followHIM - 1 Samuel 8-18 -- Part 1 : Dr. Daniel Peterson

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Why do the Israelites demand a king? Dr. Daniel Peterson explores the rise and downfall of Saul, Saul’s complicated relationship with David, and how pride often comes before a spiritual fall.Please rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive ProducersDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing & SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Show Notes/TranscriptsJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Rough Video EditorAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsKrystal Roberts: French TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-piano

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John, by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow him. Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I'm here with my, now listen to this closely, my 600 shekel co-host, John, by the way. Shekel, of course, is Hebrew for grams, right? Yeah. Yes, this is my 600 gram co-host. I don't know if you know that reference, John, 600 shekels. Oh, that was the weight of Goliath's spear alone. The spear head. The spear head was 600 shekels.

Available in the gift shop today as you leave, right. Yeah. John, we are in 1 Samuel today. We've discussed the first few chapters, but now we're going to get into the meat of things, and we have a returning guest. Please tell us who's with us. Well, we are just so glad to have Brother Daniel C. Peterson back again. Before we hit the record button, we've been talking and laughing, and we love Brother Peterson. So glad he's here. And for all of the contributions he has made over the years, in fact, I was going to tell you, I have a double cassette recording. It's called Understanding Islam. I bet when I first got that, I listened to it 10 times. It helped me so much in not only understanding the Book of Mormon, but I had a student who was a Muslim. It helped me so much just to see how she treated the Quran,

which she brought to class. It was so helpful to me. So, I have to thank you personally. Brother Peterson has been a professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University and founder of the university's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. And those are not text messages, are those, Hank? He's published and spoken extensively both on Islamic and LDS subjects. He's formerly the chairman of the board of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, which has been renamed now the Neil A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His professional work as an Arabist focuses on the Koran and on Islamic philosophical theology. He's the author, among other things, of a biography entitled Muhammad, Prophet of God. He was part of that Witnesses movie, the Interpreter Foundation.

In fact, I hope all of our listeners will go to interpreterfoundation.org and look at all of the faithful scholarship that is there and that they can learn and benefit from. He has a blog that my father-in-law loves to read, Sic et Non, which means yes and no, that's Latin. How do you spell that, John? S-I-C-E-T-N-O-N. But what's coming up that's pretty exciting is they did the Witnesses film about the three Witnesses.

Now they've got kind of a docudrama called Undaunted. And this you can go to witnessesofthebookofmormon.org. But I want Dr. Peterson to tell us more about this Undaunted and what it is, because I'm pretty excited about this. Let me show you. I don't know if this is going to be visible or not, but there it is. And DVD will eventually be streaming. And it's a docudrama. The theatrical film Witnesses was focused on Joseph Smith and the three witnesses. This is not a theatrical film. It goes beyond the three witnesses to the eight witnesses as well. And also what I call the unofficial or informal witnesses, Mary Whitmer,

Emma Smith, Lucy Mack Smith, people like that, Josiah Stowell, other people who saw the place, had an encounter with an angelic messenger, things like that. And it also incorporates scenes from the Witnesses film, but also scenes filmed specially for it. The story of Mary Whitmer, for example, the experience of Hiram Page with a mob, things like that that are quite dramatically portrayed. And commentary from scholars. We have several of the most prominent LDS historians. We have a retired federal judge talking about the importance of eyewitness testimony, a retired federal prosecutor talking about the same subject. We have the fellow who made the plates for the movie and who makes them for church visitor centers or church films, talking about what it would take to make plates, to fake them

in effect. So just a lot of interesting perspective, including a couple of non-Latter-day saints who we wanted to get their perspective on these things. So I'm excited about it. It's actually the film that I set out to make initially, the theatrical film, was kind of an afterthought. We thought, hey, this would be a great story. Let's do that. The docudrama was the one that we wanted to make. And so now it's finally appearing. About two and a half hours long in two parts.

It doesn't have to be watched all at one sitting. And then I want to say something else about a series of what we're calling Reels, which are available on the Interpreter Foundation website. And they are seven to 12-minute short features dealing with specific issues. Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, Sidney Rigdon, the reliability of eyewitness testimony, the Kinderhook plates, James J. Strang,

issues like that that might come up, questions that might arise while people are thinking about the witnesses. Especially we're hoping young people watch them and learn something more about the witnesses than what they have previously known. Oh, that's so great. I can't wait to see that. I'll watch every minute of it probably repeatedly. Let's see, I think you did a lecture at BYU in a speeches once called A Scholar Looks at the Book of Mormon. You talked about having a fascination when you were in high school, I think, for guerrilla warfare. Yeah, I did. For some reason, who knows why, teenage perversity, whatever it was,

I was really interested in guerrilla warfare. So I read Che Guevara and Mao Zedong and people like that, theorists of guerrilla warfare. Not a very reputable hobby, I think. It got me in trouble. At one point, I was in the honors program as an undergraduate at BYU, and they had you fill out an individual curriculum planning form each semester. I hated those things. I thought they were a waste of time. And so one year, I just didn't do it, and they kept pestering me to do it. So I finally sat down and said, okay, what the heck? It would ask, you know, for example,

what is your career objective? Well, some of you may remember the old story of Patty Hearst, the heiress in California who joined a weird group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. And she described herself when she was captured as an urban guerrilla. And so I thought, ah, that sounds good. I'll make that my career objective. So I said, career objective, urban guerrilla. What courses are you taking toward this? I didn't figure anybody would read it, right? So I filled it out and I said, I'm taking some ROTC courses on weapons and tactics, civil engineering courses on bridge design. You know, I just picked them out of the catalog and sent it in. Man, I got to meet most of the senior administrators at BYU.

