Hank Smith: 00:00:02 Welcome to FollowHIM, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come, Follow Me study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:00:09 And I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:00:11 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:00:12 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:00:15 As together we follow him.

Hank Smith: 00:00:20 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of FollowHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with my, now listen to this closely, my 600 shekel co-host John Bytheway.

John Bytheway: 00:00:34 Shekel, of course, is Hebrew for grams, right? Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:00:38 Yes. My 600 gram co-host. I don’t know if you know that reference, John, 600 shekel.

John Bytheway: 00:00:45 Oh, that was the weight of Goliath’s spear alone.

Hank Smith: 00:00:48 The spear head, the spear head was 600 shekels.

John Bytheway: 00:00:53 Available in the gift shop today as you leave, right.

Hank Smith: 00:00:55 Yeah. John, we are in First Samuel today. We’ve discussed the first few chapters. But now, we’re going to get into the meat of things. And we have a returning guest. Please tell us who’s with us.

John Bytheway: 00:01:08 Well, we are just so glad to have Brother Daniel C. Peterson back again. Before we hit the record button, we’ve been talking and laughing. And we love Brother Peterson. So glad he’s here. And for all of the contributions he has made over the years, in fact, I was going to tell you I have a double cassette recording. It’s called Understanding Islam. I bet when I first got that, I listened to it 10 times.

John Bytheway: 00:01:31 It helped me so much in not only understanding the Book of Mormon, but I had a student who was Muslim. It helped me so much just to see how she treated the Quran, which she brought to class. It was so helpful to me. So, I have to thank you personally, Brother Peterson. He’s been a professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University and founder of the university’s Middle Eastern Text Initiative. And those are not text messages, are those, Hank?

John Bytheway: 00:01:59 He’s published and spoken extensively both on Islamic and LDS subjects. He’s formerly the chairman of the board of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, which has been renamed now as the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His professional work as an Arabist focuses on the Quran and on Islamic philosophical theology. He is the author, among other things, of a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God.

John Bytheway: 00:02:27 He was part of that Witnesses movie, The Interpreter Foundation. In fact, I hope all of our listeners will go to interpreterfoundation.org and look at all of the faithful scholarship that is there and that they can learn and benefit from. He has a blog that my father-in-law loves to read, Sic et Non, which means yes and no. That’s Latin.

Hank Smith: 00:02:49 How do you spell that, John?

John Bytheway: 00:02:51 S-I-C E-T N-O-N. But what’s coming up that’s pretty exciting is they did the Witnesses film about the three witnesses. Now, they’ve got a docudrama called Undaunted. And this, you can go to witnessesofthebookofmormon.org. But I want Dr. Peterson to tell us more about this Undaunted and what it is because I’m pretty excited about this.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:03:14 Let me show you. I don’t know if this is going to be visible or not, but there it is. And DVD will eventually be streaming, and it’s a docudrama. The theatrical film Witnesses was focused on Joseph Smith and the three witnesses. This is not a theatrical film. It goes beyond the three witnesses to the eight witnesses as well. And also, what I call the unofficial or informal witnesses, Mary Whitmer, Emma Smith, Lucy Mack Smith, people like that.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:03:43 Josiah Stowell, other people who saw the plates, had an encounter with an angelic messenger, things like that. And it also incorporates scenes from the Witnesses film, but also scenes filmed especially for it, the story of Mary Whitmer, for example, the experience of Hiram Page with a mob, things like that that are quite dramatically portrayed, and commentary from scholars. We have several of the most prominent LDS historians.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:04:11 We have a retired federal judge talking about the importance of eyewitness testimony, a retired federal prosecutor talking about the same subject. We have the fellow, who made the plates for the movie and who makes them for church visitors’ centers or church films, talking about what it would take to make plates, to fake them in effect. So, just a lot of interesting perspective, including a couple of non-Latter-day Saints, who we wanted to get their perspective on these things. So, I’m excited about it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:04:40 It’s actually the film that I set out to make initially. The theatrical film was an afterthought. We thought, “Hey, this would be a great story. Let’s do that.” The docudrama was the one that we wanted to make. And so, now, it’s finally appearing. About two and a half hours long and two parts. It doesn’t have to be watched all at one sitting. And then, I want to say something else about a series of what we’re calling Reels, which are available on The Interpreter Foundation website.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:05:06 And they’re seven to 12-minute short features, dealing with specific issues. Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, Sidney Rigdon, the Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony, the Kinderhook Plates, James Jesse Strang, issues like that that might come up, questions that might arise while people are thinking about the witnesses. Especially, we’re hoping young people watch them and learn something more about the witnesses than what they have previously known.

John Bytheway: 00:05:32 Oh, that’s so great. I can’t wait to see that. I’ll watch every minute of it probably repeatedly. Let’s see. I think you did a lecture at BYU in speeches once called A scholar Looks at the Book of Mormon. You talked about having a fascination when you were in high school, I think, for guerilla warfare.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:05:51 Yeah, I did. Yeah. For some reason who knows why, teenage perversity, whatever it was, I was really interested in guerilla warfare. So, I read Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung and people like that, theories of guerilla warfare. Not a very reputable hobby, I think. It got me in trouble. At one point, I was in the Honors Program as an undergraduate at BYU. And they had you fill out an individual curriculum planning form each semester.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:06:17 I hated those things. I thought they were a waste of time. And so, one year, I just didn’t do it and they kept pestering me to do it. So, I finally sat down and said, “Okay, what the heck.” It would ask, for example, what is your career objective? Well, some of you may remember the old story of Patty Hearst, the heiress in California, who joined a weird group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. And she described herself when she was captured as an urban guerrilla.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:06:44 And so, I thought, “Ah, that sounds good. I’ll make that my career objective.” So, I said, “Career objective, urban guerrilla.” What courses are you taking toward this? I didn’t figure anybody would read it, right? So, I filled it out and I said, “I’m taking some ROTC courses on weapons and tactics, civil engineering courses on bridge design.” I just picked them out of the catalog and sent it in. Man, I got to meet most of the senior administrators at BYU. So, I was interested in that kind of thing. But then, I was-

Hank Smith: 00:07:18 That’s great.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:07:19 … over teaching Gospel Doctrine in the Jerusalem branch after I’d graduated actually and was beginning… I was about to begin graduate studies. That’s a story in itself. But I was looking at the chapters in the Book of Mormon about the Gadianton robbers. And suddenly, it occurred to me the Gadianton robbers were a textbook case of guerrilla warfare practice.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:07:38 And even in the arrows they made, which eventually led to their at least temporary defeat, that they were… it was like they were following Mao’s playbook. But of course, even if you think Joseph Smith wrote it more than a century before Mao wrote anything, so I’m thinking, “How did Joseph do this? How would he have known anything about it?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:07:56 Joseph’s idea of the military was fife and drum parades about the revolutionary war and dressing up in his lieutenant general’s uniform, reviewing the troops on his horse Charlie in Nauvoo. That was not guerrilla warfare, which is not romantic at all, and yet the Book of Mormon accurately describes it. And I thought, “That is stunning, really.” A small thing, but it’s a throw-away details where you think, “How did he pull this off?”

