Alter renders 1 Sam 15:29 (recording the words of Saul) thusly:
And, what’s more, Israel’s
Eternal does not deceive and does not repent, for He is no human to repent.” (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 2:238)
Commenting how Saul was in error, Alter noted the
following:
Israel’s Eternal does not
deceive and does not repent. Samuel’s use of the verb “repent” strikes a
peculiar dissonance. We in fact have been told that God repented that He made
Saul king. What Samuel says here is that God will not change His mind about
changing His mind. But might not this verbal contradiction cast some doubt on
Samuel’s reliability as a source for what God does and doesn’t want? There even
remains a shadow of a doubt as to whether the election of Saul in the first
place was God’s, or whether it was merely Samuel’s all-too-human mistake. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 2:238)
