8 When Jacob and his sons had come into Egypt, and were crushed by the Egyptians, the prayers of your fathers came up to the Lord, and the Lord sent Moses and Aaron, who took your fathers out of Egypt, and he put them into this place.
And the Lord was angry with Moses, and said, Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? To my knowledge he is good at talking. And now he is coming out to you: and when he sees you he will be glad in his heart. Let him give ear to your voice, and you will put my words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and with his, teaching you what you have to do. And he will do the talking for you to the people: he will be to you as a mouth and you will be to him as God.
Now after a long time the king of Egypt came to his end: and the children of Israel were crying in their grief under the weight of their work, and their cry for help came to the ears of God. And at the sound of their weeping the agreement which God had made with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob came to his mind.
And Joshua said, By this you will see that the living God is among you, and that he will certainly send out from before you the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Hivite and the Perizzite and the Girgashite and the Amorite and the Jebusite. See, the ark of the agreement of the Lord of all the earth is going over before you into Jordan. So take twelve men out of the tribes of Israel, a man from every tribe. And when the feet of the priests who take up the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, come to rest in the waters of Jordan, the waters of Jordan will be cut off, all the waters flowing down from higher up, and will come together in a mass.
And Jacob went down to Egypt, and came to his end there, and so did our fathers;
And gave them the lands of the nations; and they took the work of the peoples for a heritage;
<To the chief music-maker. Of the sons of Korah Maschil.> It has come to our ears, O God, our fathers have given us the story, of the works which you did in their days, in the old times, Uprooting the nations with your hand, and planting our fathers in their place; cutting down the nations, but increasing the growth of your people. For they did not make the land theirs by their swords, and it was not their arms which kept them safe; but your right hand, and your arm, and the light of your face, because you had pleasure in them.
And Samuel said to the people, The Lord is witness, who gave authority to Moses and Aaron, and who took your fathers up out of the land of Egypt.
Then Jacob went on from Beer-sheba; and the sons of Jacob took their father and their little ones and their wives in the carts which Pharaoh had sent for them. And they took their cattle and all the goods which they had got in the land of Canaan, and came to Egypt, even Jacob and all his seed: His sons and his sons' sons, his daughters and his daughters' sons and all his family he took with him into Egypt.
Take heart and be strong; for you will give to this people for their heritage the land which I gave by an oath to their fathers.
Moses my servant is dead; so now get up! Go over Jordan, you and all this people, into the land which I am giving to them, to the children of Israel. Every place on which you put your foot I have given to you, as I said to Moses. From the waste land and this mountain Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, and all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea, in the west, will be your country.
How our fathers went down into Egypt, and we were living in Egypt for a long time; and the Egyptians were cruel to us and to our fathers:
So that day the Lord gave Israel salvation from the hands of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the sea's edge. And Israel saw the great work which the Lord had done against the Egyptians, and the fear of the Lord came on the people and they had faith in the Lord and in his servant Moses.
These are the same Aaron and Moses to whom the Lord said, Take the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt in their armies.
And the Lord said to Aaron, Go into the waste land and you will see Moses. So he went and came across Moses at the mountain of God, and gave him a kiss. And Moses gave Aaron an account of all the words of the Lord which he had sent him to say, and of all the signs which he had given him orders to do. Then Moses and Aaron went and got together all the chiefs of the children of Israel: And Aaron said to them all the words the Lord had said to Moses, and did the signs before all the people. And the people had faith in them; and hearing that the Lord had taken up the cause of the children of Israel and had seen their troubles, with bent heads they gave him worship.
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Commentary on 1 Samuel 12 Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
CHAPTER 12
1Sa 12:1-5. Samuel Testifies his Integrity.
1-4. Samuel said unto all Israel—This public address was made after the solemn re-instalment of Saul, and before the convention at Gilgal separated. Samuel, having challenged a review of his public life, received a unanimous testimony to the unsullied honor of his personal character, as well as the justice and integrity of his public administration.
5. the Lord is witness against you, and his anointed is witness—that, by their own acknowledgment, he had given them no cause to weary of the divine government by judges, and that, therefore, the blame of desiring a change of government rested with themselves. This was only insinuated, and they did not fully perceive his drift.
1Sa 12:6-16. He Reproves the People for Ingratitude.
7-16. Now therefore stand still, that I may reason with you—The burden of this faithful and uncompromising address was to show them, that though they had obtained the change of government they had so importunely desired, their conduct was highly displeasing to their heavenly King; nevertheless, if they remained faithful to Him and to the principles of the theocracy, they might be delivered from many of the evils to which the new state of things would expose them. And in confirmation of those statements, no less than in evidence of the divine displeasure, a remarkable phenomenon, on the invocation of the prophet, and of which he gave due premonition, took place.
11. Bedan—The Septuagint reads "Barak"; and for "Samuel" some versions read "Samson," which seems more natural than that the prophet should mention himself to the total omission of the greatest of the judges. (Compare Heb 11:32).
1Sa 12:17-25. He Terrifies Them with Thunder in Harvest-time.
17-25. Is it not wheat harvest to-day?—That season in Palestine occurs at the end of June or beginning of July, when it seldom or never rains, and the sky is serene and cloudless. There could not, therefore, have been a stronger or more appropriate proof of a divine mission than the phenomenon of rain and thunder happening, without any prognostics of its approach, upon the prediction of a person professing himself to be a prophet of the Lord, and giving it as an attestation of his words being true. The people regarded it as a miraculous display of divine power, and, panic-struck, implored the prophet to pray for them. Promising to do so, he dispelled their fears. The conduct of Samuel, in this whole affair of the king's appointment, shows him to have been a great and good man who sank all private and personal considerations in disinterested zeal for his country's good and whose last words in public were to warn the people, and their king, of the danger of apostasy and disobedience to God.