Hello and welcome to the scriptures a real broadcast.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and this is the podcast where we talk about elements

of the scriptures that have made them become more real to us

because we believe we can draw more power out of the scriptures when they're real to us,

and we need that power in our lives so desperately these days.

Today, this is a little shortcast.

We're going to talk about Samuel.

I've already spent some time talking about that with my wife as a guest.

There are just a couple of elements that we're going to touch on in this shortcast,

including kind of the authorship of the book and what that tells us about the authorship of the Bible in general.

And it's worth noting that I'm releasing this episode and the one with my wife first, and then we'll do

Ruth as a follow-up episode. We're going to have a longer one on Ruth. I think that the come

follow me reading says to read Ruth first and then Samuel, that makes sense because the story

of Ruth takes place during the period of judges. But on Sunday, which is when I usually

release these podcasts, I'm going to actually be doing a lecture on Ruth, and we're going to make

that a joint broadcast with the scriptures are real. And so we're just going to leave that

to be done Sunday night. And as soon as I can get it edited, then I'll get it posted. And so we'll

have some Ruth material for you soon. But today we're doing Samuel. So there are a number of things

that I want to talk about with Samuel, including, as I said, something about the authorship of Samuel and

some of that background. So the Talmud claims that

Samuel is the author of the book of Samuel. That seems unlikely to me since he dies part

way through the book. And so he may have had some hand in it. My guess is that this is something

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