God's Stories #7: Samuel
God's Stories #7: Samuel
The prophet who lent his name to two books in the Bible finally gets a movie to himself.
There are two books in the Bible named after Samuel, but the man himself rarely gets his own movie. Usually he’s part of the prologue, maybe even the prologue to the prologue: he’s the guy who anointed and rejected King Saul, and he’s the guy who anointed David and put him on the path to the throne in Saul’s place. Samuel serves a useful dramatic function as a kingmaker of sorts, but filmmakers have generally shown very little interest in his story before the kings came into his life.
Not surprisingly, Robert Savo—the producer behind the ‘God’s Stories’ series of Arabic Bible movies—takes a different approach. Just as he based an entire film on the oft-neglected middle patriarch Isaac, so too he devotes an entire film to the prophet Samuel. A fair chunk of the film is still about Samuel’s relationship with King Saul—and, ultimately, his anointing of David—but to the extent that Saul and David appear in this film, we see them from Samuel’s perspective, not vice versa.
And so this film begins with Samuel as a boy, living with the compassionate but troubled high priest Eli, and it ends with Samuel as an old man, anointing another boy and proclaiming him king. In between, we see how Eli is troubled by the corruption of his adult sons, and we see how Samuel grows up to be disappointed in his adult sons, too. Thus, just as the Isaac movie began and ended with men from two different generations seeking a wife in Haran, so too the Samuel film begins and ends with men from two different generations looking for signs of hope in boys from outside their family who, for whatever reason, seem to have attracted God’s favour.
The film is a pretty straightforward, albeit compressed, adaptation of the biblical account of Samuel’s life, so it isn’t quite the paradigm shift, for me, that Savo’s movies about Abraham and Isaac were. To put this another way, Samuel doesn’t change my perspective on anything so much as it simply moves a supporting character to the foreground and dramatizes more of his life story than I’m used to seeing.
But I do have a few basic points to make about this film:
First, I have to say that I really liked the performances where Eli and the adult Samuel are concerned. Both of them are portrayed as weary old souls who are still trying to do God’s work despite life’s disappointments, and I believed in these characters a little more than I was expecting to. I was especially touched by the way Eli holds young Samuel close to him and accepts the judgment against his family that Samuel has just delivered; it’s not the boy’s fault that God gave him such a bleak message to pass along, after all.
The focus on Eli and Samuel’s disappointment with their sons, and on Eli’s efforts to transmit some sort of wisdom to the young Samuel, is another example of one of the recurring themes in the ‘God’s Stories’ series, which is the passing along of faith and family traditions between the generations.
There’s a light, comical feel to some of these scenes, like the one where young Samuel hears God’s voice and keeps mistaking it for Eli’s. (The priest and the boy are separated by a curtain, and Samuel, assuming that the voice he hears is Eli’s, keeps walking around the curtain to ask what Eli wants.)
The introduction of Saul, the first king of Israel, is also somewhat comical. We first see him in a long tracking shot as he and his servant enter a village square, looking for a donkey and grabbing food as they walk around; Saul really does just seem like some random dude who walked in out of the fields, with no hint of divine destiny or a larger purpose about him. And then, when Samuel formally announces that Saul is the new king, it turns out Saul is hiding among the baggage—which is not a particularly auspicious start for a new royal dynasty or, indeed, a new national system of government.1
The film amplifies Eli’s role a bit, so that he actively protests when his sons help the people of Israel carry the Ark of the Covenant into battle against the Philistines: “This is not a magic box that you can cart around for your own purpose! God is not at your beck and call!” Later, when Eli hears the people cheering, he tells Samuel that the sound they’re hearing is just “empty religious shouting and noise making. Not every shout honours God.” Years later, when the Israelites tell Samuel they want a king, the parallel seems clear: “the people” wanted to take the Ark into battle, which ended in disaster, and now “the people” want a king to rule them, which will also be disastrous.
The battle scenes, incidentally, are extremely brief and extremely small-scale. There’s just enough to let you know that they happened; the real focus remains the effect that these battles have on the faith and fears of the Israelites. I suspect that budget and technical limitations of this sort also account for the fact that the film skips past the one major story about the adult Samuel that doesn’t involve Saul or David, i.e. the one in which Samuel leads (or at least inspires) the Israelites in battle against the Philistines in I Samuel 7.
A recurring theme in this film is whether God is on our side or we are on God’s side. Saul, in particular, keeps talking as though he expects God to be on his side—but Samuel and others try to tell him he’s got it the wrong way around.
Samuel, thankfully, doesn’t have to suffer alone as he dwells on his disappointing, bribe-taking sons and his disappointing, God-disobeying first king. He spends much of the film with a fictitious friend named Jonahdab, who does what he can to lift Samuel’s spirits. Jonahdab’s presence also gives Samuel an opportunity to explain why he does certain things, like bringing a heifer to Bethlehem as if he’s merely going there to perform a sacrifice; in that case, he’s hiding the fact that he’s about to anoint a rival to King Saul’s throne.
The film draws attention to certain biblical details that are so brief I must admit I had forgotten they are in there, like Saul raising a monument to himself on Mt Carmel, the signifance of which Samuel and Jonahdab discuss at some length.
When Samuel chastises Saul for failing to crush the Amalekites as thoroughly as God had commanded, he drags Saul into the tent and throws him to the ground! No deference to Saul’s royal status here! This stands in stark contrast to the way other films have shown Saul engaging in a sort of power struggle with Samuel. Yes, Saul is deeply troubled, but in those films, he does try to show his strength. Here, he seems almost like a chastened teenager.
I love the way one of Jesse’s sons says Samuel has come to Bethlehem, and Jesse replies, “Samuel? God help us!” That fits with how the biblical account says “the elders of the town trembled” when they met Samuel.
Samuel makes the point that “obedience is a way of living, it’s not just something you do, like a sacrifice. God looks at the heart of a man and judges a man by his motives. Many don’t sacrifice with obedience in their hearts.” This is well before Samuel is sent to anoint David—a boy who will, of course, be known as “a man after God’s own heart” (I Samuel 13:14; cf Acts 13:22).
And that about covers it, I think.
Next up: I don’t currently have access to the next film, which is about David, but I do have access to the film about Elijah, so I might go straight to that.
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The ‘God’s Stories’ films can be purchased online at the GII Store. Note: It is possible that some of these titles might not be the upgraded versions of those films.
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An English dub of Samuel is available on Tubi and via the Vision Video YouTube channel, but the dubbing quality isn’t very good, and it appears to be the older version of the film. Watch the “upgraded” version of the film, in Arabic, if you can.
Bits of Samuel appear in this super-trailer for the ‘God’s Stories’ series:
Samuel also has its own trailer:
This subversive take on the beginning of Saul’s reign fits the biblical account pretty well: as some interpreters have pointed out, it’s pretty clear from the text that neither Samuel nor God appreciates the Israelites’ demands for a king, and the choice of Saul is kind of a snub, really, as Saul is from Gibeah (I Samuel 10:26, 15:34, etc.), a town that lay at the epicentre of a major civil war that nearly wiped out the entire tribe of Benjamin (Judges 19-21). So when the biblical Saul says he’s from the smallest family in the smallest tribe (I Samuel 9:21), he’s not just being humble; he’s reminding the reader of his tribe’s ignominious recent past. Think of it this way: the nation went through a major civil war just a generation or two ago, and nearly destroyed the tribe that sparked the war. Then the Israelites said, “We want a king.” And then Samuel and God said, “Oh really? How about a king from that tribe…?”