John Bytheway: 00:08:22 Thank you so much. Because that’s what I remember learning from you was like, yeah, they didn’t occupy territory. They just came out of the mountains, attacked and disappeared again. And when they got too big and they did occupy territory, then that was their downfall, right?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:08:37 That was the big arrow that Mao warned against what he called premature regularization, where you think it’s a mouthful. I don’t know what it is in Chinese, but it’s where you think you’re ready to go toe to toe with a regular army, and you’re really not yet. But he learned from that, that you have to bide your time until you really are ready. Because once you hold territory, then you have to defend it. Up until then, you’re just lightning strikes, attack and withdraw.

John Bytheway: 00:09:04 And blend in.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:09:05 Demoralize the enemy. But the Book of Mormon is perfect on that, just perfect.

Hank Smith: 00:09:10 Dan Peterson is the Hank Aaron of religious educators. It’s a home run every time.

John Bytheway: 00:09:16 We’re two minutes in, right? Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:09:19 Yeah. All right. Well, let’s jump in. We are in First Samuel today. Dan, we’re going to hand it over to you. We’ll throw in some comments here and there. But when we left off with Dr. Strathearn, Samuel was a young man, grew, and the Lord was with him. And then, we pick up continuing with the stories.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:09:37 By Chapter 8, he’s old and he’s got sons that are supposed to assume his role. And it’s the old story. It happened to the other previous high priest. These sons turned out to be corrupt. They’re taking bribes and so on. And so, the elders of Israel come to Samuel and say, “This just isn’t satisfactory,” which is obviously true. And I think Samuel may have a little bit of a problem with that. He never quite admits the problem with his boys. You can imagine that.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:10:06 But Israel says, “This will not do.” But they propose a solution, “We want a king.” And they say in verse 5 of Chapter 8, “Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” There’s a lot packed into that little phrase, “Make us like all the nations.” That’s exactly what they’re not supposed to be. They’re not supposed to be like all the nations. But they were a tribal confederacy at this point. They’re ruled over by judges.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:10:28 And the word in Semitic languages, still in Arabic today, for judging is also related to the word for governing. So, it’s kind of a little bit of both. It’s not just being swearing in on a judge in our modern sense. But they want him to make them a king and Samuel is not pleased because he knows. Well, the Lord will soon tell him that they’re not rejecting him so much, although they are rejecting his family, but his family brought it on themselves. But they’re rejecting the Lord. The thing displeased Samuel, and Samuel prayed under the Lord.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:10:59 And the Lord says unto Samuel, “Hearken unto the voice of the people. Give them what they want for they,” and this is important, verse 7, “for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” I mean, this is a decisive thing and I can’t help but think forward to the appearance of Christ before Pilate when Pilate talks about Jesus claiming to be the king of the Jews, and the crowd responds, “We have no king, but Caesar.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:11:23 And I think, “Man, do you not realize this is an echo of that fateful day when the monarchy of Israel was born, and it displeased Samuel, it displeased the Lord.” The Lord says, “Look, they’ve done this all the time. So, you go ahead and give them what they want.” But verse 9, “Howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them. Show them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. Give them what they want, but tell them what this is going to cost them.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:11:50 Yep. They’re not going to go into this blindly. They need to know in advance what this is going to do. And so, he lays out, “This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you” in verse 11. And it talks about all these things that he will do, abuses really. He’ll draft all your people. He’ll make them his servants. He’ll draft them into his army. He’ll make them work, and cook for him, and take care of his palace, and reap his harvest, and make his instruments of war.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:12:18 He’ll take your daughters, make them bakers and so on. He’ll take your fields, your vineyards, your olive yards, even the best of them. He’ll give them out to his cronies, to his servants, it says here. He’ll take the tenth of your seed. This is probably in addition to the tithe that they’re supposed to pay.

Hank Smith: 00:12:33 Yeah, this is tax.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:12:35 Yeah, it’s a tax. Now, some of us today would say, “Wow, 10%?”

Hank Smith: 00:12:39 I’ll take it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:12:39 Cool.

Hank Smith: 00:12:40 Yeah. It’s a good tax rate.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:12:40 I’ll take it. It’s presumptuous on his part to take the same amount, the same percentage that the Lord takes. So now, it’s not going to be 10%, but 20% that they have to fork over. That begins to be a burden. And he’ll take your best young men, your donkeys. He’ll put them to his work. Take the tenth of your sheep, and you’ll be his servants. And the word for servant is, well, it’s hard to distinguish in ancient Hebrew between servant and slave.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:13:09 And later on, by the way, when Goliath is addressing the Israelite troops, he’ll identify them as the servants of Saul. They should be the servants of the Lord, but it’s striking that that is in fact what they become certainly in the eyes of the Philistines. They’re just the servants of their king. But the people refuse to obey Samuel. They say, “Nay, but we will have a king over us” in verse 19. And they repeat it, “That we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:13:40 I think they’ve thought that this tribal confederation business didn’t work really well, but that’s apparently what the Lord wanted for them. He didn’t want a king. Now, interestingly, later on, when they do have the battle with Goliath, when Saul was chosen, one of the things that makes him stand out is that he’s a full head taller than anybody else. He’s a big guy. But then, they confront Goliath who’s according to most scholars that comes out to about nine feet tall.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:14:06 They want a king to defend them, fight their battles. But when the time comes and their king meets an even bigger guy, he’s terrified. And the whole army of Israel is terrified with him. If you don’t have the Lord fighting your battle, which is I think part of the moral of this whole story with David. David goes out and he’s a relatively little guy, and he’s got no armor, and he defeats Goliath. And we’ll talk about that later. But in fact, your strength doesn’t consist in the fact that you have a tall king because they have an even bigger warrior.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:14:34 The Lord says to Samuel, “Go ahead, hearken unto the voice. Make them a king.”

John Bytheway: 00:14:38 It always surprises me when I read this because his argument sounds so convincing, and he gets right to the end of it. And they say, “Yeah, but we want a king.” It’s like, they didn’t hear any of that. And having tried to raise kids, it’s like, okay, but this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. But they want what they want when they want it.

John Bytheway: 00:14:58 And it’s intriguing to me, too, the idea of hearken unto the voice of the people, which was so important as the reign of the judges would introduce in the Book of Mormon, that do your business by the voice of the people. And I see that, well, that’s a principle here too, but they’ll get the consequences of it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:15:15 They will. So, there are the roots of a democratic idea even in the Old Testament. And the Book of Mormon tells us that people won’t usually choose evil, but sometimes they do. I mean, I know it’s bad form in some circles to cite someone like Hitler, but Hitler was democratically elected. He got a minority of the vote, but the highest single vote total. The people chose evil.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:15:41 The motto of some totalitarians I’ve heard is one man, one vote once. Once you’ve won, boy, that’s it. No more democratic elections. So, when people make a really bad choice, they need to recognize that it may carry bad consequences for them. But they’ve been warned.

