Was God Telling Samuel to Lie?

But Samuel said, “How can I go? When Saul hears of it, he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer with you, and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’“ 1 Samuel 16:2.

When people of the Bible resort to deceptions, which make a person believe as truth what is not true (Gen 12:10-20), or they lie with the intention to deceive (Acts 5:1-6), or they evade the truth through prevarication (Exod 1:15-22), we rightly ascribe such a behavior to human finiteness and sin. But when faced with 1 Samuel 16:1, 2, the stakes are infinitely higher. There Samuel is told that God has rejected Saul and that Samuel should go and anoint David as king. Samuel, however, is afraid that Saul will kill him. In response God says to Samuel, “Take a heifer with you, and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’“

How strange! Is God telling Samuel to protect his life by deceiving the king or his patrolmen? How can this same God expect truthfulness (Gen 17:1), if He teaches His prophet to lie?

Suggested solutions to such dilemmas – When dealing with such dilemmas some have concluded that: (1) the prohibition against lying or deceiving is not an absolute standard in the Bible; lying is rather considered an “acceptable and generally praiseworthy means for a weaker party to succeed against a stronger power… . God, too, can legitimately encourage prevarication when operating on behalf of an underdog;”¹ (2) lying to a liar is condoned. So lying to Laban is “indirectly justified” (Gen 30:1-43);² (3) higher norms transcend lower norms without abolishing them. So the duty to save life is greater than the duty to be truthful (e.g., Josh 2:5);³ and (4) divine deception is acceptable if it serves a higher end.⁴

But can such conclusions be drawn from the biblical text?

God and integrity – The testimony of Scripture about God’s character challenges the above opinions. In Numbers we read, “God is not man, that he should lie” (Num 23:19). Just a few verses before the episode under consideration, Samuel declares, “The Glory of Israel will not lie” (1 Sam 15:29; see also Ps 89:35; Titus 1:2; and Heb 6:18). Truthfulness characterizes the very nature of God’s being and His way of acting.

The prohibition against lying is an absolute standard of conduct for humans as well. Truth cannot suffer manipulation. God expects truthfulness in the very core of human beings (Ps 51:6), and in their actions (Exod 20:16; Rev 14:5). Without it human life and destiny are in ultimate jeopardy (Lev 19:11; Prov 12:22; Rev 21:8, 27; 22:15). Consequently, the interpretation of the text in 1 Samuel 16:1, 2 requires us to safeguard God’s reputation as a Being of integrity and honesty, expecting the same requirement for humans.

Concealment of truth – The context of 1 Samuel 16 shows the miserable state into which Saul placed himself and his kingdom. Ever since God rejected him as king of Israel (1 Samuel 16:1), even Samuel could not feel safe from the king’s unpredictable rage. So God responded to Samuel’s fear by reminding him that his trip to Bethlehem need not worry him that much. First, priests did go from place to place offering sacrifices, followed by a special feast at which the elders of the place were honored guests. In the case of Bethlehem, the invitation of Jesse and his sons would be nothing unusual. Besides, due to his position as a levitical judge, Samuel could travel even outside of his regular priestly jurisdiction, especially when the sacrifice of a heifer was needed to atone for an unsolved murder in a rural region. This might explain the fear with which the town’s elders met Samuel: “Do you come peaceably?” And he said, “Peaceably” (1 Sam 16:4, 5). Moreover, while sacrifice and the feast that followed it were public events, the anointing happened disconnected from the sacrifice and feasting, in a more private setting. So it happened for Saul’s anointing (1 Sam 9:22-10:8), and also in David’s case, who was anointed “in the midst of his brothers” (1 Sam 16:13). No aspect of the public events could identify Samuel’s ministry in Bethlehem as an anointing ceremony, nor was the taking of a heifer with him connected with the anointing.

