This may be the worst time in my life.

I am not a scribe and I have lived a life that has left me little time and even less desire to write on this clay tablet about all I have seen.

But now I need to write my thoughts, though I will hide this, for fear that the people would hate me if they saw it.

When they shouted, “Give us a king!”, I felt like Sheol (‘Underworld’) was rising up to bring me down to the recesses of the earth.

Yet the Voice has commanded me to do so. While I am warning the people what a king will do and be, they will not listen. And the Voice said: ‘It is not you that they have rejected, but Me.’ This did not make me feel one bit better. For it is my failure that led to this.

I first heard the Voice when I was a child. I ran into my master Eli’s bedroom, thinking that it was his voice that woke me. For all his limitations, and there were many, he understood the Voice before I did.

I was called, and I have lived my life according to everything the Voice told me. I have been the leader of my people. I have been a leader to all Israel, unlike the Shofetim (‘Judges’) who were more local and tribal than my role as leader for all the tribes.

If only my sons had been worthy. I never took anything for myself. I never engaged in any practices that defrauded or cheated anyone. If only they had been upright people, they would have succeeded me. Instead, I will not have a dynasty. I will not see my work continue. Sons should not trade on the honor of their father, for they will diminish their father’s honor. They have left me without continuity into the future, and this may be even worse.

But this is only my personal woe. I am less concerned for myself than I am for God’s relationship with the people. The people do not trust in God as the only King they need. After all the acts of God, all the miracles, after the Exodus, after Mt. Sinai, after the victories with Moses and Joshua, after all the victorious shofetim, they still want a king, as if power comes from palaces and horses. They still do not understand anything about Power.

They say: “We should have a kingdom like the other kingdoms. We should have an army like the armies of all those kingdoms.”

But I believe, as I write this, that it is not God’s fault or my fault or even my sons’ fault. And I do not think that it is the divisions within the people, which they barely remember, that led to the war between the tribes and the tribe of Benjamin, that is the reason that they demand a king. They do not fear their own disunity, or their own emotion, and they do not even feel a need for the sense of unity that a kingdom rather than a collection of tribes might provide.

No, they want to bring the Power of Heaven to earth, as if a human king can harness this. Their belief that a king can do this is dangerous beyond reckoning, especially if he comes to believe it himself.

And yet, it is my task to go to find a king. I wonder what the Voice will tell me. I fear that the king will bring misery and war to the people. For he will only reflect a people who do not understand the King.

I must indeed hear the Voice. Because this young man is the last person I would have chosen if it were up to me.

He has held no position. He is not a tribal leader. He has no experience in war; he has not even been a soldier. But as king, he will have to lead the people against the mighty Philistines with their chariots and superior weapons.

I ask myself why God has chosen him, and it must be to teach the people what they do not understand, the reason they wanted a king, that the true Power is to be found in Heaven and not earth. The king will be a simple man, who I met while he was searching the countryside for his father’s lost mules. This was the important mission that he was sent on!

It cannot be a coincidence that he is from the tribe of Benjamin, still decimated from that war a generation ago. Take a simple man from the smallest tribe. No tribal jealousies; no one from Judah or Ephraim. It reminds me of the story of Gideon, who says that he is a nobody from a lesser clan in a lesser tribe (Book of Judges 6:15).

So, the idea must be to show the people that since a war could not be won through this nobody, the wars that will be won will be through the Power of God, not the power of the new king.

But here, in secrecy, I can doubt this plan: I never assume that the people will understand. If this king wins a war, I am afraid they will think he is a great leader. And even worse, he might believe that he should get the acclaim.

Since my life has ended in failure, since my kind of leadership began and will end with me, I am thinking a great deal about the nature of leadership. I see now that for all my piety and righteousness, I, too, became too concerned with my role and my legacy. Does human leadership always lead a person to misunderstand the true meaning of their role?

What a scene! I speak to the assembly, warning them again about the perils of a king, and they still clamor for a king, so I give in, as the Voice has told me to. And I look for him, for Saul, and I can’t find him. In that moment, I was both mortified and hopeful; embarrassed in the moment that the selected man did not come forward and wishing that he had fled back to his farm.

For better or worse, he was found among the mules and baggage, hiding. This is the king? Then again, going back and forth in my mind, humility is exactly what the new king should have. Perhaps this will work out, after all…. If he recognizes that he should listen to my instructions, and follows the commands of God, and does not get a head full of pride and arrogance, …

He is brought forth, and as the crowd acclaims him king, I see him differently. He is very tall, taller than them all. And he is handsome.

But then something else happens. I watch his eyes carefully. And there is a moment, when the eyes that looked like a frightened deer change, as if they have become a different color. It is like a priestly robe, as I know, transforms a person into something sacred. His eyes lose their fear, and they stare over the cheering crowd to the horizon, as if he sees his life and his future in a whole new way.

The titles we are given, the positions we attain, certainly can change us. The question becomes: Do we start believing what other people believe about us? Don’t we know that we are still the same people before they called us “King” or “Prophet”? Underneath the robe, I am the same person. But with the robe, I cannot help but try to live up to the expectations that come with it.

The challenge for our new king will be: Will he lose all his humility? Will he love his new-found popularity so much that he will do everything the people want, even if it contradicts the commands that God gives him through me? Will he follow the rituals and laws of our people’s tradition? What will happen? We’ve never had a king before, and I do not know what to expect. And to be truthful, I don’t think God does either.

I have been thinking about wine jugs. There are expressions about old wine in new jugs and new wine in old jugs.

