{"id":58054,"date":"2019-06-23T04:43:02","date_gmt":"2019-06-23T01:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=58054"},"modified":"2023-01-18T19:35:11","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T17:35:11","slug":"sauls-moral-depravity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/sauls-moral-depravity\/","title":{"rendered":"Saul\u2019s Moral Depravity"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[834,394,381,885],"acf":{"old_id":"58054","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":56443,"related_cahpter":"250","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Ruthlessly using his daughter as lure to get the man she loved killed","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the plan that Saul devised, Michal\u2019s uncalculating love became bait to lure her beloved into his death. Saul, we are told, was pleased to hear of his daughter\u2019s love for David, though he was not happy in a way we would expect a father uninvolved in a lethal contest for power to be. Instead, he convinced her to use her inscripted love in a plot to eliminate his rival to the throne&#8230;The narrative emphasizes Michal\u2019s intensely vulnerable condition by its unprecedented ascription of love of a woman for a man. That his daughter would be devastated if his scheme succeeded didn\u2019t enter Saul\u2019s calculus in any way&#8230; <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The plot might possibly have succeeded. This is because Saul, who by now understands the workings of ambition and lust for power, was certain that David, too, would not hesitate to use Michal\u2019s love as an instrument to serve ends of his own. And this assumption proved correct. Here, too, as in the rest of the narrative, David\u2019s inner life, as Robert Alter pointed out, is meticulously kept opaque.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While detailing how everyone was enamoured of David, the narrator avoids mentioning anything about David\u2019s own feelings. Jonatahan loved him deeply. But did David love Jonatahan? Did he love Michal? We don\u2019t know. Opaqueness is intrinsic to the mystique of charisma\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They both wished to use Michal, although David aimed to use her to forge a political alliance, while Saul schemed to use her to murder the man she loved.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While David\u2019s way of treating Michal instrumentally was typical for tradtional societies, Saul\u2019s way was morally depraved. As it turned out, in any case, David won this round, delivering twofold the requested hundred foreskins and obtaining thereby a legal connection to the king\u2019s household that would abet his unspoken ambition to succeed Saul on the throne.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In its essence, love is a noninstrumental relationship. The other whom you love is not solely a means to your end. You care for the other person for his or her own sake. Yet Saul\u2019s treatment of his daughter as an instrument in a plot to kill her beloved violated the protection that parental love is supposed to grant. Michal\u2019s story epitomizes the problem of instrumentalizing essential noninstrumental relations, since it concerns the way in which the quest for power corrupts its wielders and seekers to the point of debasing love itself. Uninhibited political instrumentalization, our author implies, spreads its poisonous reach into what should be the most secure fabric of human relations &#8211; the father&#8217;s love for his children.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Excerpts from <em>The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp.33-4. By permission of the author.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":56668,"id":56668,"title":"halbertal-book cover.jpg","filename":"halbertal-book-cover.jpg.png","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/halbertal-book-cover.jpg.png","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-fine-grained-phenomenology-of-political-power\/halbertal-book-cover-jpg\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"halbertal-book-cover-jpg","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":56661,"date":"2019-06-02 14:58:58","modified":"2019-06-03 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