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<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to beat the story of Saul and David for biblical sex and violence, and the first shots in Of Kings and Prophets<\/i> \u2014 premiering tonight at 10pm on ABC \u2014 waste no time getting to the \u201cviolence\u201d part of that equation. (The sex comes later.)<\/p>\n
Before the first episode has even gotten so far as to tell us the show\u2019s title, it gives us a blood-soaked montage that introduces the story\u2019s two parallel storylines: in one, Saul and his sons are in battle, savagely killing their enemies, while in the other, David wakes from a nightmare to discover that his sheep have been killed by a lion.<\/p>\n
One of these storylines has a lot of substance and thematic potential. The other, I\u2019m afraid, seems a bit silly to me, and unintentionally reveals the perils of trying to expand minor details in the Old Testament into full-fledged drama.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get the silly storyline out of the way first.<\/p>\n
I should admit up front that I have never been a shepherd, and I have never had to track or kill a lion. But I couldn\u2019t help chuckling a bit when, early in the episode, the people of Bethlehem get together to discuss their lion problem and one of them shouts, with great perplexity, \u201cHow are we going to kill a lion!?\u201d Hunting parties were not exactly unknown to the ancients, but no one here even proposes forming one; instead, it is left to David to go after the lion on his own. And this is all to kill just one lion: it is not part of a pride, it is not traveling with any other lions or lionesses.<\/p>\n
The biblical David said he killed lions and bears<\/a> as a matter of course \u2014 it was all just part of the job of being a shepherd \u2014 but in the first episode of this show, Queen Ahinoam tells David \u201cword of this will spread,\u201d and she says he will become \u201cfamous\u201d for killing just one of these beasts. Somehow this seems unlikely to me.<\/p>\n Much better, so far, is the series\u2019 depiction of Saul and his family.<\/p>\n Saul had been king for only a decade or two by the time this story starts, and there were no kings before him at all; what\u2019s more, his own tribe, the tribe of Benjamin, had been almost exterminated just a generation or two earlier in a civil war described in Judges 19-21<\/a>. (There was a reason<\/i> Saul said he came from \u201cthe smallest tribe of Israel<\/a>\u201d when Samuel made him king.) So I question whether Saul\u2019s monarchy would have seemed as established<\/i> as it does in this series, with its palace and whatnot.<\/p>\n That being said, I do like how the show focuses on Saul\u2019s efforts to unite the tribes of Israel, whether by fighting against a common enemy \u2014 the Philistines \u2014 or by arranging marriages between his daughters and the leading men of other tribes. The Israelites were never as united as we like to think they were; all three of the kings associated with the \u201cunited monarchy\u201d had to deal with civil wars and rebellions of one sort or another. So it makes sense for this series to focus on the politics that went on within<\/i> the Israelite nation, as well as their wars against the other nations.<\/p>\n The series also focuses on the tug-of-war between Saul and Samuel, and in a way that is sympathetic to Saul\u2019s side. Your typical Sunday School lesson takes it as a given that when Samuel told Saul to wipe out the Amalekites, his word was the word of God and needed to be obeyed \u2014 but within this episode, Saul cannot tell whether Samuel is speaking for God or only for himself, and, with the threat of the Philistines looming above them, Saul sees no point to attacking the Amalekites, who are portrayed here as a relatively minor nomadic tribe that can easily be wiped out in a day (in a scene that\u2019s strikingly reminiscent of the \u201cNo prisoners!\u201d sequence in Lawrence of Arabia<\/a><\/i>).<\/p>\n It would be tempting to say that this series is pitting modern skepticism against traditional religion, but it\u2019s actually more complicated than that. The Old Testament is full of disagreements on how the Israelites should treat foreigners and their offspring, and in its own way, Of Kings and Prophets<\/i> is tapping into those debates within the Bible \u2014 and the dialogue shows that the writers have done their research. Ahinoam quotes Deuteronomy 25<\/a> to the effect that the Amalekites are not supposed to be punished until after<\/i> Israel is at rest from its enemies \u2014 and with the Philistines still oppressing the Israelites, the nation is clearly not at rest yet. On a deeper note, Saul protests that killing women and children is what Israel\u2019s enemies<\/i> do, and he says the Israelites are meant to be \u201ca light to the nations.\u201d That phrase actually comes from the book of Isaiah<\/a>, which was written hundreds of years after Saul\u2019s time, but there are passages in Isaiah that do<\/i> stand in opposition to the books of Moses on these issues (I get into some of that here<\/a>) \u2014 so as anachronistic as the Isaiah reference might be, it does show that the series is engaging with the Old Testament as a whole.<\/p>\n On a dramatic level, I love that the series is paying attention to the family dynamics within Saul\u2019s home, even if I don\u2019t always like the way<\/i> it pays attention to them. Plenty of films about David have focused on his friendship with Saul\u2019s son Jonathan and his ill-fated marriage to Saul\u2019s daughter Michal, but this may be the first to give equal time to Saul\u2019s daughter Merav and youngest son Ishbaal. (The biblical Saul had at least two other sons, but you can only do so much in a TV series, I guess.) This might also be the first show to pay significant attention to Saul\u2019s concubine Rizpah. The show\u2019s Twitter feed has made a point lately of noting that each member of the cast comes from a different ethnic background (Haaz Sleiman is Lebanese, Jeanine Mason is Cuban, Simone Kessell is Maori, etc.), and at times you might wonder how such different-looking people could all come from the same genetic family, but in the case of Michal (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), at least, it is explained that her mother was a Cushite, i.e. African, concubine. (And we know that some of the ancient Israelites \u2014 including Moses<\/a>! \u2014 were married to Cushites, and that some Cushites worked for the Israelite kings<\/a>, so kudos to the series for bringing that<\/i> to the foreground, too.)<\/p>\n Where there are wives and concubines, sex cannot be far behind, and I don\u2019t mind the fact that the series gets into that, per se<\/i>. But there is something about the portrayal<\/i> of the sex that feels a bit modern and titillating, like the way Rizpah sinks out of the frame to give Saul one last blowjob before battle, or the way Merav rolls around in bed with her fianc\u00e9 shortly after meeting him for the first time. (Well, for the first time since she was a child, at any rate.) It was very important to the ancients that a woman be a virgin on her wedding day, and, well, yes, Merav is engaged to the man she\u2019s with in this<\/i> scene, but we know from the Bible that Saul will eventually offer her to other men \u2014 including David \u2014 so if later episodes follow the Bible in this regard, then the fact that she isn\u2019t a virgin any more ought to be a big deal. I guess we\u2019ll see if it is. For now, I simply note that neither Merav nor her fianc\u00e9 even notes that they\u2019re crossing a line here, beyond a bit of dialogue to the effect that her father would be upset.<\/p>\n