Samuel
Edited by
Rachelle Gilmour [+–]
Trinity College, University of Divinity (Melbourne)
Rachelle Gilmour is Bromby Associate Professor of Old Testament at Trinity College, University of Divinity (Melbourne). Her most recent books are Divine Violence in the Book of Samuel (Oxford University Press, 2021) and an edited volume with B.J.M. Johnson, Explorations in the Interpretation of Samuel: Intertextuality and Reception (De Gruyter, 2024). She is currently preparing a commentary on 1 Samuel 1-15 for the IECOT/IEKAT series (Kohlhammer).
Mahri Leonard-Fleckman [+–]
College of the Holy Cross
Mahri Leonard-Fleckman is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross. Her interests include scribal practices, methods of history writing, and the dynamics of empire, including responses to empire across different cultural groups. Her most recent book project is Scribal Representations and Social Landscapes of the Iron Age Shephelah (Oxford University Press, 2025)
The Book of Samuel narrates with compelling drama the institution of monarchy in Ancient Israel and the early development of the house of David, a polity that will rule the southern kingdom of Judah over the centuries that follow. Poetry and lists are integrated into this historiographical masterpiece with its cast of charismatic characters, its plot of political intrigue, and its literary artistry. For contemporary scholars and readers, Samuel has offered a wealth of material for historical analysis, political philosophy, and insights into ancient storytelling techniques. However, composed over several centuries of Israel’s history, this inquiry is far from straight forward: Samuel reflects theological and ideological interests from a range of historical contexts before, during, and after the Babylonian exile, and many of its literary features invite both diachronic and synchronic explanations.
This volume introduces students and readers to the narrative, theological, and political complexity of the Book of Samuel. In “Preliminary Considerations,” traditional approaches to biblical study are applied to Samuel, including concerns with structure, themes, theology, history, and composition. In “Issues in Exegesis,” the essays work sequentially through the Book of Samuel, bringing the text into dialogue with a range of critical methodologies that push our discipline forward and invite emerging scholars to see the full richness of this book, including archaeology, memory, history, gender, interspecies, reception history, and political readings. Each of these essays will illuminate the book with close exegetical detail while simultaneously providing students with an overview of the field of Biblical Studies at its interdisciplinary forefront.
This volume will be first published online and then as a print book.
Chapters 8-10 published 2025.
Provisional Table of Contents:
Preliminary Considerations
1. Structure, themes and theology in the book of Samuel
Rachelle Gilmour
2. Historiography and Samuel
Mahri Leonard-Fleckman
3. Composition of Samuel
Jeremy M. Hutton
Issues in Exegesis
4. Hoping and Working for Change: A Feminist Reading of 1 Samuel 1–3
Ilse Muellner
5. Multiplying mice, mother cows, and errant oxen: An interspecies reading of the Ark Narrative (1 Samuel 4-6, 2 Samuel 6)
Suzanna Millar
6. The Institution of Kingship in Ancient Israel: An Act of Averting or Inviting Chaos (1 Samuel 7-12)
Hulisani Ramantswana
7. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Disentangling the Saulide Traditions in 1 Samuel 13–15
Nathaniel Greene
8. The Afterlife of Gath of the Philistines
Daniel Pioske
9. Desiring Men: Gender and Sexuality in 1 Samuel 18-23
Rhiannon Graybill
10. “If a Man Finds His Enemy, Will He Let Him Go?” (1 Sam 24-26)
Steven L. McKenzie
11. The Philistine David, Contested Friendship, and the Politics of Solidarity (1 Samuel 27-30)
Ki-Eun Jang
12. A Plethora of Conflicting Views: A Reception Exegetical Study of 1 Samuel 31–2 Samuel 1
Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer
13. The Unhistories of Michal and Rizpah: An Affective Political Reading of 2 Samuel 2-4
Dong Sung Kim
14. 2 Samuel 5–10: Remembering the Foundations of Davidic Kingship
Ian D. Wilson
15. Desire and the Deity: Love Triangles in 2 Samuel 11–12
Maria Metzler
16. The Price of Love: Gender, Power, and Divine Will in 2 Samuel 13-20
Song-Mi Suzie Park
17. When Warriors Come Together: Structure, Message and Literary Considerations in 2 Samuel 21 and 23
Shira Golani
18. Remembering the Pestilence: Visualizing 2 Samuel 24 in Plague Columns, Altars, and Ceiling Paintings
Sara Kipfer
Table of Contents
Chapter 8
University of St Thomas
Daniel Pioske is an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. He is the author of three books, David’s Jerusalem: Between Memory and History (Routledge, 2015), Memory in a Time of Prose (Oxford, 2018), and The Bible Among Ruins (Cambridge, 2023).
The city of Gath is referred to more often than any other Philistine location in the Hebrew Bible. But what is peculiar about these references is that the Philistine center was destroyed relatively early in the history of the Iron Age (ca. 830 BCE). Biblical stories about the location and those individuals connected to it, including both David and Goliath, therefore took shape and were developed further after the city had fallen into ruin. This study proposes that the ruins of Gath itself contributed to the formation of these stories, calling to mind to later audiences the monumental city that Gath had once been.
Chapter 9
University of Richmond
Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her research interests include prophecy, gender and sexuality, horror theory, speculative fiction, and the Bible as literature. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021). She has also co-edited three books: Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (with Cooper Minister and Beatrice Lawrence, Lexington Books, 2019), The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Readings (with Lynn R. Huber, Bloomsbury / T. & T. Clark, 2020), and “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood (with Peter J. Sabo, Gorgias Press, 2020). Her current projects include the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on Jonah(with Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner) and an edited volume entitled Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion (with Kent L. Brintnall and Linn Tonstad).
First Samuel 18–23 is a text filled with passion – passion of all sorts. Jonathan expresses his love to David, even stripping himself before him; Michal is likewise enamored. Saul has a different sort of obsession with David, shot through with paranoia and rage. And David himself demonstrates complicated and not always reciprocal relationships with each of these figures. This essay uses these chapters of 1 Samuel to focalize and explore gender and sexuality in the text, with particular attention to masculinity, queerness, and the usefulness of LGBTQ+ and queer approaches in reading an ancient text such as this. My aim is not simply to elucidate this section of text, but to demonstrate how these reading strategies can be deployed more broadly, across the books of Samuel and other biblical texts. The chapter also explores feminist reading, with attention both to Michal and to the rhetorics of masculinity that pervade the text.
Chapter 10
Rhodes College
Steven L. McKenzie is Professor of Religious Studies and Spence L. Wilson Senior Research Fellow at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He is the author of King David: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Introduction to the Historical Books (Eerdmans, 2010) as well as General Editor for the Hebrew Bible of the SBL Study Bible (HarperCollins, 2023).
The coherence of 1 Sam 24–26 as a literary unit and its role in the David story at large is the main topic of investigation. Beginning with a narrative analysis of 1 Sam 25, the article moves on to a consideration of which of the two stories in 1 Sam 24 and 26 was written first. Articles by Cynthia Edenburg and John Van Seters that take opposite views on the matter are assessed before the possibility that 24:5b–6 (Eng. 24:4b–5) is likely out of place as the result of a transmissional error is suggested. In addition, it is proposed that ch. 24 is part of an interpolation in 23:19–25:44, signaled by the editor’s use of the literary device known as Wiederaufnahme or “narrative resumption.” This points to the logical conclusion that ch. 24 was based on ch. 26.