So, you know, I was interested in that kind of thing. But then I was over teaching gospel doctrine in the Jerusalem branch after I'd graduated, actually, and was beginning. I was about to begin graduate studies. That's a story in itself. But I was looking at the chapters in the Book of Mormon about the Gadiant robbers, and suddenly it occurred to me the Gadiant robbers were a textbook case of guerrilla warfare practice. And even in the errors they made, which eventually led to their at least temporary defeat, that it was like they

were following Mao's playbook. But of course, even if you think Joseph Smith wrote it more than a century before Mao wrote anything, so I'm thinking, how did Joseph do this? How would he have known anything about it? Joseph's idea of the military was fife and drum parades about the Revolutionary War and dressing up in his lieutenant general's uniform, reviewing the troops on his horse, Charlie, in Nauvoo. That was not guerrilla warfare, which is not romantic at all. And yet the Book of Mormon accurately describes it. And I thought, that is stunning,

really. A small thing, but it's those throwaway details where you think, how did he pull this off? Thank you so much. Because that's what I remember learning from you was like, yeah, they didn't occupy territory. They just came out of the mountains, attacked and disappeared again. And when they got too big and they did occupy territory, then that was their downfall, right? That was the big error that Mao warned against, what he called premature regularization, where you think it's a mouthful. I don't know what it is in Chinese, but it's where you think you're ready to go toe-to-toe with a regular army, and you're really not yet. But he learned from that that you have to bide your time until you really are ready,

because once you hold territory, then you have to defend it. Up until then, you're just lightning strikes, attack and withdraw. And blend in. Demoralize the enemy. But the Book of Mormon is perfect on that. Just perfect. Dan Peterson is the Hank Aaron of religious educators. It's a home run every time.

Or two minutes in, right? Yeah. All right. Well, let's jump in. We are in 1 Samuel today. Dan, we're going to kind of hand it over to you. We'll throw in some comments here and there. But when we left off with Dr. Strathairn, Samuel was a young man, grew, and the Lord was with him. And then we pick up continuing with the stories.

By chapter 8, he's old, and he's got sons that are supposed to sort of assume his role, and it's the old story. It happened to the other previous high priest. These sons turned out to be corrupt. They're taking bribes and so on. And so the elders of Israel come to Samuel and say, this just isn't satisfactory, which is obviously true. And I think Samuel may have a little bit of a problem with that. He never quite admits the problem with his boys. You can imagine that. But Israel says, this will not do. But they propose a solution. We want a king. And they say in verse 5 of chapter 8, now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. There's a lot packed into that little phrase, make us like all the nations. That's exactly what they're not supposed to be. They're not supposed to be like all the nations. But they were a tribal confederacy at this point.

They were ruled over by judges. And the word in Semitic languages, still in Arabic today, for judging is also related to the word for governing. So it's kind of a little bit of both. It's not just being serving a judge in our modern sense. But they want him to make them a king. And Samuel's not pleased because he knows, well, the Lord will soon tell him that they're not rejecting him so much, although they are kind of rejecting his family, but his family brought it on themselves. But they're rejecting the Lord.

The thing displeased Samuel, and Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord says unto Samuel, hearken unto the voice of the people, give them what they want. For they, and this is important, verse 7, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. I mean, this is a decisive thing, and I can't help but think forward to the appearance of Christ before Pilate when Pilate talks about Jesus claiming to be the king of the Jews, and the crowd responds, we have no king but Caesar.

And I think, man, do you not realize this is an echo of that fateful day when the monarchy of Israel was born? And it displeased Samuel, it displeased the Lord. The Lord says, look, they've done this all the time. So you go ahead and give them what they want. But verse 9, how be it, yet protests solemnly unto them, show them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. Give them what they want, but tell them what this is going to cost them. Yep. Yeah.

They're not going to go into this blindly. They need to know in advance what this is going to do. And so he lays out, this will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you in verse 11. And it talks about all these things that he will do. Abuses, really. He'll draft all your people. He'll make them his servants. He'll draft them into his army. He'll make them work and cook for him and take care of his palace and reap his harvest and make his instruments of war. He'll take your daughters, make them bakers and so on. He'll take your fields,

your vineyards, your olive yards, even the best of them. He'll give them out to his cronies, to his servants, it says here. He'll take the 10th of your seed. This is probably in addition to the tithe that they're supposed to pay. Yeah. This is tax. Yeah, it's a tax. Now, some of us today would say, wow, 10%? I'll take it. Cool. Yeah, that's a good tax rate. I'll take it. It's presumptuous on his part to take the same amount, the same

percentage that the Lord takes. So now it's not going to be 10%, but 20% that they have to fork over. That begins to be a burden. And he'll take your best young men, your donkeys, he'll put them to his work, take the 10th of your sheep, and you'll be his servants. And the word for servant is, well, it's hard to distinguish in ancient Hebrew between servant and slave. And later on, by the way, when Goliath is addressing the Israelite troops, he'll identify them as the servants of Saul. They should be the servants of the Lord. But it's striking that that is in fact what they become, certainly in the eyes of the Philistines. They're just the servants of their king. But the people refuse to obey Samuel. They say, nay, but we will have a king over us, in

verse 19. And they repeat it, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles. I think they've thought that this tribal confederation business didn't work really well, but that's apparently what the Lord wanted for them. He didn't want a king. Now, interestingly, later on, when they do have the battle with Goliath, when Saul is chosen, he's one of the things that makes him stand out is that he's a full head taller than anybody else. He's a big guy. But then they confront Goliath, who's, according to most scholars, comes out to about nine feet tall. They want a king to defend them, fight their battles.

But when the time comes and their king meets an even bigger guy, he's terrified. And the whole army of Israel is terrified with him. You don't have the Lord fighting your battle, which is, I think, part of the moral of this whole story with David. David goes out and he's a relatively little guy and he's got no armor and he defeats Goliath. We'll talk about that later. But in fact, your strength doesn't consist in the fact that you have a tall king because they have an even bigger warrior. The Lord says to Samuel, go ahead, hearken unto their voice, make them a king. It always surprises me when I read this because his argument sounds so convincing and he gets right to the end of it and they say,

yeah, but we want a king. It's like they didn't hear any of that, you know, and having tried to raise kids, it's like, okay, but this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, but they want what they want when they want it. And it's intriguing to me too, the idea of hearken to the voice of the people, which was so important as the reign of the judges was introduced in the Book of Mormon, that do your business by the voice of the people. And I see that, well, that's a principle here too, but they'll get the consequences of it. They will. So, you know, there are the roots of a kind of democratic idea, even in the Old Testament. And, you know, the Book of Mormon tells us that people won't usually choose evil, but sometimes they do. I mean, I know it's bad form in some circles to cite someone like Hitler,

but Hitler was democratically elected. He got a minority of the vote, but the highest single vote total. The people chose evil. The motto of some totalitarians I've heard is one man, one vote once. Once you've won, boy, that's it. No more democratic elections. So when people make a really bad choice, they need to recognize that it may carry bad consequences for them. But they've been warned. I use this with my students, this verse five, make us like all the nations. Verse 20, make us like all the nations. The idea of we're tired of being different. I'm tired of being a peculiar people. We want to be like everybody else. Tired of getting up in the morning and going to seminary. I'm tired of everyone looking, there's the Latter-day Saint kid.

