Commentaria in I Regum (I Samuelis)
12. BUT SEEING THAT NAAS, etc., YOU SAID: A KING SHALL REIGN OVER US.—From this the cause is clear why the Hebrews asked a king: it was the fear of the imminent Naas, as I said above.
14. IF YOU WILL FEAR THE LORD,—by reverencing, loving, worshipping, obeying him, and taking care that in no matter you offend him by transgressing his law. For, as St. Chrysostom says on Psalm 127: “There is no evil which the fear of God does not extinguish. As fire, whatever iron it takes, twisted or consumed with rust, makes it bright and beautiful, wiping off the rust, and corrects most perfectly whatever in it was perverse and bent; so the fear of God, even in a short time, does all things, and suffers those who have been dyed by it to be broken by nothing human.”
Elegantly and forcibly Tertullian, book On Prescription, chap. 43: “Where,” he says, “is the fear of God, there is honorable gravity, and anxious diligence, and solicitous care, and tested election, and deliberate communication, and deserved promotion, and religious subjection, and devoted attendance, and modest procession, and a united Church, and all things God’s.”
YOU... FOLLOWING THE LORD,—as if to say: You will show in deed that you follow the Lord with your whole heart, as sons follow a father in all things, soldiers a leader, subjects a king. And hence you will obtain great glory: “For it is great glory to follow the Lord,” as Ecclesiasticus says, chap. 23, verse 38, and likewise great advantage. For God will protect, prosper and bless you as his followers and worshippers. Whence the Septuagint add, and he will deliver you.
15. BUT IF YOU WILL NOT HEARKEN TO THE VOICE OF THE LORD, BUT WILL REBEL AGAINST HIS WORDS,—First, some with Hugo explain thus: “If you shall deem the precepts of God harsh and difficult, or impossible, in the keeping.” For, as St. Gregory says: “Good works are to be held in the love of sweetness, not in the estimation of harshness; for those to whom what is commanded by the Lord always seems hard and harsh gradually fall away and fail.” And a little after: “If you do not make bitter,” he says, “the mouth of the Lord, as if to say: If you carry out to the end of life with cheerfulness those precepts of charity which are harsh to the carnal.” For he is a slothful and wicked servant “who feigneth labor in a commandment,” Psalm 93:20. Second, the same Hugo: as if to say: “If you make God speak harshly on account of your sins,” so that he says: “Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.”
Third, and genuinely, the Hebrew is, but ye shall have embittered or made bitter the mouth of the Lord, that is, if you shall have irritated and provoked the Lord to anger; for anger is wont to show itself in a bitter mouth and countenance, and in the bitter and harsh words that proceed from it; whence the Chaldee renders, and you shall have rebelled against the words of the Lord. Again, by the mouth and words of the Lord can be understood the laws and precepts of God, which he himself uttered with his own mouth, as if to say: “If you shall have offended the law, and provoked it to anger.” It is a prosopopoeia; for to the inanimate law are attributed soul, sense and anger. For the law seems to be angry with the wicked, while it is violated and despised by them, and therefore, as if angry, it threatens its violators with the threats and penalties enacted in it. But by the law is understood God the lawgiver, who is angry with transgressors and inflicts on them the penalties established in the law. This sense therefore returns to the same as the former.
THE HAND OF THE LORD SHALL BE UPON YOU, AND UPON YOUR FATHERS.—First, the Chaldee explains thus: The plague of the Lord will be upon you, as that which was upon your fathers when they rebelled against God in the desert. So also Vatablus: He will afflict you, he says, as he afflicted your ancestors when they were disobedient. Lyranus adds: The hand of the Lord, he says, will be upon you in the future, as it was upon your fathers in the past. And the Carthusian: “Some,” he says, “explain thus: So shall it be upon you hereafter, and so shall you be punished, as it was before, and as your fathers the transgressors were punished.” For the Hebrew “and,” when it couples like things, has the same force as “as,” as is clear in Proverbs.
Second, Dionysius, as if to say: “Both you,” he says, “and your fathers, who lead you to evil or do not restrain you from vices, shall incur the due penalties of God, or upon your deceased fathers who are condemned; whose damnation or torment will be increased by your iniquities and condemnations, inasmuch as they furnished you the occasion and example of sinning, and the penalty of one damned overflows upon another.” This sense, if understood of the living, is most plain; if of the dead, it seems more remote, and sought further and higher than the gross mind of the Hebrews would reach.
Third, “The hand of the Lord shall be upon you and upon your fathers,” that is, your princes; for the prince is the father of the country, as Aristotle testifies, book 8 of the Ethics chap. 11; whence Homer calls king Agamemnon “father and shepherd of the peoples.” And the Romans called their senators, who ruled all things, Conscript Fathers; and often in Scripture princes are called Fathers. So St. Gregory, Abulensis, Cajetan. Whence the Septuagint render, upon you, and upon your king. Hear Seneca, book 1 On Clemency, chap. 14:
“This which is to be done by a parent is to be done also by a prince, whom we have called Father of his country, that he may know that a paternal power has been given to him, which is most temperate, consulting for his children and putting his own interests after theirs. Slowly may a father cut off his own members, and when he has cut off wish to restore them, and in cutting off groan, having hesitated much and long.”
17. IS IT NOT NOW WHEAT HARVEST? I WILL CALL UPON THE LORD, AND HE WILL SEND THUNDER (voices) AND RAIN.—This was a miracle, as St. Gregory, Lyranus, Hugo, Abulensis, Vatablus, Dionysius, Cajetan and the rest teach. For, as St. Jerome writes, an eyewitness, on Amos chap. 4, verse 7: “Have we ever seen rains at the end of the month of June, or in the month of July, in these provinces, and especially in Judea? Finally in the books of Kings, as a great sign and portent, in the days of summer and harvest, at the prayer of Samuel, rains were stirred up.”
Again, because when the sky was clear Samuel by his prayers suddenly drew from heaven these thunders and rains, and obtained from God that it be done miraculously. Hear the Author of the Wonders of Holy Scripture, book 2, chap. 9, in St. Augustine, tome 3: “Samuel invoking the Lord, when the people asked a king for themselves, the Lord thundered by rains and dreadful voices, by which the people, who had heard that they had repelled the Lord from reigning over them, might understand. Which crashes the Lord again quieted at the prayer of Samuel, after he saw within the repentance of the people over this matter.”
The same Author adds that Samuel, the people repenting, soon stopped the rains and cleared the sky; which was a new miracle. Hence Clement of Alexandria, book 6 of the Stromata, blames the Greeks for having distorted this history of Samuel to Aeacus, feigning that he by his prayers obtained rain from God, by which the crops dead from drought revived.