Samuel and His God

"Whether you have visited Samuel's story often or are exploring for the first time, the guidebook you absolutely need to take along with you is Marty Steussy's Samuel and His God. Lucid, succinct, and constantly engaging, Steussy provides a friendly way into a serious critical analysis of the biblical narrative. She creates a conversation of interpreters which points her reader to the big picture as well as the telling details. She prods us to consider what we are doing when we interpret a troubling text and she offers creative suggestions. Sympathetic to Samuel, challenging to God, Steussy's account changed my reading of the story."—David M. Gunn, A. A. Bradford Professor of Religion, Texas Christian University

"Marti Steussy's Samuel and His God combines excellent up-to-date scholarship with lively and accessible prose. The result is a sophisticated literary analysis of the Bible's Samuel traditions that will appeal to a broad range of readers. Steussy skillfully combines the techniques of narrative criticism with the insights of more traditional historical-critical approaches to biblical texts. Arguing that in the current text of 1 Samuel, 'we hear the Samuel stories from a sequence of tellers,' Steussy helps us appreciate the net narrative effect of a final form that developed over time, incorporating many voices and divergent opinions on the nature of God and of human leadership in Israel. Taking a cue from the Samuel stories themselves, she resists our tendency to smooth over the tensions in the texts and simplify their complexities. Her honest, careful reading is engaging, provocative, and certain to appeal to scholars and laypeople alike."—Richard H. Lowery, Phillips Theological Seminary and Lexington Theological Seminary