Reminds me of the Lord's preface in the Doctrine and Covenants in section one, where it says that their image is an idol in the likeness of the world. I want to be like the world. Every man walketh in his own way and after the image of his own God, which is in the likeness of the world. It's about verse 16, I think. And it's that same thing. I want to be like the world. I want to be like the nations.

We don't like standing out, especially, you know, we can say this about teenagers. They want to be part of the group, but it's true of all of us to an extent. We don't like being mocked or looked down upon. And I think of the great and spacious building in the Book of Mormon, where the people are up there in the building and they're pointing the finger of mockery, the finger of scorn, and some of the people partaking of the fruit of the tree fall away for that very reason. Man, it's embarrassing. They're making fun of me. I don't like this. And yet the gospel, the kingdom, the church have always got to be out of sync with the world.

If they weren't, that would be a matter for concern. That's right. Yeah. The point is not to be weird for the sake of being weird. We should be different. If we're in lockstep with everybody around us, something has gone seriously wrong. And I can say that when I was growing up, when I began to be active in the church, most of my friends, well, almost none of my friends were active Latter-day Saints.

So I had a ward that didn't have very many young people in it. And I was in a high school with very few Latter-day Saints. And it began to bother me because I began to be very sensitive on certain issues where if I was three minutes late to sacrament meeting, I felt really terrible. I'd really blown it. My dad wasn't a member. My mother wasn't active. And then I'd think about my friends who were doing, I won't go much further, but they were doing things a lot worse than being three minutes late for a sacrament meeting. And I thought, no, they don't feel any guilt at all.

How's this an improvement? You know, I feel rotten for doing things that they wouldn't even think about. You go through that phase where you're thinking, is this really better? Well, in the long term, of course, it is. And in the not very long term, it's better. But still, there were moments where I thought it'd be so easy to just toss all this aside and just be like my friends. I think of a really sad confession of a really prominent scholar.

You'd recognize his name. He's passed away now, but he told me once how sad he was that he had been critical of the church when his children were growing up. He was active. He was committed. He was a believer, he said, but somehow I conveyed my criticism and not my faith. And now most of his children are disaffected. And he was so sorrowful. And he said, he just hoped the Lord would forgive him for that. It was such a mistake. Because he genuinely was committed, believed very explicitly. I've noticed that they're going to choose a king, but the Lord doesn't shut the door. He says, all right, let's do it your way.

Let's go get a king. I'll help you out in this, even though it's not going to work out. Yeah, he does. And so he inspires Samuel to go and choose a king. And so you get that story in chapter nine. There's a man of Benjamin. Benjamin was the smallest of the tribes. It effectively disappears.

Generations later, it kind of merges with the tribe of Judah and just vanishes. But he goes out to visit with a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, and he has a son whose name was Saul. Now, a choice young man, it says, and a goodly. And there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier person than he. From his shoulders and upward, he was higher than any of the people. In other words, he was a full head taller than anybody else. He was a big, strong guy. And what they're looking for really, it seems, is kind of like a war leader as much as anything. And so it kind of makes sense that

you look at him and think, well, he's big and he's strong. Like Mormon was large in stature. In these days, the generals were often right in the thick of battle. They weren't necessarily back behind the lines plotting strategy. They were out there fighting. Having a guy who's strong and tall and has a long arm span, this makes sense. But he's pretty humble in a sense. And he is. I mean, he comes from humble circumstances and he actually starts off actually humble that will change that will change yes and you know it's the old line from lord acton you know power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely i think that's what happens here it's a sad cautionary tale it starts off with a very domestic or humble, everyday kind of case. Saul's father has some donkeys and they're lost. And he sends Saul and a friend servant to go out

and try to find these donkeys. And they look around and they look around and they can't find them. And finally, they come to a land called Zoph. Saul says, let's go back. I mean, we can't find them. But the servant says, no, there's in this city a man of God. He's an honorable man. All that he saith comes surely to pass. Now let us go through the pure adventure. He can show us our way that we should go. And it's interesting to me that Saul doesn't seem to have heard of him. Samuel is a famous guy, but Saul, there's several clues here in these chapters that Saul is maybe not the most spiritually sensitive guy around.

His servant knows about Samuel, the great man of God, the seer. Saul doesn't know anything about him. So he says, let's go ask him. They talk about getting a gift and we'll give him something. This reminds me in a way of the story of Joseph Smith. One of the things Joseph was known for among people who knew him, I won't even say in the early days of the church, before the founding of the church, was his ability to find things. There are several stories about that, that he could see things at a distance. This is the kind of thing that apparently Samuel could do, and he was called a seer.

That was one of his gifts. Very, very humble. I mean, you think, surely there are more exalted things than this that you can do than finding donkeys. But it is something he can do. And Joseph could do the same sort of thing. And he finally gives it up partly because Joseph Sr. tells him, you've got a great calling. You shouldn't be wasting it on this kind of nonsense. Stop looking for lost coins and things like that. That's not what you're supposed to do. You've got this ability and devote it to God. There's a point of contact there between Samuel and Joseph, I think. So anyway, they encounter Samuel and Samuel's already been warned, verse 15, that the day before he says that there will be a man who'll show up out of the land of Benjamin and he's the one that you're supposed to anoint to be the captain over my people Israel. He may save my people out of the land of the Philistines. I've looked upon my people because their cry has come unto me. Same kind of language you get when Moses is called to deliver the people of Israel out of Egypt.