Hank Smith: 00:15:58 I use this with my students, this verse 5, make us like all the nations, verse 20, make us like all the nations, the idea of we’re tired of being different. I’m tired of being a peculiar people. We want to be like everybody else. I’m tired of getting up in the morning and going to seminary. I’m tired of everyone looking, there’s the Latter-day Saint kid.

John Bytheway: 00:16:20 Reminds me of the Lord’s preface in the Doctrine and Covenants in Section 1, where it says that their image as an idol in the likeness of the world. I want to be like the world. Every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, which is in the likeness of the world is about what verse 16, I think. And it’s that same thing, I want to be like the world. I want to be like the nations.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:16:41 We don’t like standing out, especially we can say this about teenagers. They want to be part of the group, but it’s true of all of us to an extent. We don’t like being mocked or looked down upon. And I think of the great and spacious building in the Book of Mormon. Well, the people are up there in the building and they’re pointing the finger of mockery, the finger of scorn. And some of the people partaking of the fruit of the tree fall away for that very reason.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:17:05 Man, it’s embarrassing. They’re making fun of me. I don’t like this. And yet the gospel, the kingdom, the church have always got to be out of sync with the world. If they weren’t, that would be a matter for concern.

John Bytheway: 00:17:18 That’s right.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:17:20 The point is not to be weird for the sake of being weird. We should be different. If we’re in lockstep with everybody around us, something has gone seriously wrong. And I can say that when I was growing up, when I began to be active in the church, most of my friends… well, almost none of my friends were active Latter-day Saints. So, I had a ward that didn’t have very many young people in it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:17:37 And I was in a high school with very few Latter-day Saints. And it began to bother me because I began to be very sensitive on certain issues, where if I was three minutes late to sacrament meeting, I felt really terrible. I’d really blown it. My dad wasn’t a member, my mother wasn’t active. And then, I’d think about my friends who were doing, I won’t go much further, but they were doing things a lot worse than being three minutes late for a sacrament meeting.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:18:01 And I thought, “No, they don’t feel any guilt at all. How’s this an improvement?” I feel rotten for doing things that they wouldn’t even think about. You go through that phase where you’re thinking, “Is this really better?” Well, in the long term, of course, it is and in the not very long term, it’s better. But still, there were moments where I thought it’d be so easy to just toss all this aside and just be like my friends.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:18:27 I think of a really sad confession of a really prominent scholar. You’d recognize his name. He’s passed away now. But he told me once how sad he was that he had been critical of the church when his children were growing up. He was active. He was committed. He was a believer. He said, “But somehow I conveyed my criticism and not my faith.” And now, most of his children are disaffected, and he was so sorrowful.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:18:54 And he said, he just hoped the Lord would forgive him for that. It was such a mistake, because he genuinely was committed, believed very explicitly.

Hank Smith: 00:19:03 I’ve noticed that they’re going to choose a king, but the Lord doesn’t shut the door. He says, “All right, let’s do it your way. Let’s go get a king. I’ll help you out in this, even though it’s not going to work out.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:19:15 Yeah, he does. And so, he inspires Samuel to go and choose a king. And so, you get that story in Chapter 9, there’s a man of Benjamin. Benjamin was the smallest of the tribes. It effectively disappears generations later. It merges with the tribe of Judah and just vanishes. But he goes out to visit with a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish. And he has a son whose name was Saul, now a choice young man, it says, and a goodly.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:19:40 And there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier person than he. From his shoulders and upward, he was higher than any of the people. In other words, he was a full head taller than anybody else. He was a big, strong guy. And what they’re looking for really, it seems is kind of like a war leader as much as anything. And so, it makes sense that you look at him like, well, he’s big and he’s strong, like Mormon was large in stature.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:20:05 And in these days, the generals were often right in the thick of battle. They weren’t necessarily back behind the lines plotting strategy. They were out there fighting. And having a guy who’s strong and tall and has long arm span, this makes sense. But he’s pretty humble in a sense, and he is. I mean, he comes from humble circumstances and he actually starts off actually humble. That will change.

Hank Smith: 00:20:27 Yeah. That will change.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:20:29 Yes. And it’s the old line from Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think that’s what happens here. It’s a sad cautionary tale. It starts off with a very domestic or humble everyday case. Saul’s father has some donkeys, and they’re lost. And he sends Saul and a friend… servant to go out and try to find these donkeys. And they look around and they look around and they can’t find them.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:20:57 And finally, they come to a land called Zuph. Saul says, “Let’s go back. I mean, we can’t find them.” But the servant says, “No, there’s in this city a man of God. He’s an honorable man. All that he saith comes surely to pass. Now, let us go thither. Peradventure he can show us our way that we should go.” And it’s interesting to me that Saul doesn’t seem to have heard of him. Samuel is a famous guy. There’s several clues here in these chapters that Saul is maybe not the most spiritually sensitive guy around.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:21:28 His servant knows about Samuel, the great man of God, the seer. Nah, Saul doesn’t know anything about him. So, he says, “Let’s go ask him.” They talk about getting a gift, and we’ll give him something. This reminds me, in a way, of the story of Joseph Smith. One of the things Joseph was known for among people who knew him, I won’t even say in the early days of the church, before the founding of the church, was his ability to find things.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:21:50 There are several stories about that, that he could see things at a distance. This is the kind of thing that apparently Samuel could do, and he’s called the seer. And that was one of his gifts. Very, very humble. I mean, you think, “Surely, there are more exalted things than this that you can do than finding donkeys,” but it is something he can do. And Joseph could do the same sort of thing.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:22:12 And he finally gives it up partly because Joseph Sr. tells him, “You’ve got a great calling. You shouldn’t be wasting it on this kind of nonsense. Stop looking for lost coins and things like that. That’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’ve got this ability, and devote it to God.” There’s a point of contact there between Samuel and Joseph, I think. So, anyway, they encounter Samuel and Samuel’s already been warned, verse 15, the day before.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:22:39 He says, “There will be a man who’ll show up out of the land of Benjamin. And he’s the one that you’re supposed to anoint to be the captain over my people Israel. He may save my people out of the land of the Philistines. I’ve looked upon my people because their cry has come unto me.” Same kind of language you get when Moses is called to deliver the people of Israel out of Egypt. “I’ve heard their cry.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:22:59 And when Samuel saw Saul, the Lord said unto him, “Behold the man whom I spake to thee of, this same shall reign over my people.” So, Samuel gives him this advice. He’s forget about the donkeys, verse 20. They’ve been found. Don’t worry about them. “But what’s really important is you, the desire of Israel,” it says, “on whom is all the desire of Israel. Is it not on thee and on all thy father’s house?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:23:23 Now, the desire of Israel ought to be God, but, oh well, it’s right now on Saul. And Saul responds in a humble way. He says, “Am I not a Benjaminite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel, my family the least of all the families of the tribes of Benjamin? Wherefore then speakest thou so to me?” This is commendable. He starts off well, at least he seems to. And so, you go through this little episode of Samuels calling him and anointing him at the beginning of Chapter 10.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:23:57 And I want to say something about that, that in Chapter 10, Samuel takes a vial of oil and pours it upon his head. Now, Latter-day Saints are aware of anointings. We still believe in use of oil for certain kinds of anointing, not only inside the temple, but outside of the temple. But the word for anointing is related to the word Messiah. The verb to anoint is related to the word Messiah.

