In defence of King Saul

In the wake of the recent reading of the haftorah for Shabbat Zachor, where we retell the failure of Sha’ul HaMelech—King Saul—to exterminate the last of the Amalekites, it occurred to me that this unhappy episode raises issues for Pirkei Avot.

The principle that one should judge others favourably, if it is possible to do so, is enshrined in the third and final teaching of Yehoshua ben Perachyah at Avot 1:6:

עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת

Make for yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person on a scale of merit.

This teaching applies to everyone, at all times, and it is incredibly difficult to get right. There are circumstances where it is practically impossible to judge a person favourably, for example when that person has committed a despicable and inexcusable crime for which there is unchallengeable evidence of guilt. But most of the time it is possible to find something positive to say about a person who has done wrong. This exercise is important for us. Why? Partly because it should help us to recognise that we too have good points and less-than-good points to our personalities and our behaviour: in judging ourselves by looking through the eyes of others, as it were, we can assess whether we too deserve to be judged favourably. Also, partly because when we judge others it is often without hearing another side to the argument that they have done wrong and should be condemned for doing so.

Let us look at this mishnah in the context of Saul, the first king of Israel, a man of courage and humility, a scholar and someone who was even capable of receiving prophecy. It seems quite inexplicable that he should have failed to carry out the prophet Samuel’s instruction to kill all the Amalekites together with their livestock, this being an order that came directly from the God to whom Saul prayed and in whom he fervently believed. How could he have done this, forfeiting his right to the crown in the process and triggering a downward spiral of depression and psychotic behaviour that ended only with his death and that of his beloved son Jonathan? Surely we would never have missed this unique opportunity to serve God and to rid the world of the scourge of Amalek!

But maybe we would see things differently if we looked the Saul’s eyes.

First, from the moment Moses became leader of the Jewish people until the time Samuel instructed Saul to kill all the Amalekites, I don’t think we find any examples of the leaders of Israel receiving messages from prophets, telling them what God wants them to do. Between Moses and Saul comes the era of the Judges—leaders of Israel who were also the links in the chain of Torah tradition (Avot 1:1) and who would be expected to make their leadership decisions on the basis of their own understanding, not on what others ordered them to do. Samuel’s instruction to Saul was therefore unprecedented, and this itself may have left the king uncertain as to what he had to do.

Secondly, the Oral Law teaches that we should seek to emulate God’s ways: just as He is gracious and merciful, so too should we be gracious and merciful (Shabbat 133b). Saul may have speculated that a kind and merciful God would surely not seriously contemplate the complete extermination of a nation He had created, or of innocent animals that could be brought to His altar as sacrifices in His honour?

Thirdly, the Zohar (2:154a) teaches that Saul himself was a prophet and, though prophecy was removed from him when he became king, he retained ruach hakodesh—a measure of divine inspiration.  It is possible that his decision to spare Agag and the animals was based on a moment of misplaced inspiration.

Admittedly, even if they are aggregated these hypotheses are not entirely convincing, but they do go some way to seeking an explanation for Saul’s disobedience to the word of God that does not cast him as a wholly wilful rebel against God’s word.