earticle

영어

This paper is intended to reconsider the reason for Samuel's being. As generally believed, the role of Samuel is to connect the gap between the times of judges and kings. Thus, Samuel has been widely ignored by the shadows of various judges and the glorious king David even though Samuel had performed many important functions, such as prophet, seer, priest and judge. The only person who can be matched in these functions is Moses. This paper tries to investigate the true purpose of God through the personage Samuel. For this research, one of the literary approaches so-called 'intertextuality' is employed, by which the close relations of the crucial expressions appearing both in Moses' story(Ex. 1-15) and Samuel's(I Sam. 1-8) are investigated. In five stages, Moses and Samuel will be compared. First, their births are related to the 'misery' of a person(people) and God's 'seeing and re- membering.' Second, these two persons must confront the one(s) who "do not know Yahweh." This ignorance invites the catastrophic disaster, which is the third stage. The stories of the ten plagues in Exodus and the Ark of Covenant are matched in terms, expressions and storyline. Fourth, the confrontations of the enemies, Egyptians at the Red-Sea and Philistines at Mizpah take place and God defeats them by the same method. Now the history reaches its peak. At the time of Moses, the next stage after being saved at the Red-Sea by God was 'praising God and worshipping Him as King. Thus, divine kingship was proclaimed. Then at the time of Samuel, the people of Israel had undergone the same salvific power of God. Then, it is obvious that they also proclaimed the kingship of God. But astonishingly they asked for human kingship because of the corruption of Samuel's sons. Samuel failed to discipline his sons for demonstrating divine kingship. Through these literary comparisons, it is apparent that Samuel is not intended to be a bridge figure between judges and kings. Rather, his true role is to reactualize the time of Moses when God was inaugurated as the only King. But Samuel failed and eventually human kings had to come and go. This is why the title of this study is 'Samuel, God's Failed Plan.'

한국어

사무엘은 사사시대를 마감하고 왕을 세우는 징검다리의 역할로 계획되어진 인물이 아니다. 모세의 시대(출 1-15장)와 사무엘의 시대(삼상 1-8장)를 성서간대화법(Intertextua- lity)을 통해 비교해 보면 사무엘은 '인간왕권'이 아닌 모세의 시대와 같이 '여호와의 왕권'을 새롭게 확립해야할 인물이었다. 인간 왕이 세워졌다는 것은 그의 사명이 실패했음을 의미한다.