I've heard their cry. And when Samuel saw Saul, the Lord said unto him, behold, the man whom I speak to thee of, this same shall reign over my people. So Samuel gives him this advice. He says, forget about the donkeys. Verse 20, they've been found. Don't worry about them. But what's really important is you, the desire of Israel, it says. On whom is all the desire of Israel? Is it not on thee and on all thy father's house. Now, the desire of Israel ought to be God, but oh well, it's right now on Saul. And Saul responds in a humble way. He says, am I not a Benjaminite of the smallest of the tribes of Israel, my family, the least of all the families of the tribes of Benjamin? Wherefore then speakest thou so to me? This is commendable. He starts off

well. At least he seems to. And so you go through this little episode of Samuel's calling him and anointing him at the beginning of chapter 10. And I want to say something about that, that in chapter 10, Samuel takes a vial of oil and pours it upon his head. Now, Latter-day Saints are aware of anointings. We still believe in the use of oil for certain kinds of anointing, not only inside the temple, but outside of the temple. But the word for anointing is related to the word Messiah. The verb to anoint is related to the word Messiah. Anointed one is Messiah, right? Yeah. So, Christos, Christ, that's the Greek word related to anointing,

a chrism people sometimes talk about. The Messiah, the Savior, is the anointed one in the ultimate sense. But in the meantime, kings are anointed. He's anointed to be a king as well, Jesus is. Kings have been anointed. We'll have two of them in this set of chapters, Saul and then David, who are anointed with oil literally to become kings. And so these chapters, I think, ought to be of interest to Latter-day Saints who know something about royal anointings. And they still do that, I understand, during the coronation of the British monarch. There's an anointing with oil, which is carryover from biblical practices, I'm sure,

inspired by these very chapters. It's a literal anointing with oil that makes them literally the anointed one. Man, we start out so well here. Like you're thinking, this is going to work. We found the most humble guy in all of Israel. This is going to work. And it's not going to work. No, unfortunately, it goes to his head. Saul is a tragic story. He's not simply evil. Some of the later kings of Israel will be simply evil.

He wasn't. But he goes very bad. Has to be removed, and his line doesn't succeed him afterwards, which is terribly sad. This is a lesson in section 121. As soon as man gets a little power authority, as they suppose, they can't handle it. They cannot handle it. One of the things I love about these stories, most of us probably are not going to have the opportunity to serve as kings of Judah or Israel or anything like that, not in this life. But they're so human in a way. This is the same thing that can go to advancement in a

business, in a corporation, or advancement, frankly, in the church. We have to be careful that if we're called to a position, it doesn't go to our heads, that we don't become better than others because we have that position or that we think that there's glory in it for us. That's not what it's about. I really like the principle that we should look at the scripture and think, boy, look how stupid he was. Look at how wicked he was. Is there any chance that I'm guilty of this sort of thing? I mean, could this apply to me?

I'm not Saul, but have I ever behaved like this? When, man, I succeed at something, I get an appointment or get an office or win some praise, and I start thinking, I really am good. Because if he just could have kept that attitude, if he could have kept that, am I not a Benjamite, the smallest tribe of Israel? My family's the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin.

Man, if you could keep that humility, you're going to be okay, Saul. But he loses that. Moses and Enoch, who kind of started out with, all the people hate me, I'm slow of speech, Enoch says, and they seem to have been able to keep it, I guess. I like the idea of sometimes in the scriptures you have examples, sometimes you have warnings. This is one of those that starts as an example and sadly ends up a don't do this, a warning. Yeah. I remember my brother telling me once that when he was called as a bishop, he said it was

probably the darkest day of his life in terms of testimony. Why? Because he said, I'd always looked up to bishops. And I found out they're just like me. Yeah. So I was one and I thought, really? But I don't think that's a bad attitude to have. Somewhere I've seen a line from Heber J. Grant, I can't remember where, it's been years, where he said, if you ever feel totally adequate to a church calling, that's a real problem. You should feel intimidated, humbled, and worried.

Not to the point of being disabled, but thinking, man, I need help because I just can't do this. If you come to it like, man, I've been waiting for this position for a long time. Heads are going to roll. I'm really going to make changes here. Then I think you need to go back to the drawing board a little bit. Anyone who wants to be bishop should be. And I've heard that line from general authorities too, who said, you want this position? This idea that you should be humbled by the calling and intimidated by it rather than exhilarated. Boy, now I have power and authority and this is what I deserve.

It's about time they called me. That's entirely the wrong attitude. To me, that's really relevant to these passages, that Saul starts off with that attitude. And so you think at first, this is going to go well. This is a good guy. But he can't keep it. And that's the tragedy of Saul. But he's not a rotten person.

But he turns to the worse. The corruption, yeah, takes hold. Yeah. People are called together in verse 17 at Mizpah. Samuel wants to manifest to them who has been called. He kind of recites their history to them, and you've rejected your God. He says again in verse 19, he saved you. He himself saved you.

You didn't need a king then, but you said unto him, nay, but set a king over us. Now, therefore, present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes and by your thousands. I mean, you're going to get what you asked for. So Samuel caused all the tribes of Israel to come near. The tribe of Benjamin is taken. I suppose they cast lots or determine in some way which tribe is relevant. Then he caused the tribe of Benjamin to come forth and he chooses the family. And Saul is chosen out of the family and they can't find him. And this is actually sort of comical in a way. Therefore, they inquired of the Lord further, if the man should yet come thither. And the Lord answered, behold, he hath hid himself among the stuff. Now, what that means is they've all gathered from all over Israel to Mizpah for this big pan-Israelite meeting.

Saul's hanging among the baggage. He does not want to be king. He's hiding out there. So they ran and fetched him thence. I want to see a sacrament meeting like this. The new bishop is so-and-so. Where is he? He's out in the parking lot.

