Week 9 1 Samuel 15
After Saul made his career-&-life-altering stupid decision (making a sacrifice that he wasn’t supposed to make) Samuel told him this: rebellion is as bad as the sin of divination; arrogance is like the evil of idolatry.
It’s a pretty interesting comment and it seems like Samuel was implying that there was a kind of socially-acknowledged Evilness Scale. I don’t know for sure but I don’t think there actually was such a scale. If there was it would map-out evil actions – sins – and classify them into different families or castes. So for instance there might have been a) Mildly-Evil Actions & b) Middle-of-the-Road-Evil Actions & c) Seriously-Evil Actions. A concrete example would be that killing someone is a heavier & eviler evil than stealing a bag of coleslaw.
But what Samuel said was that rebellion was roughly equivalent to divination. That arrogance was on the same footing as idolatry.
Personally I think I’d want to argue that rebellion & divination are two distinct evils (same with arrogance & idolatry). And I don’t want to put words in Samuel’s mouth but I figure he might agree that evils do have their own unique individualities. But I don’t think that was his point. I think Samuel’s main point was that all evils share a kinship. There’s a family likeness. All thing that are bad – small medium & large – are similar because they can never get to be good.
Note: quote from 1 Samuel 15:23 (CSB). Month-end reading report: I’ve read 26% of the bible in 17% of the year.