Shoftim: Why God Began with Shaul
When we think of the kings of Israel, most of us think first of David or Shlomo. David united the kingdom, established Jerusalem, and became the ancestor of the eternal royal dynasty. Shlomo built the Beit HaMikdash and became synonymous with wisdom.
Shaul rarely comes first.
If anything, he is remembered as the king who lost the kingdom.
That has always struck me as curious.
This week’s parashah, Shoftim, introduces the Torah’s mitzvah of appointing a king. If there was ever a week to study a king, it is surely this one. And if there was ever a king whom we might expect to become the Torah’s great model of leadership, it ought to be the very first one, chosen directly by God through the prophet Shmuel.
Yet the more I study both the Torah and the commentators, the more I find myself asking a different question.
Not, “Was Shaul a great king?”
But rather:
“Why did God begin with Shaul?”
The answer, I suspect, begins not with Shaul himself, but with the Torah’s surprisingly cautious introduction to monarchy.
Unlike most mitzvot, the Torah does not simply command the appointment of a king. Instead, it anticipates a future moment when the people themselves will say:
“כִּי תָבֹא אֶל הָאָרֶץ … וְאָמַרְתָּ אָשִׂימָה עָלַי מֶלֶךְ כְּכָל הַגּוֹיִם אֲשֶׁר סְבִיבֹתָי. שׂוֹם תָּשִׂים עָלֶיךָ מֶלֶךְ אֲשֶׁר יִבְחַר ה’ אֱלֹקֶיךָ בּוֹ.”
“When you come into the land… and you say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations around me,’ you shall surely set over yourself a king whom the Lord your God shall choose.”
(Devarim 17:14-15)
The wording is remarkable.
Most commandments begin with God’s instruction. This one begins with the people’s desire: “וְאָמַרְתָּ אָשִׂימָה עָלַי מֶלֶךְ.” Only then does the Torah explain how that desire must be restrained.
The debate among our commentators reflects that unusual introduction. The Gemara records two views: Rabbi Yehudah regards appointing a king as a mitzvah, while Rabbi Nehorai understands these verses as responding to the people’s future request. Rambam codifies monarchy as a positive commandment, whereas Abarbanel views the passage as regulating something the people would seek rather than describing the Torah’s political ideal.
Whether one follows Rambam or Abarbanel, one point remains true. The institution may have emerged from the people’s request, but the king himself would still be chosen by God.
Indeed, before Shaul even appears, God tells Shmuel:
“כָּעֵת מָחָר אֶשְׁלַח אֵלֶיךָ אִישׁ מֵאֶרֶץ בִּנְיָמִן.”
“About this time tomorrow I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin.”
(I Shmuel 9:16)
There is an important distinction here between the institution and the individual. The people’s request may have reflected a spiritual failing. They sought to be “כְּכָל הַגּוֹיִם“, “like all the nations.” Yet once monarchy became Israel’s reality, God Himself selected the man who would occupy the throne. Whatever reservations existed about the request, the text leaves little doubt about the king.
Shaul was not merely the people’s choice. He was God’s.
Remarkably, the Torah spends very little time describing the king’s powers. Instead, it focuses almost entirely on his limitations. He must not multiply horses. He must not multiply wives. He must not accumulate excessive silver and gold. He must write his own Sefer Torah. He must read it throughout his life.
And then comes the verse that, to me, explains everything:
“לְבִלְתִּי רוּם לְבָבוֹ מֵאֶחָיו.”
“So that his heart shall not become elevated above his brothers.”
(Devarim 17:20)
Notice what the Torah fears. It does not fear that the king will be too humble. It fears that he will become too powerful. It fears the moment when he begins to believe that the throne has placed him above everyone else.
Centuries later, when the people finally ask Shmuel for a king, they use almost exactly the language anticipated by the Torah:
“וְהָיִינוּ גַם אֲנַחְנוּ כְּכָל הַגּוֹיִם.”
“…that we also may be like all the nations.”