He does not want this calling. He's in the coat closet. So then they see him, and he's head and shoulders taller than anybody else. You can't hide. No, and Samuel says, do you see him whom the Lord hath chosen? There is none like him among all the people. And all the people shouted and said, God save the king, which sounds very British. Yeah, I noticed that. And some people really favor him. And then, of course, there are some, the children of Belial, bad guys, the kind of thugs.

We say, how shall this man save us? And they despised him and brought him no presents. But he held his peace. He doesn't respond to them with anger or anything like that. And there will be a really nice illustration of that later. In some ways, I've thought sometimes the best candidates for positions might be precisely those who don't think themselves adequate, who aren't seeking the position, who would rather on the whole just be left alone or be junior Sunday school teacher or something like that, don't want to be bishop or stake president.

That's why six months before my bishop is released, I usually send in a full portfolio on why I should be the next bishop, and it almost guarantees. That's right. Boy, I've got plans. Here we go. I've got my ties all picked out, president. Here we go. A friend of mine who was serving as my department chair was eventually chosen to be the dean of my college. He didn't want to be the dean of the college, and so he set out to campaign for it. He put up signs on his door announcing his candidacy for dean and all that sort of thing. And he got a call from the academic vice president who told him, look, it's not going to work. You're going to be the new dean.

And here's the funny thing. That very same weekend that he was chosen as dean, he had been my department chair. He was also chosen as, he'd been serving as a bishop of a campus ward. He was also chosen as the stake president of his home stake the same weekend. And here's the really terrible thing. For some reason, there was a mix-up, and he was not released as the bishop of the campus ward for about a month after his calling as stake president of his home stake. And he's a new dean as well.

And I ran into him in the hallway one day shortly after, and I started to make a crack. And he said said don't it's not funny my life is over it's not funny too soon too soon yeah but you know i love the people who get the callings who who didn't want them but rise to the occasion they they do it because they were called and so far you know sa Saul looks like that kind of guy. And then we get into chapter 11 of, that always sounds ominous to me. Chapter 11.

Entering chapter 11. Bankruptcy. But we get into the story of Nahash the Ammonite. This is interesting because there is actually a passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls that should come at the end of chapter 10 that gives a little more context for this story. There's a version of Samuel in 4Q Sam something or other from cave four. It's the famous cave. If you ever go to the Dead Sea area of the Quran, you go out to that overlook and you see the cave right below you. That's it. That's the cave this document came from. And it has a few verses that aren't in our text of the Bible about how Nahash

the Ammonite had already done this kind of thing. He'd been harassing the Israelites and putting out eyes, and he's just a really obnoxious, terrible person, right? So he comes up and he encamps against Jabesh Gilead. Now, the Ammonites are roughly in the area of today's Jordan. I mean, they're on the other side of the Jordan River. The modern city of Amman has that name for a reason. That's roughly the territory of the Ammonites. And so Jabesh Gilead is also on the other side of the Jordan River. Of all the Israelite settlements, it's kind of exposed because it's not in the land of Israel proper, what we think of today as the land of Israel. It's over on the other side. And so this guy from the Ammonites decides he's going to come after them.

They're kind of an outlier, kind of off by themselves. All the men of Jabesh said to him, make a covenant with us and we will serve thee because he's besieging them. And Nahash the Ammonite answered them, on this condition will I make a covenant with you, that I may thrust out all your right eyes and lay it for reproach upon all Israel. Now, that's an attractive deal. Right. You can see why they're not very enthused about it. And, you know, this is meant, not only it's cruel, but it's also meant as a humiliation to have an entire population that had to submit to have their right eyes removed.

I mean, they in their lives would never overcome the shame of this. I think there also may be a practical reason. These are archers. They have that reputation. Well, if you eliminate one of their eyes, they can't see as well to be Bowman. They will be kind of neutralized and they lose their sense of distance. It's sadistic and it's cruel, but it also has a point. It's a propaganda point and a military point.

These days, they kind of allowed kind of gentlemanly warfare in a way, I mean, ironically. The elders said to him, give us seven days respite and we'll send messengers onto all the coasts of Israel. That is, coasts, not just the coastal cities, but all the regions of Israel. That's King James-ish for all the regions of Israel. And if there be no man to save us, we'll come out to thee. I mean, if this is the only choice we have rather than a massacre of everyone in the town, okay, we'll do it. So the messengers come to Gibeah of Saul. That's an area in sort of north of Jerusalem. They tell the tidings in the ears of the people. All the people lift up their voices and weep because

they don't know what to do. And Saul comes, he's out with the herd. And this is interesting because he hasn't yet become the king with a palace. He's basically a war leader. Well, it hasn't been a war, an active war up till now. And so he's just out doing what he'd done before, handling the herds. And he comes in at the end of the day and says, what's the problem? And they tell him. And then the spirit of God comes upon Saul. And we might simply say he was filled with a spirit of indignation. It may have been the spirit of God as well, but it's certainly, I think, he's just infuriated. This is a terrible thing to demand of fellow Israelites. It's an injustice, it's a humiliation, and it's naked aggression. So he takes a yoke of oxen.

He hews them in pieces and he sends them throughout all the coasts of Israel by the hands of messengers saying, whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen. And the fear of the Lord fell on the people and they came out with one consent. It's a very striking image. He cuts up these oxen, sends the parts around. It's kind of a weird thing to do, but it's a simile oath. It's like what you find in the Book of Mormon, where the people rend their garments listening to Captain

Moroni. May we be rent even as our garments are rent. Use a material object and say, if we don't do X, Y, and and z may something happen to us just like what happened to this material thing in this case the oxen you have it in the book of ruth for example where repeatedly you have characters say in first samuel 2 the lord do so to me and more also if i do not do x y and z and some commentators say well it probably meant as you know, same image like drawing the hand across the throat, like the image of a sacrifice or something like that. The Lord do that to me if I don't fulfill the oath that I'm making, which I think is a really,

really interesting, striking image. It's not something we would do today. It's got some echoes. So he becomes the war leader they've wanted. Gives these great numbers and the people come to him and he goes and he defeats the Ammonites. Just scatters them. And then verse 12, the people said unto Samuel, who is he that said, shall Saul reign over us? Bring the men that we may put them to death. Saying, boy, there were people who didn't think he was up to the job. But look at what he did. What a great leader he's proven to be.

