Saul, the first king of Israel, had a complex relationship with the Amalekites and Edomites. His own name is that of an Edomite king, his family have names that recall the gods of Edom and his chief-of-staff, his master herdsman, was Doeg from Edom. This suggests an alliance between the tribe of Benjamin and the people of Edom.
This would not be entirely surprising. In the civil war that ensued after the gang-rape and subsequent death of Jonathan’s concubine at Gibeah, 98% of the men of Benjamin were killed and all of the women. Jonathan, by the way, is not Saul’s son and David’s friend, but the Levite grandson of Moses. The virtual annihilation of all the clans of Benjamin by the remaining eleven tribes of Israel was sufficient reason for ongoing mistrust by the survivors as well as a search for a strategic alliance outside Israel.
The tribe of Benjamin was rebuilt by a remnant of six hundred men who managed to flee into the wilderness after the final battle and who had been given four hundred brides from Jabesh Gilead, a city on the far side of the Jordan. These young women were trophies of war—their community had been wiped out in punishment for ignoring the call to battle when eleven of the tribes massed against Gibeah. The remaining two hundred women needed as wives for the surviving men were abducted from a dance in Shiloh.
The trauma in this situation is unimaginable. The children of these marriages were brought up by fathers who’d survived a genocide and by mothers who were captured either in a battle where their families were killed or else at a dance. As they grew up, they would have been groomed to:
- resent the new settlers in Jabesh Gilead, the hometown of their mothers
- bear a grudge against Levites from the hill country of Ephraim, the territory where Jonathan had illegally taken a job as a priest
- hate the people of Bethlehem where the murdered concubine had come from.
Now the remarkable thing about Saul, who was a generation or two down the track from these children, is that he achieved reconciliation in two of these three instances.
His first action as king was to save the people of Jabesh Gilead from the violent depredations of Nahash, ruler of the Ammonites. In addition, he was—at least to begin with—a close friend of Samuel, a Levite and priest from the hill country of Ephraim.
Thus he succeeded in two out of the three great reconciliations needed to restore the tribal unity that had been so savagely disrupted by the civil war.
Yet, faced with David of Bethlehem, that last reconciliation was beyond him. The feud between Bethlehem and Gibeah intensified throughout Saul’s reign and became even worse under David.
Saul’s alliance with Edom and the fact he made such inroads towards reconciliation is the reason I suspect he carried Esau’s mantle.
This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May Jesus of Nazareth restore and reconcile your community.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.
John’s gospel is an epic poem in the mirror-reflective style of Hebrew prophetic poetry. Many commentators have noticed this and shown how the matching pairs line up. However, they haven’t looked beyond the loveliness of the design to the clues offered by the clues embedded in the symmetry. John reveals the inheritance given to specific disciples—the mantles of the patriarchs, prophets and kings that were handed on by Jesus as specific legacies: Elijah’s, Joseph’s, Reuben’s, Jacob’s, David’s, Esau’s… and more! The Elijah Tapestry, The Summoning of Time, The Lustral Waters, The Inviolable Kingdom and Bathing in Bronze (coming late 2026) work verse by verse from the front, matching to various verses from the back to unveil the not-so-hidden secrets of the mantles.