God sends an evil spirit to Saul in 1 Samuel 18:10-11?

[chaz0426]

I had bible study with my non-denominational friends tonight since there are really no catholic bible studies currently going on at my university right now.

Anyway we read 1 Samuel 18-21

However we all were confused when we came to 1 Samuel 18:10-11
where it say Says God sent an evil spirit to preside over Saul which caused him to try to kill David with a spear.

We were all confused over why God who is all good would send an evil spirit.

I attempted that God does not cause evil or do evil but is a side effect of free will and turning against God.

They understood but still didn’t get it since God ultimately creates and all things come through him and stuff.

I was still confused over what 1 Samuel 18:10-11 meant though when God sent an evil spirit.

Anyone know?

By the way: The God of the old testament seems pretty tyrannical and jerkish sometimes especially if one reads it too literally like some of my protestant friends tend to do. Why is this so?

 

[tobinatorstark]

maybe you can draw some conclusions from the Haydock Bible Commentary on 1 Samuel??

haydock1859.tripod.com/id628.html

note it says first Kings. Douay-Rheims is has 1,2, 3, 4 Kings. 1, 2 Kings are also known as 1 and 2 Samuel. 3, 4 Kings are also known as 1, 2 Kings in modern BIbles

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

I had bible study with my non-denominational friends tonight since there are really no catholic bible studies currently going on at my university right now.

Anyway we read 1 Samuel 18-21

However we all were confused when we came to 1 Samuel 18:10-11
where it say Says God sent an evil spirit to preside over Saul which caused him to try to kill David with a spear.

We were all confused over why God who is all good would send an evil spirit.

I attempted that God does not cause evil or do evil but is a side effect of free will and turning against God.

They understood but still didn’t get it since God ultimately creates and all things come through him and stuff.

I was still confused over what 1 Samuel 18:10-11 meant though when God sent an evil spirit.

Anyone know?

By the way: The God of the old testament seems pretty tyrannical and jerkish sometimes especially if one reads it too literally like some of my protestant friends tend to do. Why is this so?

The author of the Books of Samuel takes for granted that God is “responsible”, or is “behind”, all that happens among men - good or evil. He expresses this by treating God as directly responsible for all things. The moral difficulties this implies, that bothered (& bother) later generations, crop up later.​

This is why there are two versions of the incident of David’s census: in 2 Samuel, the temptation - as it is seen - to number the men of Israel, is ascribed to God. In 1 Chronicles, it is ascribed to satan: by ascribing a temptation or an evil to a party other than God, God is “cleared” of blame, & the temptation can remain a temptation to evil.

As a matter of the history of thought, thinking about Divine responsibility for events came before thinking about human freedom over against that of a god or the gods or God. The Babylonians thought of the evil demoness Lamashtu (= “She who has no twin”) as the daughter of the high god Anu; Israelite & Jewish thought did not think of its god as having children, so it had to meet the problem of how to “account for” evil in other ways.

That’s the problem with having only One God - He has to be responsible for events that could otherwise be explained by disagreements amomg the gods. One way to lessen the difficulty, is to blame one of the “sons of G/god” - so the satan becomes the tormenter of Job. This however means that if the satan does the evil, God is still ultimately responsible for the satan & his activities - the problem was not solved, but only relieved, a bit. Another possibility is to have the satan as Satan; he goes from being a tempter but not himself evil or “fallen” (he is “the angel over” evil, but is not “the devil”) to being a rebel against God. The number of Satans was not always 1 - in 1 Enoch, there are many; & 1 Enoch influenced the NT.

As for the spear episode - the Israelites & Jews had no understanding of mental sickness. And sickness, of all kinds, began by being attributed to God; this is all tied up with what they thought about piety & prosperity - in Proverbs, prosperity is the reward of the pious. From which it is easy to reason that because X is not prosperous, he must be impious. This is the idea that Job refuses to accept; that is given the lie by the Crucifixion above all: for the NT writers, suffering is capable of being a way to be one with Christ, & of treading Satan underfoot.

Any use to you ?