Let's put those people to death. And Saul said, no, no, there shall not a man be put to death this day. For today, the Lord hath wrought salvation in Israel. That's the humble Saul again. Let there be no recriminations, no revenge. And God did it. I didn't do it. God did it. He's still doing okay at this point. And we admire him. He's an admirable character at this point. He saves his people, I mean, with the help of God, obviously. But he doesn't take the credit. He doesn't take the glory. Samuel says, let's go renew the kingdom. And they go to Gilgal, which is probably down somewhere by Jericho, probably in the minefield over toward the Jordan River now, which is a good place to renew the kingdom because that's probably where the Israelites had crossed to enter into the land of Israel in the first place. So they're kind of renewing things. Okay, now we're going to have a kingdom. This reminds me a little bit of Abraham Lincoln, right?

Choosing not to destroy the South after the end of the war. Yeah, and we do admire people who do that, who have the chance for vengeance and they don't take it. They don't take it, yeah. Is this the author telling us what he used to be like? So when we get to the point where he becomes- The contrast becomes clear and it's it's just tragic yeah but we can see why the lord would have chosen him why samuel would have been pleased with him and even at the end we'll get repeated sort of poignant uh notes about how samuel never

sees him again after he's rejected but he mourns for him because he started off as a good man samuel regretted establishing a kingdom, a kingship. He didn't want to establish a monarchy, but Saul was a good guy. Now, Samuel is about to take his leave here in chapter 12. And it's an interesting passage to me. Basically goes to the people and says, all Israel, behold, I've given you what you wanted. The king walketh before you. I am old and gray-headed. He says, Behold, my sons are with you. I mean, he still brings up his sons, and I'm thinking, why do you do that? Sort of paternal, you know, whatever.

Your sons are jerks. It's a dad, very human to me. Behold, my sons are with you, and I have walked before you from my childhood unto this day. And that's really true. This is a prophet whose career began really young, and he's been a prominent figure in Israel all this time. Witness against me, he says in verse 3, before the Lord, before his anointed, the king. And then he asks them, have I done wrong things?

Have I taken your ox? Have I defrauded you? Have I oppressed anybody? And they all say no. And then he says in verse 5, the Lord is witness against you, and his anointed is witness this day, that you have not found ought in my hand. And they answered, he is witness. It reminds me a little bit of Paul in Acts, taking his sort of farewell tour of the cities of Asia. He knows he's not going to see them again. And he goes and he says at one point, have I delivered the message to you? Did I deliver to you what the Lord told

me to tell you? You be witnesses against yourselves now that I did. I delivered to you everything the Lord commanded me to tell you. And they say, yeah, you did. In that case, Paul, whose name originally is Saul, by the way, I think he's probably aware the difficulties are coming. The apostasy is coming, but he wants it certified that he did what he was supposed to do. What happens to them afterwards is not his fault. He carried out his mission. And Samuel is doing kind of the same thing. Do you remember Elder Holland doing that with his Book of Mormon talk? I want it clear. When I stand before the judgment throne of God, I declared the Book of Mormon is true. And I think that's powerful when a witness, a prophet, an apostle bears that

solemn testimony and says, you heard it from me. I mean, there's a passage from George Buchanan that I have always been struck by. George Buchanan apparently on several public occasions indicated that he had seen the Savior face to face. And at one point he's speaking and he says, I want you to know that you heard someone today who knows what he is saying and that you heard him testify that he knows with a certainty that God lives and that Jesus Christ lives for I have seen him. And I think, boy, you know, it takes a lot to toss that out. This is someone who's bearing solemn testimony to you as powerfully as any human can. The Lord is witness against you.

We've done it. Yeah, you told the truth. And then he goes on to give them the message again that, you know, you have rebelled against God consistently through your history, and you've done it again. Verse 12, you said unto me, Nay, but a king shall reign over us when the Lord your God was your king. That's in verse 12. But this is what you wanted, and the Lord has given you your king. You've got him now.

But he says, I'm going to give you a witness that what I'm saying is true. Verse 16, and this doesn't stand out as much to us as it might have, or as it would have to them. Now, therefore, stand and see this great thing, he says in verse 16, which the Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not wheat harvest today? I will call unto the Lord, and he shall send thunder and rain, that ye may perceive and see that your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, and asking your king. So Samuel called unto the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that Now, what's so impressive about that? The harvest season is the dry season in Palestine, in Israel. And so there shouldn't be thunder and rain on a day like that.

And certainly not just when Samuel says, okay, I'm going to call on it and it's going to come. And it does. And so there's thunder and rain and the people say, oh, you know, wow, you're right. All the people said unto Samuel, pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not. For we have added unto all our sins this evil to ask us a king. But Samuel says, look, I'm still going to go on praying for you. Verse 23, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you. But you have sinned.

Fear the Lord. But if you still do wickedly, he ends the chapter. Verse 25, ye shall be consumed, both ye and your king. So you've got to stop doing these things. The Lord is long suffering with you, and even I am because I love you. You're my people and I'll pray for you. But against our advice repeatedly, you've chosen to go down this path. Okay, now we're going to see the beginning of the downfall of Saul in chapter 13. Saul reigned one

year, and when he'd reigned two years over Israel, then he begins to do all the things that Samuel had sort of predicted. He'll start drafting your people. And before we see him, he's just out there working with the herds. And when the time comes for a war, he calls on people to join him and they fight. Now he's going to create a standing army. Chose him 3,000 men of Israel. The rest of the people he sent every man to his tent. But he gets a large group together. I mean, the numbers in Israel are probably not that huge in those days. But to have a 3,000-person standing army, that's got to be maintained. He's got to tax people to get the funds to feed them and maintain their equipment

and all that kind of thing. So he is beginning to become a king like all the nations, which is exactly what Samuel had said and what they wanted, what they said they wanted. And so then he has this really interesting thing where Jonathan goes off and smites the Philistines, and then the Philistines gather themselves together to fight with Israel. 30,000 chariots and 6,000 horsemen, people as the sandwiches on the seashore in multitude. And they came up and did war. And when the people of Israel saw it, they were in a strait, it says in verse 6. People were distressed.