Hank Smith: 00:24:21 Anointed one is Messiah, right?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:24:21 Yeah. So, Christos, Christ, that’s the Greek word related to anointing, a chrism people sometimes talk about. The Messiah, the Savior, is the anointed one in the ultimate sense. But in the meantime, kings are anointed. He’s anointed to be a king as well, Jesus is. Kings have been anointed. We’ll have two of them in this set of chapters, Saul and then David, who are anointed with oil literally to become kings.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:24:48 And so, these chapters, I think, ought to be of interest to Latter-day Saints, who know something about oil anointings. And they still do that, I understand, during the coronation of the British Monarch. There’s an anointing with oil, which is carryover from biblical practices, I’m sure, inspired by these very chapters. It’s a literal anointing with oil that makes them literally the anointed one.

Hank Smith: 00:25:10 Man, we start out so well here. You’re thinking, “This is going to work. We found the most humble guy in all of Israel. This is going to work,” and it’s not going to work.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:25:22 Now, unfortunately, it goes to his head. Saul is a tragic story. He’s not simply evil. Some of the later kings of Israel will be simply evil. He wasn’t, but he goes very bad. Has to be removed and his line doesn’t succeed him afterwards, which is terribly sad.

Hank Smith: 00:25:41 This is a lesson in Section 121. As soon as men gets a little power or authority, as they suppose, they can’t handle it. They cannot handle it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:25:49 Yeah. One of the things I love about these stories, most of us probably are not going to have the opportunity to serve as kings of Judah or Israel or anything like that, not in this life, but they’re so human in a way. This is the same thing, it can go to advancement in a business, in a corporation, or advancement, frankly, in the church.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:26:11 We have to be careful that if we’re called to a position, it doesn’t go to our heads, that we don’t become better than others because we have that position or that we think that there’s glory in it for us. That’s not what it’s about. I really like the principle that we should look at the scripture and think, “Boy, look how stupid he was. Look at how wicked he was.” Is there any chance that I’m guilty of this sort of thing? I mean, could this apply to me?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:26:34 I’m not Saul, but have I ever behaved like this? When, man, I succeed at something, I got an appointment or I get an office or win some praise, and I start thinking, “I really am good.”

Hank Smith: 00:26:46 Because if he just could have kept that attitude, if he could have kept that, am I not a Benjamite, the smallest tribe of Israel, my family is the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin? Man, if you could keep that humility, you’re going to be okay, Saul. But he loses that.

John Bytheway: 00:27:02 Moses and Enoch, who we’ve started out with, “All the people hate me. I’m slow of speech,” Enoch says. And they seem to have been able to keep it, I guess. I like the idea of sometimes in the scriptures, you have examples, sometimes you have warnings. This is one of those that starts as an example and sadly ends up at, don’t do this, a warning.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:27:24 Yeah. I remember my brother telling me once that when he was called as a bishop, he said it was probably the darkest day of his life in terms of testimony. Why? Because he said, “I’d always looked up to bishops.”

Hank Smith: 00:27:40 And I found out they’re just like me.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:27:42 Yeah. I was one and I thought, “Really?” But I don’t think that’s a bad attitude to have. Somewhere I’ve seen a line from Heber J. Grant and I can’t remember where, it’s been years, where he said, “If you ever feel totally adequate to a church calling, that’s a real problem. You should feel intimidated, humbled and worried, not to the point of being disabled.” I’m thinking, “Man, I need help because I just can’t do this.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:28:11 If you come to it like, “Man, I’ve been waiting for this position for a long time. Heads are going to roll. I’m really going to make changes here.” Then I think you need to go back to the drawing board a little bit.

Hank Smith: 00:28:24 Anyone who wants to be bishop should be.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:28:26 And I’ve heard that line from general authorities too, who said, “You want this position?” This idea that you should be humbled by the colleague and intimidated by it, rather than exhilarated. “Boy, now I have power and authority, and this is what I deserve. It’s about time they called me.” That’s entirely the wrong attitude.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:28:43 To me, that’s really relevant to these passages that Saul starts off with that attitude and so you think at first, this is going to go well. This is a good guy. But he can’t keep it and that’s the tragedy of Saul. But he’s not a rotten person, but he turns to the worst.

Hank Smith: 00:29:00 The corruption takes hold.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:29:02 Yeah. People are called together, in verse 17, at Mizpah. Samuel wants to manifest to them who has been called. He recites their history to them. “And you’ve rejected your God,” he says again in verse 19. “He saved you. He himself saved you. You didn’t need a king then, but you’ve said unto him, nay, but set a king over us. Now, therefore, present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes and by your thousands. I mean, you’re going to get what you asked for.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:29:28 So, Samuel calls all the tribes of Israel to come near, the tribe of Benjamin has taken. I suppose they cast lots or determined in some way which tribe is relevant. Then, he calls the tribe of Benjamin to come forth and he chooses the family. And Saul is chosen out of the family, and they can’t find him. And this is actually sort of comical in a way. Therefore, they inquired of the Lord further, if the man should yet come thither.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:29:51 And the Lord answered, “Behold, he hath hid himself among the stuff.” Now, what that means is, they’ve all gathered from all over Israel to Mizpah for this big pan-Israelite meeting. Saul is hanging among the baggage. He does not want to be king. He’s hiding out there. So, they ran and fetched him thence.

Hank Smith: 00:30:13 I want to see a sacrament meeting like this. The new bishop is so and so. Where is he? He’s out in the parking lot. He does not want this calling.

John Bytheway: 00:30:23 He’s in the coat closet.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:30:25 So then, they see him and he’s head and shoulders taller than anybody else.

Hank Smith: 00:30:29 You can’t hide.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:30:30 No. And Samuel says, “Do you see him whom the Lord have chosen? There’s none like him among all the people.” And all the people shouted and said, “God save the king,” which sounds very British.

