To understand 1 & 2 Samuel you must understand Judges. To understand Judges you must understand Joshua. To understand Joshua you must understand Deuteronomy. To understand Deuteronomy you must understand Exodus. To understand Exodus you must understand Genesis.
You must read the Bible in order to read the Bible. Every time you read through the Bible, you are better equipped to read the Bible. You begin, more and more, to read the Bible in light of the Bible. You bring less of yourself and less of your culture to it. You begin to read yourself and the world in light of the Bible.
To understand Samuel, you must understand Judges.Through the latter half of Judges, one repeatedly encounters this haunting line, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). The morality of Israel is linked to her king. Think how often in Kings you read something like this, “Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. And he did not do what was right in the eyes of the LORD his God, as his father David had done, but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel. He even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel. And he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree” (2 Kings 16:2–4). The King leads the people in worship or idolatry.
To understand this aspect of Samuel and Judges, you must understand Joshua. Joshua closes with Joshua charging the people to remain faithful to the covenant that God has made with them. This means driving out the remnant of the nations, not intermarrying with them, and not being like them.
Joshua recalls God’s faithfulness to His promise in bringing them to the land and warns them not to go and serve other gods, lest God drive them from the land (Joshua 23). It was their disobedience to this command and this threat of judgment that looms large over Judges.
To understand Joshua you must understand Deuteronomy. During the time of the judges, two promises had not yet been fulfilled, that of a king and a place. Again and again in Deuteronomy we find language like this, “But when you go over the Jordan and live in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to inherit, and when he gives you rest from all your enemies around, so that you live in safety, then to the place that the LORD your God will choose, to make his name dwell there, there you shall bring all that I command you” (Deuteronomy 12:10–11).
Also, the people’s plea for a king to Samuel was not altogether evil. It was their demand and their desire therein that were wicked. But God had promises them in His covenant saying, “When you come to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ you may indeed set a king over you whom the LORD your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you” (Deuteronomy 17:14–15).
To understand Deuteronomy you must understand the Torah. This means you must understand Exodus, where Yahweh redeems His people out of Egypt, that they might be His people and He might be their God. He does this to bring them into a land of milk and honey where He will dwell in their midst.
This means you must understand Genesis and the promises to the patriarchs. God promised Abraham land, children, and blessedness. Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob. God renamed Jacob Israel. Israel had twelve sons. Among them was Judah, whom Israel blessed saying, “Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion’s cub; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down; he crouched as a lion and as a lioness; who dares rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Binding his foal to the vine and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine, he has washed his garments in wine and his vesture in the blood of grapes. His eyes are darker than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk” (Genesis 49:8–12).
To understand that promise, we must go all the way way back to the beginning. God created man in His image, giving him dominion and placing him in the garden. Adam was a king. He was blessed. God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule—this was blessedness. This was how things were meant to be.
When Adam sinned, this was lost. But God gave the promise of a seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. This is the promise of a warrior king who would set creation right, putting the serpent back under the foot of man, a King who would reestablish God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule.
From this point forward, in your reading of Scripture, you are looking to every peculiar birth of a son with this hope. And so it is that we come to this book that opens with a woman desperate for a child that she then dedicates to the Lord. A child who grows up to anoint a king. A king who defeats the enemies of the people of the Lord, but who is to have a greater Son who will enjoy rest and build a house for Yahweh.
No Other Boast 