that makes sense because Saul is not removed as king right then and there, he’s still king, but Samuel has put him on notice that his time in that role is short now for his disobedience.

It's also interesting to note that after hearing those words from Samuel, Saul is just kind of nonchalant about it and just goes on about his business. Samuel goes to Gibeah and Saul is left with an army of 600. The Philistines send probes out to mess with the Israelites and see what they can get away with and we learn another fun fact, :there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Let the Hebrews make them swords and spears.” When I read this, I assumed that the Philistines had come in a confiscated all the weapons from the Hebrews and removed all the “smiths” from them as well. Smiths were people who worked with the metal to make things, weapons included. But it seems like this was not the case. The IM says that at this point in history, the use of iron was just starting to be used , especially among the Philistines and was much better quality of weapons than the bronze that the Hebrews would have been using. The Philistines were a technologically advanced society so it makes sense that they would be at the cutting edge of weapons technology, iron in this case.

The Hebrews would have had to take their iron type tools to the Philistines to be sharpened, but it seems like the Philistines refused to sharpen the Israelite’s tools just in case they were turned into weapons. So when it came time for battle, the Philistines had iron swords and spears and the Israelites had, basically, gardening tools. So Saul had mocked God by offering the sacrifice himself, lost most of his soldiers and only had a few very primitive weapons to face the Philistines here shortly. Will be interesting to see how it works out.