Today we look at the lead up to King Saul, and how Israel made the transition from a collections of tribes to a unified kingship. Why is the Old Testament so ambivalent on the matter of kingship? Most interestingly, there is a universally applicable political lesson here, in what may be history’s earliest commentary on the nature and source of effective governance. Also, why do the Israelites cut up animals as messages so often in this period? We look at Gideon, Abimelech, Micah and the Danites, and the Benjaminite war.

Notes for the episode are on the webpage at oldeststories.net

The Oldest Stories podcast tells the history and myth of bronze age Mesopotamia beginning with the first written clay tablets circa 3000 BCE. Using their stories and histories, we can learn a great deal about the people of the ancient world and see how the people of the very first civilizations were not all that different from us nowadays, except of course for the places where they were very different. The past is a foreign country after all.

This youtube channel is an extension of the Oldest Stories podcast, which is also available on any good podcasting app, or at the website https://oldeststories.net. New episodes release will be once a week each Wednesday.

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