11 And he said, This is the sort of king who will be your ruler: he will take your sons and make them his servants, his horsemen, and drivers of his war-carriages, and they will go running before his war-carriages;
Then Samuel gave the people the laws of the kingdom, writing them in a book which he put in a safe place before the Lord. And Samuel sent all the people away, every man to his house.
All through the life of Saul there was bitter war against the Philistines; and whenever Saul saw any strong man or any good fighting man, he kept him near himself.
When you have come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, and have taken it for a heritage and are living in it, if it is your desire to have a king over you, like the other nations round about you; Then see that you take as your king the man named by the Lord your God: let your king be one of your countrymen, not a man of another nation who is not one of yourselves. And he is not to get together a great army of horses for himself, or make the people go back to Egypt to get horses for him: because the Lord has said, You will never again go back that way. And he is not to have a great number of wives, for fear that his heart may be turned away; or great wealth of silver and gold. And when he has taken his place on the seat of his kingdom, he is to make in a book a copy of this law, from that which the priests, the Levites, have in their care: And it is to be with him for his reading all the days of his life, so that he may be trained in the fear of the Lord his God to keep and do all the words of this teaching and these laws: So that his heart may not be lifted up over his countrymen, and he may not be turned away from the orders, to one side or the other: but that his life and the lives of his children may be long in his kingdom in Israel.
Then Adonijah, the son of Haggith, lifting himself up in pride, said, I will become king; and he made ready his carriages of war and his horsemen, with fifty runners to go before him.
But Solomon did not put the children of Israel to forced work; they were the men of war, his servants, his captains, and his chiefs, captains of his war-carriages and of his horsemen. These were the chiefs of the overseers of Solomon's work, five hundred and fifty, in authority over the people who did the work.
And Solomon got together war-carriages and horsemen; he had one thousand, four hundred carriages and twelve thousand horsemen, whom he kept, some in the carriage-towns and some with the king at Jerusalem.
Your father put a hard yoke on us: if you will make the conditions under which your father kept us down less cruel, and the weight of the yoke he put on us less hard, then we will be your servants.
And the hand of the Lord was on Elijah; and he made himself strong, and went running before Ahab till they came to Jezreel.
And he put up towers in the waste land and made places for storing water, for he had much cattle, in the low hills and in the table land; and he had farmers and vine-keepers in the mountains and in the fertile land, for he was a lover of farming. In addition, Uzziah had an army of fighting-men who went out to war in bands, as they had been listed by Jeiel the scribe and Maaseiah the ruler, under the authority of Hananiah, one of the king's captains. The heads of families, the strong men of war, were two thousand, six hundred. And under their orders was a trained army of three hundred and seven thousand, five hundred, of great strength in war, helping the king against any who came against him. And Uzziah had all these forces armed with body-covers and spears and head-covers and coats of metal and bows and stones for sending from leather bands. And in Jerusalem he made machines, the invention of expert men, to be placed on the towers and angles of the walls for sending arrows and great stones. And his name was honoured far and wide; for he was greatly helped till he was strong.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on 1 Samuel 8
Commentary on 1 Samuel 8 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 8
Things went so very well with Israel, in the chapter before, under Samuel's administration, that, methinks, it is a pity to find him so quickly, as we do in this chapter, old, and going off, and things working towards a revolution. But so it is; Israel's good days seldom continue long. We have here,
Thus hard is it for people to know when they are well off.
1Sa 8:1-3
Two sad things we find here, but not strange things:-
1Sa 8:4-22
We have here the starting of a matter perfectly new and surprising, which was the setting up of kingly government in Israel. Perhaps the thing had been often talked of among them by those that were given to change and affected that which looked great. But we do not find that it was ever till now publicly proposed and debated. Abimelech was little better than a titular king, though he is said to reign over Israel (Judges 9:22), and perhaps his fall had for a great while rendered the title of king odious in Israel, as that of Tarquinius did among the Romans; but, if it had, by this time the odium was worn off, and some bold steps are here taken towards so great a revolution as that amounted to. Here is,