Hank Smith: 00:30:41 Yeah. And you noticed that.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:30:43 And some people really favor him. And then, of course, there’s some, the children of Belial, bad guys, the kind of thugs who say, “Ah, how shall this man save us?” And they despised him, and brought him no presents. But he held his peace. He doesn’t respond to them with anger or anything like that. And there’ll be a really nice illustration of that later.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:31:02 In some ways, I’ve thought sometimes the best candidates for positions might be precisely those who don’t think themselves adequate, who aren’t seeking the position, who would rather on the whole just be left alone or be junior Sunday school teacher or something like that, who don’t want to be bishop or stake president.

Hank Smith: 00:31:21 That’s why six months before my bishop is released, I usually send in a full portfolio on why I should be the next bishop, and it almost guarantees.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:31:32 That’s right. Boy, I’ve got plans.

Hank Smith: 00:31:35 Yeah. Here we go. I’ve got my ties all picked out, president. Here we go.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:31:41 A friend of mine who’s serving as my department chair was eventually chosen to be the dean of my college. He didn’t want to be the dean of the college and so he set out to campaign for it. He put up signs on his door announcing his candidacy for dean and all that sort of thing. And he got a call from the academic vice president who told him, “Look, it’s not going to work. You’re going to be the new dean.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:32:04 And here’s the funny thing. That very same weekend that he was chosen as a dean, he had been my department chair. He was also chosen as… he’d been serving as a bishop of a campus ward. He was also chosen as the stake president of his home stake the same weekend. And here’s the really terrible thing. For some reason, there was a mix up and he was not released as the bishop of the campus ward for about a month after his calling as a stake president of his home stake. And he’s a new dean as well.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:32:38 And I ran into him in the hallway one day shortly after, and I started to make a crack and he said, “Don’t, it’s not funny. My life is over.”

Hank Smith: 00:32:48 It’s not funny. Too soon, too soon.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:32:54 Yeah. But I love the people who get the callings who didn’t want them but rise to the occasion. They do it because they were called. And so far, Saul looks like that kind of guy. And then, we get into Chapter 11 of… that always sounds ominous to me.

John Bytheway: 00:33:10 Chapter 11.

Hank Smith: 00:33:11 Chapter 11.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:33:11 I think I made that correct before entering Chapter 11.

John Bytheway: 00:33:13 The bankruptcy.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:33:14 But we get into the story of Nahash, the Ammonite. This is interesting because there’s actually a passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls that should come at the end of Chapter 10, that gives a little more context for this story. There’s a version of Samuel in 4Q Sam something or rather from Cave 4, the famous cave. If you ever go to the Dead Sea area, the Qumran, and you go out to that overlook and you see the cave right below you, that’s it, that’s the cave this document came from.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:33:41 And it has a few verses that aren’t in our text of the Bible about how Nahash, the Ammonite, had already done this kind of thing. He’d been harassing the Israelites and putting out eyes. And he’s just a really obnoxious, terrible person, right? So, he comes up and he encamps against Jabesh-Gilead. Now, the Ammonites are roughly in the area of today’s Jordan. I mean, they’re on the other side of the Jordan River. The modern city of Amman has that name for a reason. That’s roughly the territory of the Ammonites.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:34:11 And so, Jabesh-Gilead is also on the other side of the Jordan River. Of all the Israelite settlements, it’s exposed because it’s not in the land of Israel proper, what we think of today as the land of Israel. It’s over on the other side. And so, this guy from the Ammonites decides he’s going to come after them. They’re an outlier, off by themselves. And all the men of Jabesh said to him, “Make a covenant with us, and we will serve thee,” because he’s besieging them.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:34:39 And Nahash, the Ammonite, answered them, “On this condition will I make a covenant with you, that I may thrust out all your right eyes, and lay it for reproach upon all Israel.” Now, that’s an attractive deal, right?

John Bytheway: 00:34:51 Brutal.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:34:51 You can see why they’re not very enthused about it. And this is meant not only it’s cruel, but it’s also meant as a humiliation to have an entire population that had to submit to have their right eyes removed. I mean, they in their lives would never overcome the shame of this. I think there also may be a practical reason. These are archers, they have that reputation. Well, if you eliminate one of their eyes, they can’t see as well to be bowman.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:35:16 They will be neutralized and they lose their sense of distance. It’s sadistic and it’s cruel, but it also has a point. It’s a propaganda point and a military point. These days, they allowed gentlemanly warfare in a way, I mean, ironically. The elders said to him, “Give us seven days’ respite, and we’ll send messages unto all the coasts of Israel.” That is coasts, not just the coastal cities, but all the regions of Israel. That’s King James English for all the regions of Israel.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:35:46 “And if there be no man to save us, we’ll come out to thee. I mean, if this is the only choice we have rather than a massacre of everyone in the town, okay, we’ll do it.” So, the messengers come to Gibeah of Saul. That’s an area in north of Jerusalem. They tell the tidings in the ears of the people. All the people lift up their voices and weep because they don’t know what to do. And Saul comes, he’s out with the herd.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:36:07 And this is interesting because he hasn’t yet become the king with a palace. He’s basically a war leader. Well, it hasn’t been a war, an active war up till now. And so, he’s just out doing what he’d done before, handling the herds. And he comes in at the end of the day and says, “What’s the problem?” And they tell him. And then, the spirit of God comes upon Saul. And we might simply say he was filled with the spirit of indignation.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:36:31 It may have been the spirit of God as well, but it’s certainly I think he’s just infuriated. This is a terrible thing to demand of fellow Israelites. It’s an injustice, it’s a humiliation and it’s naked aggression. So, he takes a yoke of oxen. He used them in pieces and he sends them throughout all the coasts of Israel by the hands of messengers saying, “Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:36:58 And the fear of the Lord fell on the people, and they came out with one consent. It’s a very striking image. They cut up these oxen, sends the parts around. It’s a weird thing to do. But it’s a solemn oath, it’s like what you find in the Book of Mormon where the people rend their garments, listening to Captain Moroni. “May we be rent even as our garments are rent.” Use a material object and say, “If we don’t do X, Y and Z, may something happen to us just like what happened to this material thing,” in this case, the oxen.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:37:30 You have it in the Book of Ruth, for example, where repeatedly, you have characters say… and for Samuel too, “The Lord do so to me and more also if I do not do X, Y and Z.” And some commentaries say, “Well, probably then is same image like drawing the hand across the throat, like the image of a sacrifice or something like that.” “The Lord do that to me if I don’t fulfill the oath that I’m making,” which I think is a really, really interesting striking image.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:37:56 It’s not something we would do today, but it’s got some echoes. So, he becomes the war leader they’ve wanted. Gives these great numbers and the people come to him, and he goes and he defeats the Ammonites, just scatters them. And then, verse 12, the people said unto Samuel, “Who is he that said, ‘Shall Saul reign over us?’ Bring the men, that we may put them to death.” Saying, boy, there were people who didn’t think he was up to the job, but look at what he did.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:38:22 What a great leader he’s proven to be. “Let’s put those people to death.” And Saul said, “No, no, there shall not a man be put to death this day, for today the Lord has brought salvation in Israel.” That’s the humble Saul again. “Let there be no recriminations, no revenge, and God did it. I didn’t do it. God did it.” He’s still doing okay at this point. And we admire him. He’s an admirable character at this point.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:38:50 He saves his people, I mean, with the help of God, obviously. But he doesn’t take the credit. He doesn’t take the glory. Samuel says, “Let’s go renew the kingdom.” And they go to Gilgal, which is probably down somewhere by Jericho over by… probably in the minefield over toward the Jordan River now, which is a good place to renew the kingdom because that’s probably where the Israelites had crossed to enter into the land of Israel in the first place.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:39:18 So, they’re renewing things. “Okay. Now, we’re going to have a kingdom.”