The people did hide themselves in caves and in thickets and in rocks and in high places and in pits. And some of the Hebrews even went over the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead, which is not exactly friendly territory. They've had problems over there before. The people followed him trembling. For Saul, he's still in Gilgal. The people who are there who don't run away are just terrified.

And he stays for seven days. Samuel's going to meet him. Samuel doesn't come. And so here's where Saul does his first really, really wrong thing. And it will become an accelerating series of them. Saul gives up on waiting for Samuel. Samuel said, I'll see you there. And, you know, because heretofore, Saul even calls upon people to join him and Samuel. It's the king and the prophet, you know, fighting together. And he starts off that way.

But Saul says, okay, he's not coming. Bring hither a burnt offering to me and peace offerings. And he offered the burnt offering. And then it came to pass as soon as he had made an end of offering, the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. Saul went out to meet him that he might salute him. And Samuel said, what hast thou done? Saul said, because I saw the people people were scattered from me, and that thou camest not within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered themselves together at

Michmash. Therefore said I, the Philistines will come down now upon me to Gilgal, and I have not made supplication unto the Lord. I forced myself, therefore I talked myself into it, or I thought this would be a good idea, and offered a burnt offering. Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly. Thou hast not kept the commandments of the Lord thy God, which he commanded thee. For now would the Lord have established thy kingdom upon Israel forever, but now thy kingdom shall not continue. The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee. Now, what's his sin here? He doesn't have the authority to do this kind of an offering, and he takes it upon himself. You know, on one level,

you can say, well, it wasn't ill-intended, but it was really bad judgment, and it was a usurpation of Samuel's divine authority. It's like, you's like committing a sin. It is committing a sin of usurping priesthood authority. I would say, look, if you're waiting for someone to give a blessing and he doesn't come and you don't have the priesthood, you still shouldn't step forward and say, by the authority of the priesthood, I give you a blessing. We don't have the authority to step in on behalf of a church leader. If I don't have the approval to baptize someone, I don't have the keys, I can't just go ahead and baptize. You wait, there's an order in the kingdom, and Saul violated it.

And he knew it. He knew it. Yep, he did. Now, you can understand his reasoning. This is a transition step to becoming bad, but it was bad nonetheless. And so Samuel says to him, look, okay, you're not going to be overthrown as king, but your son won't succeed you. Your line won't succeed you after you. You've lost that privilege of becoming the sire of a line of kings. And we would say from our point of view of being in the line of the Messiah himself, that will become the Davidic house, the role of the Davidic house, not the house of Saul, son of Kish.

It could have been apparently, but it wasn't. It's a crucial misstep, not the last one. And it may show a certain degree of arrogance or I'm the king, so I can step forward and do this act. I mean, we're in tight circumstances. Don't need to wait. But he doesn't have the right. King though he is, he shouldn't do this. It doesn't matter what your status is outside of the church. In the church, there's an order and you may be a corporate president and your bishop may be, who knows what, some really humble profession. But still, in the church, he's the boss in your ward. When an interesting thing happens at military academies and so forth, when you've got a sergeant being the bishop over a captain or a major who's his first or second counselor, that sort of thing happens sometimes in the military where all those ranks disappear when you're in an ecclesiastical

setting. I remember talking to someone on my mission who was a serviceman from Germany, an American serviceman. And I asked him the question, so does it ever happen that a general is a member of a state and the state president is of a much lower rank? He said, oh yeah, yeah, it happens. And I said, how does it work? He said, really well, because we understand that. The general commands on six days a week in non-ecclesiastical things. One of the lines I loved most from that meeting with Elder Gong, as I say, it was Elder Gong and his wife and three others of us for a couple of hours talking about an interesting issue. And toward the end of it,

one of our number, the non-general authority and general authority wife contingent, one of them said to Elder Gong, well, we're really grateful for certain things that we've been talking about and what you do. He says, I can tell you that we in the pews really appreciate this. And Elder Gong came back really quickly and very mildly and said, we're all in the pews. Dan, in that verse 12, I forced myself, therefore, is this a rationalization of, look, I had no choice. I had to do this. What's that? I forced myself. I think that's kind of what it suggests. I talked myself into it. I mean, it suggests to me that he thought about it. He wanted to wait, but then he made this decision and it was a wrong decision. Again, I think it's a

transitional bad deed. This is not evil Saul. This is pretty good Saul, but flawed Saul. Thinking about this and thinking, wow, we're in kind of a tight military situation. I need the blessing of God. Samuel hasn't come. He's a little late. I think in a tight circumstance like this, I can do it. But there are certain circumstances where, no, it isn't fine to step forward and do something like this. What the Lord has always been trying to teach the Israelites, I think, is His exactness in obeying His commandments. I think that's one of the reasons for a lot of the little commandments about not eating this or eating that. And it's to teach us that you keep these rules. I'll say this about our own observance of the word of wisdom.

I think the word of wisdom is valuable in and of itself, obviously. It's a good code of health and so on. But it also teaches us obedience. People have asked me, do you really think that drinking a cup of coffee would send you to hell? My answer is probably not you. I mean, if you're a non-member, I'm sure it wouldn't. But me, maybe. Maybe. Because it's not so much the cup of coffee,

that's nothing. It's the attitude that would say, I can drink this and it really doesn't matter. Because it does matter. Not intrinsically. People make it more difficult sometimes coming up with these ridiculous thought experiments. Well well what if you were in the desert dying of thirst and all you had was a thermos of coffee i'd imagine at a certain point the lord is going to say go ahead and drink the coffee come on but that's not the same thing it's the light attitude that says i can do this i can violate a little bit of the commandment i can shave a little bit off the rules and I'll be fine. Well, you start shaving the rules a little bit, then you shave them more and then more. And pretty soon there are no rules. So the Lord is trying to teach his people to obey with exactness and

honor, if you will. This small decision is going to lead to worse and worse decisions until Saul is completely off the cliff here. I'm guessing that in a way that's one of the points in the military of teaching people marching and drills and things like that. It's to accustom them to the idea that in more weighty issues than just marching down the parade field, when the order comes, you do it. Because you don't want an army where everybody's saying, you know, I don't know, maybe I will try to take that bridge or maybe I won't. Maybe my group will go north instead of south or something like that. I figured it would be okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really feel like doing that today.

