Meditation on Entropy

I'm still reading the Old Testament book of 1st Samuel. It's about 30 chapters of pure action, interspersed with odd meditative episodes and powerful rhetoric, drama, emotion and the scent of death. What strikes me about this book is that it is one of the earliest books which is actually written like a novel. The characters have discernible motives and the plot shows signs of non-prophetic foreshadowing and other literary devices.

The whole thing is very different from the near-legendary exploits of the Israelites as they journeyed out from Egypt and into the Promised Land. Rather, it is the story of a people now linked to their land and behaving like ordinary people, yet touched with the shadow of the Almighty.

But as you read further into the text, you see entropy creeping in. People wind down, give in to lower-energy decision-making, to summary rather than expansion. They make bad choices which you know will get them in the long term. Worse, in the light of what we now know, the roots of the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust were laid then; the seed was planted when they decided to get for themselves a king.

It lifts you up to see how much effort went into the avoidance of disaster, how much input was given to raise these people against the burden of entropy. That they took so long to self-destruct and lose their Promised Land is the miracle of the tale.