{"id":58427,"date":"2019-06-27T21:57:35","date_gmt":"2019-06-27T18:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=58427"},"modified":"2023-01-22T11:43:27","modified_gmt":"2023-01-22T09:43:27","slug":"when-the-king-is-made-to-prophesy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/when-the-king-is-made-to-prophesy\/","title":{"rendered":"When The King Is Made To Prophesy"},"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":[394,835,423,885],"acf":{"old_id":"58427","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":56443,"related_cahpter":"251","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"The reigning king was afflicted with vertiginous emotional instability","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Among the many self-defeating dimensions of power politics epitomized in the life of the heroes of Samuel, is the way in which the unconcealed pursuit of power which undermines the very aura of power stands out. In one short and rather peculiar incident, the narrative drives the relationship among loss of self, ecstasy, and exposure to an extreme manifestation. The incident occurs as David takes his first steps as a wanted fugitive seeking refuge. Having been threatened several times at the court of Saul, David realized that he had no chance of surviving in immediate proximity to the king and his loyalists. In his last night at the court, David saved his own life in a hurried escape with the aid of his devoted Michal, and he sought refuge at the home of the prophet Samuel, who had earlier anointed him as the future king:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And David had fled and gotten away and had come to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done to him&#8230; And Saul sent messengers to take David, and they saw a band of prophets in ecstacy with Samuel standing poised over them, and the spirit of God came upon Saul\u2019s messengers and they, too, went into ecstasy&#8230;And Saul himself went to Ramah\u2026 and the spirit of God came upon him, too, and he walked along speaking in ecstasy&#8230;. And he, too, stripped off his clothes, and he, too, went into ecstasy before Samuel and lay naked all that day and all that night (19:18-24).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The king of Israel lay naked in an ecstatic state, stripped of his aura, exposed and incapacitated in front of the prophet and the rival he was desperately plotting to destroy. The verb that captures Saul\u2019s ecstatic state of mind in this passage &#8211; \u201cto prophesy\u201d &#8211; is the same verb that was used in the description of Saul\u2019s murderous rage. It signifies the unraveling of the self that is shared by both states. The frenzied attempt to hold onto power made Saul internally powerless. Naked and therefore stripped out of the regalia of power, his manic breakdown was an outcome of the corrosive effects of this pursuit. Lying naked and dispossessed of all the marks of authority, Saul\u2019s personal weakness and emotional breakdown became manifest. That kind of mental collapse, in its extreme forms, is displayed in two ways &#8211; in an incapacity to hide one\u2019s inner life culminating in the dissolving of the boundaries of the self, and in a radical vacillation of moods and attitudes, caused by a hypersensitivity associating with psychic overexposure and the unraveling of one\u2019s personality. The reigning king was afflicted with undefended transparency and vertiginous emotional instability.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Excerpts from \u201cThe Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel\u201d \u2013 Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp.36-8. 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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