If you've ever been in an organization where you have people working under you, I can tell you it's such a good feeling when you have people that you can agree on an assignment with and you just know it'll be taken care of. Don't have to think about it anymore. That person, it will be done because that person's really reliable, and that's what you want. And Saul doesn't prove reliable here. And even, I think that the idea of exactness, but also the idea of, will you keep a commandment whether or not it makes sense to you at the time. It's the Adam thing. I know not, save the Lord commanded me. And the sequence is nice. Okay, then Adam had it explained to him,

but maybe we'll have that explained to us. Maybe we won't. What will we do if it doesn't make sense to us? It's a test. There's a story that Harold B. Lee told about his childhood that I think is really interesting about him running out in a field in Idaho where he was growing up. And he came up to a fence that bounded the area that he was in. And he suddenly heard a voice. He said it was as clear a voice as he had ever heard, an audible voice that said, do not climb the fence. And he said, I looked around, I couldn't see anybody. Never did see anybody there. But he said, the voice was absolutely clear. And he said, so I turned away and I didn't climb the fence. And he said, I don't know what was on the other

side of the fence. And I won't know in this life. He said, but I didn't climb the fence. And I learned a lot from that. If the voice comes and says, don't climb the fence, don't climb the fence. And I noticed that Saul, Samuel says, what have you done? And Saul says, I saw the people, they were scattered. It's not my fault. It's their fault. Yeah. He'll do that again when he pulls it again. It's the people, the people kind of made me do it. Not my fault. Yeah. What if he just would have said, I did wrong. What have you done? And Saul said,

I did wrong. You know, but this, ah, I had to, it was someone else's fault. I think that covers a multitude of sins. I think quite often,

if we do something wrong, we just frankly acknowledge it. You say, yeah, I'm sorry. That was a mistake. I wasn't, I'm sorry.

I won't do it again. Then it can be overlooked. But if it begins to suggest a pattern of behavior, I don't take responsibility and I make bad decisions and so on, then people lose confidence. The Lord loses confidence in you. I'm just looking at it because this is kind of the turning point and then it's going to continue later. I just was analyzing that turning point. All right, let's keep going. Yeah. Chapter 14, this story of Jonathan smiting the garrison of the Philistines. It's a curious story. Jonathan sets off. He's kind of an adventurous sort, strapping young lad.

I'm guessing that if Saul was big, Jonathan might've been too. And he's been raised to be a warrior as the son of the king. And he goes over to take on a Philistine garrison. And he goes with just his armor bearer. It says they discover themselves under the Philistines. That's old King James English for they kind of reveal themselves. They're not hiding anymore. They just stand right out, separated by some distance and say, here we are. And the Israelites have been hiding under rocks and in caverns and things like that. So the Philistines get a kick out of it. And the Philistines are feeling pretty adequate to the case. We hear two jerks challenging us. What's wrong with these two idiots? And he says to his armor bearers, if they say, stay there and we'll come to you,

then we'll stay here. But if they say, come on over, boys, then we'll know that they've been delivered into our hands. And that's what they do. Verse 11, both of them discovered themselves under the garrison of the Philistines. And the Philistines said, behold, this is such stately King James language. I think you have to understand that it's probably not as stately. Behold, the Hebrews come forth out of the holes where they'd hid themselves. As look, the Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they'd hid themselves as, look, the Hebrews are coming out of the holes they've been hiding in. We've had him intimidated. Now these two guys have come out. And the men of the garrison answered Jonathan and his armor bearer and said, come up to us and we will show you a thing. It's kind of like,

come on over. We'll teach you a lesson. We'll take care of you. And Jonathan said, okay. That was the sign I was looking for. They've been delivered into our hands. And he goes after them. They're very effective. It causes a panic among the Philistines. And the Philistines run. And Saul sees it.

People can see the Philistine garrison is melting away. And so Saul calls for some auguring. He wants an oracle to be taken. Bring the ark over. The ark was with them. And so they check. And then Saul joins together and they go into battle. It's a spectacular rout. So the Lord saved Israel that day. And the men of Israel were distressed that day, though, for one reason. Here's where another bad decision on the part of Saul comes into play. Saul had adjured the people, verse 24, saying, Cursed be the man that eateth any food until

evening, that I may be avenged on mine enemies. Now, notice the way he personalizes it, too. It's mine enemies. I should be avenged. Me, me, me. He issues this stupid rule. It's a really hot day, probably. And he says, nobody should eat, and I'm guessing maybe nobody should drink for the remainder

of this day until I've been thoroughly avenged on all my enemies. But guess who didn't hear him make that oath? That's a very solemn oath. Jonathan didn't hear it because he was out fighting with the Philistines. He wasn't there. So it says along the way, they've been commanded not to eat, but Jonathan comes across a honeycomb and he's hungry. And it's been a long day of battle. He needs some calories. And so he eats a little bit of the honey, totally innocently. And I mean, he's the hero of the day and yet he's

violated his dad's command. And this shows, by the way, kind of a stupidly literalistic way of understanding the command. I mean, most of us would say reasonably, well, look, if he didn't hear it, he's not guilty of violating it, but Saul won't give him that way out. And so Jonathan says, he responds to this when they tell him, you know, your father put the people under an oath that they not eat anything today. And Jonathan says, Jonathan comes out of this so often as the better man than his father, Saul, especially as Saul becomes worse. But Jonathan says, my father hath troubled the land. What he's saying is this is a bad decision on my dad's part. You know, look what it did for me. I mean, I got some calories in me. He wouldn't think in his modern terms, because I've eaten something. I feel better. I've got a little more energy now,

and we can carry on with the battle. He said, do you not see how much better if the people would have been able to eat today of the food that they came across in the camp of the Philistines, that they would have been more effective rather than less? And so they have a tremendous victory. Then the people go out of control. Please join us for part two of this podcast.