Hank Smith: 00:39:21 This reminds me a little bit of Abraham Lincoln choosing not to destroy the south after the end of the war.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:39:31 Yeah. And we do admire people who do that, who have the chance for vengeance and they don’t take it.

Hank Smith: 00:39:36 They don’t take it. Yeah. Is this the author telling us what he used to be like? So, when we get to the point where he becomes-

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:39:44 The contrast becomes clear and it’s just tragic. Yeah. But we can see why the Lord would’ve chosen him, why Samuel would’ve been pleased with him. And even at the end, we’ll get repeated poignant notes about how Samuel never sees him again after he’s rejected. But he mourns for him because he started off as a good man. Samuel regretted establishing a kingdom, a kingship. He didn’t want to establish a monarchy, but Saul was a good guy.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:40:11 Now, Samuel is about to take his leave here in Chapter 12. And it’s an interesting passage to me. He basically goes to the people and says, “All Israel, behold, I’ve given you what you wanted. The king walketh before you. I am old and gray headed.” He says, “Behold, my sons are with you.” I mean, he still brings up his sons. And I’m thinking, “Why do you do that?” Sort of paternal, whatever. Your sons are jerks. It’s a dad, very human to me.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:40:40 “Behold, my sons are with you. And I’ve walked before you from my childhood unto this day.” And that’s really true. This is a prophet whose career began really young, and he’s been a prominent figure in Israel all this time. “Witness against me,” he says in verse 3, “before the Lord, before His anointed, the king.” And then, he asked them, “Have I done wrong things? Have I taken your ox? Have I defrauded you? Have I oppressed anybody?” And they all say, “No.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:41:07 And then, he says in verse 5, “The Lord is witness against you, and his anointed is witness this day, that you have not found ought in my hand.” And they answered, “He is witness.” He reminds me a little bit of Paul in Acts taking his farewell tour of the cities of Asia. He knows he’s not going to see them again. And he goes and he says at one point, “Have I delivered the message to you? Did I deliver to you what the Lord told me to tell you?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:41:32 “You’d be witnesses against yourselves now that I did. I delivered to you everything the Lord commanded me to tell you.” And they said, “Yeah, you did.” In that case, Paul, whose name originally is Saul, by the way, I think he’s probably aware the difficulties are coming. The apostasy is coming. But he wants it certified that he did what he was supposed to do.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:41:51 What happens to them afterwards is not his fault. He carried out his mission, and Samuel is doing the same thing.

Hank Smith: 00:41:58 Do you remember Elder Holland doing that with his Book of Mormon talk? “I want it clear when I stand before the judgment throne of God, I declared the Book of Mormon is true.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:42:08 And I think that’s powerful when a witness, a prophet and apostle bears that solemn testimony that says, “You heard it from me.” I mean, there’s a passage from George Buchanan that I have always been struck by. George Buchanan apparently on several public occasions indicated that he had seen the Savior face to face.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:42:27 And at one point, he’s speaking and he says, “I want you to know that you heard someone today who knows what he is saying, and that you heard him testify that he knows with a certainty that God lives and that Jesus Christ lives, for I have seen him.” And I think it takes a lot to toss that out. This is someone who’s bearing solemn testimony to you as powerfully as any human can.

Hank Smith: 00:42:56 The Lord is witness against you, we’ve done it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:43:00 Yeah. You told the truth. And then, he goes on to give them the message again that you have rebelled against God consistently through your history and you’ve done it again. Verse 12, you said unto me, “Nay, but a king shall reign over us, when the Lord your God was your king.” That’s in verse 12. “But this is what you wanted and the Lord has given you your king, you’ve got him now.” But he says, “I’m going to give you a witness that what I’m saying is true,” verse 16.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:43:25 And this doesn’t stand out as much to us as it might have, or as it would have to them. “Now, therefore stand and see this great thing,” he says in verse 16, “which the Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not wheat harvest today? I will call onto the Lord, and He shall send thunder and rain, that you may perceive and see that your wickedness is great, which you have done in the sight of the Lord in asking your king.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:43:46 So, Samuel called onto the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day. And all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel. Now, what’s so impressive about that? The harvest season is the dry season in Palestine, in Israel. And so, there shouldn’t be thunder and rain on a day like that and certainly not just when Samuel says, “Okay, I’m going to call on it and it’s going to come.” And it does.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:44:10 And so, there’s thunder and rain. And the people say, “Wow, you’re right.” All the people said unto Samuel, “Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die not, for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king.” But Samuel says, “Look, I’m still going to go on praying for you,” verse 23. “God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you. But you have sinned, fear the Lord.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:44:36 “But if you still do wickedly,” he ends the chapter, verse 25, “you shall be consumed, both ye and your king. So, you got to stop doing these things. The Lord is long suffering with you and even I am because I love you. You’re my people, and I’ll pray for you. But against our advice repeatedly, you’ve chosen to go down this path.” Okay. Now, we’re going to see the beginning of the downfall of Saul in Chapter 13.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:45:03 Saul reigned one year. And when he’d reigned two years over Israel, then he begins to do all the things that Samuel has predicted. He’ll start drafting your people. And before we see him, he’s just out there working with the herds. And when the time comes for a war, he calls on people to join him and they fight. Now, he’s going to create a standing army, choosing 3,000 men of Israel. The rest of the people he sent every man to his tent. But he gets a large group together.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:45:30 I mean, the numbers in Israel are probably not that huge in those days. But to have a 3,000 person standing army, that’s got to be maintained. He’s got to tax people to get the funds to feed them and maintain their equipment and all that kind of thing. So, he is beginning to become a king like all the nations, which is exactly what Samuel had said and what they wanted, what they said they wanted.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:45:52 And so then, there’s this really interesting thing where Jonathan goes off and smites the Philistines. And then, the Philistines gather themselves together to fight with Israel, 30,000 chariots and 6,000 horsemen, and people as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude. And they came up and did war. When the people of Israel saw that they were in a strait, it says in verse 6, people were distressed.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:46:17 The people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits. And some of the Hebrews even went over the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead, which is not exactly a friendly territory. They’ve had problems over there before. The people followed him trembling. As for Saul, he’s still in Gilgal. The people who were there who don’t run away are just terrified.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:46:38 And he stays for seven days. Samuel’s going to meet him, but Samuel doesn’t come. And so, here’s where Saul does his first really, really wrong thing and it will become an accelerating series of them. Saul gives up on waiting for Samuel. Samuel said, “I’ll see you there.” And because even before, Saul even calls upon people to join him and Samuel. It’s the king and the prophet fighting together. And he starts off that way.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:47:05 But Saul says, “Okay, he’s not coming. Bring hither a burnt offering to me, and peace offerings.” And he offered the burnt-offering. And then, it came to pass, as soon as he had made an end of offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. Saul went out to meet him, that he might salute him. And Samuel said, “What hast thou done?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:47:22 Saul said, “Because I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that thou camest not within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered themselves together at Michmash. Therefore, said I, the Philistines will come down now upon me to Gilgal, and I have not made supplication unto the Lord. I forced myself therefore, I talked myself into it or I thought this would be a good idea, and offered a burnt offering.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:47:45 Samuel said to Saul, “Thou hast done foolishly. Thou has not kept the commandment of the Lord thy God, which he commanded thee, for now would the Lord have established thy kingdom upon Israel forever. But now thy kingdom shall not continue. The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:48:08 Now, what’s his sin here? He doesn’t have the authority to do this kind of an offering, and he takes it upon himself. On one level, you can say, “Well, it wasn’t ill intended, but it was really bad judgment, and it was usurpation of Samuel’s divine authority. It’s like committing a sin. It is committing a sin of usurping priesthood authority.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:48:30 I would say, look, if you’re waiting for someone to give a blessing and he doesn’t come, and you don’t have the priesthood, you still shouldn’t step forward and say, “By the authority of the priesthood, I give you a blessing.” We don’t have the authority to step in on behalf of a church leader. If I don’t have the approval to baptize someone and I don’t have the keys, I can’t just go ahead and baptize. You wait. There’s an order in the kingdom, and Saul violated it.