Saul was selected because he seemed to be an empty jug that held no wine. But the wine that was poured into him, including the Spirit of God but also the adoration and the criticism of the people, filled him almost immediately. At first, empowered by the Spirit, he won victories, and his popularity grew (1 Samuel 11). So did his self-esteem. Now instead of a frightened coward hiding in the baggage, he started to like his new role. He forgot that he had always been an unnoticed vessel. He liked the taste of the wine of power and fame.

He made a rash vow using God’s Name (1 Samuel 14:24), the kind of vow that gets leaders into trouble, as in the tragedy of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11). He vowed that, in a battle that had started with the Philistines, no one should eat that day. Little did he know that the conflict had been ignited by his eldest son Jonathan, who, in my estimation, is a great young man, valiant and God-fearing and a very promising heir to the throne. Jonathan did not know of his father’s vow and when he later met up with the troops, encouraged them to eat, since they were faint from the fighting and the sun and from hunger.

Later, when it became clear that God was displeased about the broken vow, the people did not reveal that it was Jonathan who had broken it. Saul, who did not understand what was happening, said that even if it were he or his son who was at fault, they would die. When it was revealed that it was Jonathan, Saul was ready to fulfill his second rash statement, but the people rose and stopped him (1 Samuel 14:45).

This is the moment that I am thinking about over and over and the reason I write these words. The people overrode God’s command and the king’s command, and they were right. These people do have a will of their own. Perhaps they are ready to have a king whom they will resist if they need to. Perhaps they are more ready for a new kind of government than I thought. They are not just empty vessels. Perhaps we can pour new wine into these jugs and produce something that will have a richness of its own.

The people may not be blank tablets, and now it is clear that Saul is not one, either. If the idea was to take a blank tablet and write the Law on it, like God wrote the Commandments on the tablets that stand to this day in the Ark, and the king would then be more a subject of God than the ruler of subjects, I am very sorry to say, it failed.

I told the king to wait for me so that I could make the sacrifice before going to battle, and he was so worried about the people’s lack of patience that he did not wait for me. And then at another point, I told him to utterly defeat the Amalekites, our worst enemy, who killed our aged and children in the desert, to take no spoils or receive any benefit from that victory, and what do I see? That he took spoils and marched home with the enemy king as a trophy. And when I rebuked him, what did he say in his defense? ‘It is what the people wanted.’

Even after I told him that this would be the end of his monarchy, he asked that I pretend that everything was well between us. What all of this means is that this blank tablet now had words written on it, such as personal ambition and popularity. It is one thing for a leader to be responsive to the will of the people. But it is quite another thing to listen to the will of the people over the Will of God. He listened to the people over the Voice of God, and now the kingship will be taken from him.

So far, this is what I will write for the records that will be passed down. But as for me, the prophet who stands in between God and the people, I am torn in two. It is true that I was against the kingship and could not understand the choice of an inconsequential farmer from the smallest tribe. But once this simple but good farmer was chosen, I came to love him. He has a good heart, and when he let the spirit of God inside him, he had moments of greatness.

And so now, even after I condemned him to his face, I pleaded with God for forgiveness. And there is none. My new mission will be to find a new king. I have little confidence at this moment that anything will go better the next time.

Any system of ruling a people is only as good as its leaders. I was good, but my sons were not worthy, and a change was necessary. Can any king or ruler resist the desire to be popular with his subjects? And if not, can any ruler live up to the ideals of the system? Just as I stand between God and the people, and I am torn in two, so every ruler, if he is worthy, will be torn. The irony is that the bigger problem comes when he does not struggle between the ideals and the realities.

I dreamed of being a second Moses, and that at the end of my life, with my eye undimmed and my vigor unabated, I would climb a mountain and die a peaceful, natural death. Instead, I can barely see, and I can hardly walk. I lie here, in this miserable hovel, feeling the life ebbing out of me.

In some ways, I am like Moses, a figure who devoted his life to his people, who tried to bring them to a new stage of destiny, and who was unappreciated by the people who were always trying to find a different kind of leader. If there had been an election, Moses would have lost.

He described a Kingdom of God, and I know what he meant: Leaders who lived by the Law, people who insisted that they did. But leaders are either inadequate to the task, following the people rather than leading them, or too consumed with their own power and legacy. Saul was the first, and David, I can see, capable and cunning and every inch a king, has personal failings that will be his undoing. A country should not be united by a personal union, because that person, at best, will die, and at worst, will create division.

Ideal rule does not depend on a personality. It is more than a king, more than any leader, more than the people. Its power does not stem from the power of the leader or the people, but from something greater than a place. The Law does not sound like something to worship or venerate or devote one’s life to. But it is the answer to the questions that circle around human beings.

And it was Moses who knew that, someday, they would insist on a king. He described the king, sitting, reading the scroll of the Law, every day, reminding himself, every single day, that he was the subject of the Law as much as his subjects. It turns out, now that we have kings, that this is but a beautiful dream. I have seen a king praying piously, and I have seen a king wielding the law like a scepter, but I have not seen one live that dream of Moses.

And yet, I say again, that the Law is still the only answer to the questions that people present to the reality of living together in a just society that is strong enough to protect itself from its enemies. Despite my moments of despair, I remember that there were moments of glory, when the people were united, when they listened to the words and lived by them. No enemy could hurt them then.

I have seen such times, and despite my weakness of body and spirit, I will not give up on Moses’s vision of a leader, reading the Law, taking it into his heart, and letting it lead him, even as he steps forward to lead the people.