God’s advice to His frightened servant (“Say, I have come to sacrifice”) belongs to a different moral category than deception, lying, or prevarication. Keil and Delitzsch comment:

There was no untruth in this, for Samuel was really about to go to a sacrificial festival, and was to invite Jesse’s family to it, and then anoint the one whom Jehovah should point out to him as the chosen one. It was simply a concealment of an unrelated detail of his mission. God has rejected Saul and hence he was not privy to the theocratic dimension of the kingdom of Israel.⁵

Lesson from 1 Samuel 16 – First Samuel 16:1, 2 teaches several lessons:

1. God teaches Samuel how to be a careful custodian of truth. It is only the cynic, says Bonhoeffer, who claims to speak the truth at all times and in all places to all men in the same way. “Every utterance lives and has its home in a particular environment. The word in the family is different from the word in business or in public. The word which has come to life in the warmth of personal relationship is frozen to death in the cold air of public existence.”⁶ Samuel cannot speak in the same way to Saul as he does to David. But in what way should the word be different?

2. God does not teach Samuel to lie. The difference between his word spoken to David and to Saul is not the difference between a truth and a lie. If asked about his purpose, Samuel would not have lied by disclosing only the sacrifice aspect of his visit. Samuel’s reply would have been strictly true. He did offer a sacrifice; and it does not appear that he could have done the work which God had designed unless he had offered this sacrifice, and called the elders of the people together and thus called Jesse’s sons. But he did not tell the principal design of his coming; had he done so, it would have produced only evil and no good: and though no man, in any circumstance, should ever tell a lie, yet, in all circumstances he is not obliged to tell the whole truth, though in every circumstance he must tell nothing but the truth, and in every case so tell the truth that the hearer shall not believe a lie by it.⁷

This is not the same as telling a half-truth.

3. Concealment of truth is not lying, and on some occasions it may be a duty. Walter Kaiser explains, in the case of Samuel, only what was true was presented to Saul. As for Samuel’s ultimate intention, nothing is affirmed or denied, and nothing incited Saul’s mind to probe concerning what may have been Samuel’s ultimate motives for coming to Bethlehem at this time. Had such question been raised an altogether different problem would have confronted Samuel, and he would have to avoid either affirming or denying what those purposes were or face the wrath of Saul in his disclosure.⁸

4. The example of Jesus is instructive here. On more than one occasion Jesus escaped from His enemies (John 8:59; 12:36), and more than once He refrained from answering (Mark 14:61; 15:5; Luke 23:9). There is a time to keep silent, and a time to speak, says the wise man (Eccl 3:7) and no one is obligated to give an answer to every question asked. Yet Jesus was not deceptive either in speech or in silence (1 Pet 2:22). To his disciples He prudently replied on one occasion: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).

“Even life itself should not be purchased with the price of falsehood,” insists Ellen G. White.

By a word or a nod the martyrs might have denied the truth and saved their lives. By consenting to cast a single grain of incense upon the idol altar they might have been saved from the rack, the scaffold, or the cross. But they refused to be false in word or deed, though life was the boon they would receive by doing so… . Their lives were ennobled and elevated in the sight of God because they stood firmly for the truth under the most aggravated circumstances (4T 336).

In describing those who have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, John the revelator underscores that in their mouths no lie was found, for they are spotless” (Rev 14:5). “The path of obedience is the only path that leads to heaven” (Te 60).

Miroslav M. Kiš

References

¹ O. Horn Prouser, “The Truth About Women and Lying,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 61 (1994):15.

² Richard A. Freund, Understanding Jewish Ethics, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 1:81.

³ Norman L. Geisler, Ethics: Alternatives and Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971), 114-136.

⁴ Lee Basham, “Why God Lied to me,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30.2 (2002): 231-249.

⁵ C. F. Keil and F. Dellitzsch, 1 Samuel, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1960), 167, 168.

⁶ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 367.

⁷ Adam Clarke, A Commentary and Critical Notes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1938), 257, 258.

⁸ Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Toward Old Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), 225, 226.

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