Hank Smith: 00:48:54 And he knew it. He knew it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:48:56 Yep. He did. Now, you can understand his reasoning. This is a transition step to becoming bad, but it was bad nonetheless. And so, Samuel says to him, “Look, okay, you’re not going to be overthrown as king, but your son won’t succeed you. Your line won’t succeed you after you. You’ve lost that privilege of becoming the sire of a line of kings,” and we would say from our point of view, of being in the line of the Messiah himself.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:49:25 That will become the Davidic house, the role of the Davidic house, not the house of Saul, son of Kish. It could have been apparently, but it wasn’t. It’s a crucial misstep, not the last one. And it may show a certain degree of arrogance, or “I’m the king so I can step forward and do this act. I mean, we’re in tight circumstances, we don’t need to wait.” But he doesn’t have the right. King though he is, he shouldn’t do this.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:49:48 It doesn’t matter what your status is outside of the church. In the church, there’s an order. And you may be a corporate president, and your bishop may be, who knows what, some really humble profession. But still in the church, he’s the boss in your ward.

John Bytheway: 00:50:04 One interesting thing happens at military academies and so forth, when you’ve got a sergeant being the bishop over a captain or a major who’s his first or second counselor. That sort of thing happens sometimes in the military where all those ranks disappear when you’re in an ecclesiastical setting.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:50:24 I remember talking to someone on my mission who was a serviceman from Germany, an American serviceman. And I asked him the question, “So, does it ever happen that a general as a member of a stake and the stake president is of a much lower rank?” He said, “Oh, yeah, that happens.” And I said, “How does it work?” He said, “Really well, because we understand that, the general commands on six days a week in non-ecclesiastical things.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:50:50 One of the lines I loved most from that meeting with Elder Gong, as I say, it was Elder Gong, and his wife, and three others of us for a couple of hours talking about an interesting issue. And toward the end of it, one of our number, the non-general authority and general authority wife contingent, one of them said to Elder Gong, “Well, we’re really grateful for certain things that we’d been talking about and what you do.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:51:10 He says, “I can tell you that we in the pews really appreciate this.” And Elder Gong came back really quickly and very mildly and said, “We’re all in the pews.”

Hank Smith: 00:51:21 Dan, in that verse 12, “I forced myself, therefore,” is this a rationalization of, “Look, I had no choice. I had to do this.” What’s that I forced myself?

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:51:32 I think that’s what it suggests. “I talked myself into it.” I mean, it suggests to me that he thought about it. He wanted to wait, but then he made this decision and it was a wrong decision. Again, I think it’s a transitional bad deed. This is not evil Saul. This is pretty good Saul, but flawed Saul, thinking about this and thinking, “Wow, we’re in a tight military situation. I need the blessing of God. Samuel hasn’t come. He’s a little late. I think in a tight circumstance like this, I can do it.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:52:03 But there are certain circumstances where, no, it isn’t fine to step forward and do something like this. What the Lord has always been trying to teach the Israelites, I think, is his exactness in obeying his commandments. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of the little commandments about not eating this or eating that. It’s to teach us that you keep these rules.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:52:24 I’ll say this about our own observance of the word of wisdom. I think the word of wisdom is valuable in and of itself. Obviously, it’s a good code of health and so on. But it also teaches us obedience. People have asked me, “Do you really think that drinking a cup of coffee would send you to hell?” And my answer is, “Probably not you. I mean, if you’re a non-member, I’m sure it wouldn’t. But me? Maybe. Maybe.” Because it’s not so much the cup of coffee, that’s nothing.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:52:54 It’s the attitude that would say, “I can drink this and it really doesn’t matter.” Yes, it does matter, not intrinsically. People make it more difficult, sometimes come up with these ridiculous thought experiments. “Well, what if you were in the desert dying of thirst and all you had was a thermos of coffee?” I’d imagine at a certain point, the Lord is going to say, “Go ahead and drink the coffee, come on.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:53:15 But that’s not the same thing. It’s the light attitude that says, “I can do this. I can violate a little bit of the commandment. I can shave a little bit off the rules and I’ll be fine.” Well, if you start shaving the rules a little bit, then you shave them more, and then more, and pretty soon there are no rules. So, the Lord is trying to teach his people to obey with exactness and honor, if you will.

Hank Smith: 00:53:37 This small decision is going to lead to worse and worse decisions until Saul is completely off the cliff here.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:53:45 I’m guessing that in a way that’s one of the points in the military of teaching people marching and drills and things like that. It’s to accustom the idea that in more weighty issues than just marching down the parade field, when the order comes, you do it. Because you don’t want an army where everybody’s saying, “I don’t know. Maybe I will try to take that bridge, or maybe I won’t. Maybe my group will go north instead of south or something like that.” No.