(I Shmuel 8:20)
Shmuel is distressed, and God replies:
“לֹא אֹתְךָ מָאָסוּ, כִּי אֹתִי מָאֲסוּ מִמְּלֹךְ עֲלֵיהֶם.”
“They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from reigning over them.”
(I Shmuel 8:7)
Suddenly the Torah’s caution becomes understandable. Israel was never meant to be like every other nation. Its true King was always God.
Any human king would therefore occupy an almost impossible position. He would stand above the people in authority, yet forever beneath God in sovereignty. Leadership would require strength without arrogance, authority without pride, and power without forgetting its source.
That balance is extraordinarily difficult.
Perhaps that is why God did not begin with David. Nor with someone like Shlomo.
David would bring the forcefulness necessary to establish a kingdom, but that very strength would carry its own dangers. Shlomo’s wisdom would become legendary, yet by the end of his reign he accumulated precisely the wives, horses, and wealth against which the Torah had warned.
Neither would have been the right place to begin.
To establish monarchy, God first chose a man whose defining quality was not strength, but humility.
Everything about Shaul reflects that choice. When Shmuel first anoints him, he protests that he comes from the smallest tribe. Before assuming the role, he is told that God will transform him:
“וְצָלְחָה עָלֶיךָ רוּחַ ה’ … וְנֶהְפַּכְתָּ לְאִישׁ אַחֵר.”
“The spirit of the Lord will come upon you… and you shall become another man.”
(I Shmuel 10:6)
When the nation gathers for his coronation, the king is chosen not by public acclaim but by lot. Then comes one of the most extraordinary scenes in Tanach.
The nation searches for its newly crowned king. He cannot be found. They ask God where he is.
The answer comes:
“הִנֵּה הוּא נֶחְבָּא אֶל הַכֵּלִים.”
“Behold, he is hiding among the baggage.”
(I Shmuel 10:22)
The image is unforgettable. The first king of Israel is not standing on a platform demanding loyalty. He is hiding.
For many years I regarded that scene as evidence that Shaul lacked the qualities required for kingship.
Today I wonder whether it was the opposite. Perhaps only a man who did not seek power was fit to become Israel’s first king.
Before Israel could learn how to exercise authority, it first had to learn to distrust authority. Before there could be a powerful king, there had to be a humble one.
Shaul embodied almost perfectly the king described in Shoftim. He was chosen by God. He sought neither wealth nor grandeur. He did not exalt himself above his brothers.
If the Torah’s greatest concern was that monarchy might corrupt, then Shaul was exactly the person with whom to begin.
Yet humility alone could never sustain a kingdom.
The Gemara observes that when certain men despised Shaul after his coronation, he remained silent. Chazal admire that restraint, yet they also identify within it a danger. The Gemara asks:
“מִפְּנֵי מָה נֶעֱנַשׁ שָׁאוּל? מִפְּנֵי שֶׁמָּחַל עַל כְּבוֹדוֹ.”
“Why was Shaul punished? Because he waived his honour.”
(Yoma 22b)
At first glance, that criticism seems surprising. Is humility not precisely the quality we have been praising?
Yet the honour of a king is not merely his own. A king represents an office entrusted to him by God for the sake of the nation. A ruler who abuses authority betrays his role, but so does a ruler who refuses to exercise it when necessary.
This tension emerges most clearly in the episode that ultimately costs Shaul his kingdom.
When commanded to wage war against Amalek, Shaul spares Agag and preserves some of the spoils. Confronted by Shmuel, he eventually admits:
“כִּי יָרֵאתִי אֶת הָעָם וָאֶשְׁמַע בְּקוֹלָם.”
“For I feared the people and listened to their voice.”
(I Shmuel 15:24)
The verse is revealing.
The king who once hid among the baggage remained reluctant to place himself above those he led. His failure was therefore not the failure of a tyrant intoxicated with power.
If anything, it was the opposite.
The very humility that protected him from arrogance could also make decisive leadership more difficult. Shaul understood the dangers of authority. What he struggled to learn was that leadership sometimes requires a person to stand apart from the crowd and bear responsibility alone.
