Let us recall that the Lord, when he
encountered Saul on the road to Damascus, shouted out to him, “Saul, Saul, why
do you persecute me?” When he heard the voice of reproach, Saul immediately recognized
the irony of his name, an irony enunciated in Jesus’ very question. He recognized
the voice in that question. It was the voice of David wandering in the desert, during that period when he was pursued by Israel’s first king.
The great sin of the ancient Saul, as
Holy Scripture describes it in the First Book of Samuel, was his persecution of
the Lord’s Anointed One. When the future Apostle heard that question—“Why do
you persecute me?”—he was confronted by a massive fact. Just as the ancient
Saul had persecuted David, this new Saul was persecuting David’s son! And this persecutor
recognized the same voice—and identical words—of reproach.
The correspondence between the two
cases is clear in the relevant Greek texts. Jesus asks Saul, “τι μη
διωκεις”—“Why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9.4; 22.7;
26.14). In the Septuagint of 1 Samuel 24.15, David asks Saul, “Whom do you
persecute (καταδιωκεις)?” Again, in 1
Samuel 26.18, David inquires of Saul, “Why does my lord persecute (καταδιωκει) his servant?”
While this Greek verbal correspondence
between 1 Samuel and Acts suffices to demonstrate Luke’s intent, it is also
worth considering the Semitic original of Jesus’ question, since we are
explicitly informed that Jesus spoke to Saul τη ‘Εβραιδι “in
Hebrew” (Acts 26.14). Now, especially in Hebrew, the burden of the question Saul
heard from Jesus was not almost verbatim identical to the earlier question of
David. David had asked Saul, “מי אתה רדף”—Whom do you persecute?” Jesus now inquires
of the new Saul “למה טירדפני”—“Why do you persecute me?” He then identifies
himself, “אנכי ישׂוע אשר אתה רודף”—“I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”
Hearing the voice of the true Messiah,
Luke tells us, Saul of Tarsus was struck with blindness, afflicted like the
unseeing King Saul in the dark cave at Engedi (1 Sam 24.3). And during those
days of darkness, the new Saul could still hear ringing in his ears the same question
David had earlier put to his own persecutor. This rabbi from Tarsus, in his
life up to this point, had imagined himself God’s faithful servant, but now he learned
that all along he had been, like the earlier Saul, just another persecutor of the
Lord’s “Just One” (Acts 22.14). (Patrick Henry Reardon, Romans: An Orthodox Commentary
[Yonkers, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018], 11-12)