Hank Smith: 00:54:09 I figured it would be okay. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 00:54:12 I don’t really feel like doing that today.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:54:14 If you’ve ever been in an organization where you have people working under you, I can tell you it’s such a good feeling when you have people that you can agree on an assignment with, and you just know it’ll be taken care of. You don’t have to think about it anymore. It will be done because that person is really reliable, and that’s what you want. And Saul doesn’t prove reliable here.

John Bytheway: 00:54:35 And even I think that the idea of exactness, but also the idea of, will you keep a commandment whether or not it makes sense to you at the time? It’s the Adam thing. “I know not, save the Lord commanded me.” And the sequence is nice. Okay. Then, Adam had it explained to him. Then, maybe we’ll have that explained to us. Maybe we won’t. What will we do if it doesn’t make sense to us? It’s a test.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:55:02 There’s a story that Harold B. Lee told about his childhood that I think is really interesting, about him running out in a field in Idaho, where he was growing up, and he came up to a fence that bounded the area that he was in and he suddenly heard a voice. He said it was as clear a voice as he had ever heard, an audible voice that said, “Do not climb the fence.” And he said, “I looked around, I couldn’t see anybody. I never did see anybody there.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:55:28 But he said, “The voice was absolutely clear.” And he said, “So, I turned away and I didn’t climb the fence.” And he said, “I don’t know what was on the other side of the fence, and I won’t know in this life.” He said, “But I didn’t climb the fence, and I learned a lot from that.” If the voice comes and says, “Don’t climb the fence,” don’t climb the fence.

Hank Smith: 00:55:48 And I noticed that Samuel says, “What have you done?” And Saul says, “I saw the people, they were scattered. It’s not my fault. It’s their fault.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:55:56 Yeah. He’ll do that again when he pulls it again. “It’s the people. The people made me do it. It’s not my fault.”

Hank Smith: 00:56:02 Yeah. What if he just would’ve said, “I did wrong? What have you done?” And Saul said, “I did wrong, but I had to. It was someone else’s fault.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:56:12 I think that covers a multitude of sins. I think quite often, if we do something wrong, we just frankly acknowledge it. We say, “Yeah, I’m sorry, that was a mistake. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” Then, it can be overlooked. But if it begins to suggest a pattern of behavior, “I don’t take responsibility, and I make bad decisions and so on,” then people lose confidence. The Lord loses confidence in you.

Hank Smith: 00:56:36 Oh, I’m just looking at it. Because this is the turning point, and then it’s going to continue later. I just was analyzing that turning point. All right. Let’s keep going.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:56:45 Yeah. Chapter 14, this story of Jonathan smiting the garrison of the Philistines. It’s a curious story. Jonathan sets off. He’s an adventurous sort, strapping young lad. I’m guessing that if Saul was big, Jonathan might have been too. And he’s been raised to be a warrior as the son of the king. And he goes over to take on a Philistine garrison. And he goes with just his armor-bearer. It says they discovered themselves under the Philistines, that’s old King James English for it.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:57:14 They reveal themselves. They’re not hiding anymore. They just stand right out, separated by some distance and say, “Here we are.” And the Israelites have been hiding in under rocks, and in caverns, and things like that. So, the Philistines get a kick out of it. And the Philistines are feeling pretty adequate to the case. “Here are two jerks challenging us. What’s wrong with these two idiots?”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:57:37 And he says to his armor-bearer, “If they say, ‘Stay there and we’ll come to you,’ then we’ll stay here. But if they say, ‘Come on over, boys,’ then we’ll know that they’ve been delivered into our hands.” And that’s what they do. Verse 11, both of them discovered themselves under the garrison of the Philistines. And the Philistines said, “Behold.” This is such stately King James language. I think you have to understand that it’s probably not as stately.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:58:01 “Behold, the Hebrews come forth out of the holes where they had hid themselves,” as “Look, the Hebrews are coming out of the holes they’ve been hiding in. We’ve had them intimidated. Now, these two guys have come out.” And the men at the garrison answered Jonathan and his armor-bearer and said, “Come up to us, and we’ll show you a thing.” Or it’s like, “Come on over, we’ll teach you a lesson. We’ll take care of you.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:58:24 And Jonathan said, “Okay, that was the sign I was looking for. They’ve been delivered into our hands.” And he goes after them, they’re very effective. It causes a panic among the Philistines. And the Philistines run and Saul sees it. People can see the Philistine garrison is melting away. And so, Saul calls for some auguring. He wants an oracle to be taken. “Bring the arc over.” The arc was with them.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:58:53 And so, they check and then Paul… Saul, excuse me, Saul joins up together and they go into battle. It’s a spectacular route. So, the Lord saved Israel that day. And the men of Israel were distressed that day though for one reason. Here’s where another bad decision on the part of Saul comes into play. Saul had adjured the people, verse 24, saying, “Cursed be the man that eateth any food until evening, that I may be avenged on mine enemies.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:59:20 Now, notice the way he personalizes it too. “It’s mine enemies. I should be avenged, me, me, me.” It just this stupid rule. It’s a really hot day probably. And he says, “Nobody should eat,” and I’m guessing maybe nobody should drink, “for the remainder of this day until I’ve been thoroughly avenged in all my enemies.” But guess who didn’t hear him make that oath? That’s a very solemn oath.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 00:59:43 Jonathan didn’t hear it because he was out fighting with the Philistines. He wasn’t there. So, it says along the way they’ve been commanded not to eat. But Jonathan comes across a honeycomb, and he’s hungry, and it’s been a long day of battle. He needs some calories. And so, he eats a little bit of the honey, totally innocently. And I mean, he’s the hero of the day, and yet he violated his dad’s command.

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 01:00:08 And this shows, by the way, a stupidly literalistic way of understanding a command. I mean, most of us would say reasonably, “Well, look, if he didn’t hear it, he’s not guilty of violating it.” But Saul won’t give him that way out. And so, Jonathan says, he responds to this when they tell him, “Your father put the people under an oath that they not eat anything today.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 01:00:30 And Jonathan says… Jonathan comes out of this so often as the better man than his father, Saul, especially as Saul becomes worse. But Jonathan says, “My father hath troubled the land.” What he’s saying is, “This is a bad decision on my dad’s part. Look what it did for me. I mean, I got some calories in me.” He wouldn’t think of as modern terms. “Because I’ve eaten something, I feel better. I’ve got a little more energy now and we can carry on with the battle.”

Dr. Daniel Peterson: 01:00:55 He said, “Do you not see how much better if the people would’ve been able to eat today of the food that they came across in the camp of the Philistines, that they would’ve been more effective rather than less?” And so, they have a tremendous victory. Then, the people go out of control.

Hank Smith: 01:01:13 Please join us for part two of this podcast.