Sunday, July 9, 2023

Patrick Henry Reardon (EO) on the Parallels between King Saul in the Old Testament and Saul's Conversion Accounts

  

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)