Samuel
c. 1070–c. 1012 BCE · Ancient Israel
“Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:”
The lineage through Samuel
Inspired(3)
who Samuel shaped
via Common Sense
- Israel's demand for a king in 1 Samuel 8 became, 2,300 years later, the backbone of America's case against monarchy
- Paine quotes the chapter at length in Common Sense, naming the prophet Samuel and Gideon, reading their warnings as God's own disapproval of government by kings
- The Bible's oldest argument with monarchy, repurposed as a revolutionary pamphlet's opening salvo
- Absalom's rebellion against King David in 2 Samuel 13-18 became the scaffold for the sharpest political satire in English verse
- Dryden lifts Achitophel, David, and Absalom by name and maps them point-for-point onto Restoration politics in Absalom and Achitophel
- The Bible's most painful father-and-son tragedy, repurposed as a coded attack on a real-world plot against the crown
via Henry VI, Part 1
- The warrior-judges Deborah and Samson echo forward into Shakespeare's first history play
- He reaches for Judges by name to lend his Joan of Arc and his English soldiers an Old Testament grandeur — the heroic vocabulary of the book's deliverers, not its chronicle of events
Famous Quotes
“How are the mighty fallen!”
“And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.”
“Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.”
“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
About Samuel
Prophet and judge who anointed Israel's first two kings, Saul and David. Traditionally credited with authoring Judges, Ruth, and the books bearing his name, bridging the era of the judges and the monarchy.
Samuel, Ranked
According to 