None of this is meant to ignore the painful final chapters of Shaul’s life, where it seems Shaul changed considerably.
The Shaul who hid among the baggage is not easily reconciled with the king who later pursued David, ordered the destruction of Nov, and sought guidance from the medium of En-Dor.
Like the later years of Shlomo, the final chapters of Shaul’s life resist simple explanations but one relates to a phrase in the Torah. The Tanach itself signals a profound turning point:
“וְרוּחַ ה’ סָרָה מֵעִם שָׁאוּל.”
“The spirit of the Lord departed from Shaul.”
(I Shmuel 16:14)
The Malbim treats this as the beginning of a painful decline in Shaul’s life. Rav Hirsch, in his broader approach to Tanach, likewise cautions us against defining great figures solely by their failures. Human greatness and human frailty often coexist.
Was the later Shaul transformed by rejection, fear, and the loss of divine favour? Did the burdens of kingship gradually distort the very qualities that once made him worthy of the throne? Or are we meant to see in his life a warning about the extraordinary pressures of power itself?
Tanach does not give an easy answer.
What remains clear, however, is that the young man whom God chose embodied precisely the quality that the Torah places at the centre of kingship:
“לְבִלְתִּי רוּם לְבָבוֹ מֵאֶחָיו.”
This is also the balance described by Rambam in Hilchot De’ot:
“הַדֶּרֶךְ הַיְשָׁרָה הִיא מִדָּה בֵּינוֹנִית שֶׁבְּכָל דֵּעָה וְדֵעָה.”
“The proper path is the middle disposition in every character trait.”
(Hilchot De’ot 1:4)
Virtue rarely lies at an extreme. Wisdom lies in holding competing qualities together. Leadership requires humility, but also confidence. Compassion, but also judgement. Restraint, but also resolve.
Rav Kook developed a similar idea. True humility does not require a person to deny his strengths; it requires him to recognise that those strengths are gifts entrusted to him by God. Humility is not the absence of greatness, but the refusal to treat greatness as one’s own.
Moshe perhaps came closest to that ideal. The Torah calls him the humblest of all men, yet he confronted Pharaoh, rebuked Korach, and led an often impossible nation for forty years. His humility never prevented him from acting. It prevented him only from acting for himself.
Seen in that light, Shaul’s story becomes profoundly moving. His tragedy was not that God chose the wrong man. Nor was it that humility proved unworthy of a king.
His tragedy was that the qualities which made him the perfect king with whom to begin Israel’s monarchy were not, by themselves, enough to preserve it.
David would contribute the strength that Shaul lacked. Shlomo would contribute wisdom of unparalleled depth. Yet each would reveal new dangers. David’s strength could become overconfidence. Shlomo’s wisdom could become self-assurance.
Shaul reminds us of a different danger: that humility itself, if not joined with firmness, can leave a leader unable to fully exercise the responsibility entrusted to him.
So was Shaul a failure?
I do not believe he was (The one before G-d removed his Spirit). He was the king Israel needed first. Before Israel could learn how to wield power, it first had to learn to fear its corruption. Before there could be a David or a Shlomo, there had to be a Shaul.
Not because he became Israel’s greatest king, but because he taught Israel its first lesson about kingship.
Power is dangerous. Authority must remain accountable.
No leader, however great, may ever imagine that he stands above his brothers or above the God who placed him there.
Perhaps that is why the Torah insists that a king carry a Sefer Torah with him continually:
“וְהָיְתָה עִמּוֹ וְקָרָא בוֹ כָּל יְמֵי חַיָּיו.”
“It shall be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life.”
(Devarim 17:19)
The purpose of kingship was never to elevate a man above the nation, but to keep power itself subject to something higher.
The institution may have begun with a flawed request. But the first king did not begin with a flawed choice. That is why, I believe, God began with Shaul. Not because he was the strongest candidate. But because before Israel could have a great king, it first needed a humble one.
