Five questions, and a people who cannot name one offence (v. 4). The old judge lays his whole career open before the LORD, and before his anointed — the king is now a witness alongside God. Samuel's have I taken? answers Samuel's own warning: the king will take (8:11-17); the prophet never did. He is describing, by contrast, the rule Israel chose to give up.

Any bribe to blind mine eyes — the very sin of his sons (8:3). Samuel does not pretend his house was clean; he asks only that his own hands be examined. A leader's integrity does not guarantee his children's, and it is still worth having. Paul will make a similar defence at Miletus: I have coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel (Acts 20:33).

Stand still... that I may reason with you — the language of a covenant lawsuit, as in Micah 6:1-5, where the LORD pleads His case by recounting what He has done. Samuel's farewell is not a memoir but a hearing: the evidence is the righteous acts of the LORD, and the question is why a people so delivered asked for another saviour.

The history that follows (vv. 8-11) runs from Jacob's descent into Egypt through Moses and Aaron, the oppressors of the judges' period, and the deliverers God raised — Jerubbaal (Gideon), Bedan, Jephthah, and Samuel himself. Bedan is a known puzzle: no judge by that name appears in Judges, and some ancient versions read Barak; others have proposed other identifications. The point is unaffected: every rescue came from the LORD, not from a throne.

Samuel names the pressure behind chapter 8: Nahash. The threat from Ammon is told in chapter 11, after the request; many take it that the menace had been building for some time before the siege of Jabesh (the longer text of 11:1 preserved in one Dead Sea Scroll describes exactly that), so that the elders came to Ramah already afraid. Fear of a visible enemy produced a demand for a visible king.

When the LORD your God was your king — the sentence the whole chapter turns on. Israel did not lack a king; it lacked faith in the one it had. The sin of chapter 8, as Samuel states it, was not monarchy but unbelief dressed up as policy.

The monarchy is accepted and immediately placed under the same covenant that governed Israel without one. Both ye and also the king — the king is not above the Law but inside it, following the LORD with his people. Verse 15 gives the other side: disobedience brings the LORD's hand against you, as it was against your fathers. Nothing about the new arrangement changes the old terms.

Four verbs — fear, serve, obey, not rebel — describe what the king cannot do for the people and what no form of government can supply. Samuel's farewell refuses the hope that an institution will make a people faithful. The crown is granted; the condition is unchanged.

Wheat harvest falls in the dry season, when, by the common account, rain is rare and thunder rarer; a storm on request is therefore an unmistakable sign. The LORD had thundered at Mizpeh to save Israel (7:10); He thunders at Gilgal to convict her. The same voice that routed the Philistines now speaks to His own people — and they hear it as judgment.

That ye may perceive and see — the miracle is for understanding, not spectacle. Samuel wants them to feel the weight of asking you a king while the LORD was their king. Verse 18 records the result: all the people greatly feared the LORD and Samuel. Fear is where repentance starts, though it is not where Samuel will let them stop (v. 20).

The anchor of the chapter. The people have just confessed we have added unto all our sins this evil (v. 19); Samuel's reply is not you are not so bad but the LORD will not forsake. The ground of hope is placed entirely outside them: for his great name's sake and because it hath pleased the LORD. Election is God's pleasure, not Israel's performance — and so it survives Israel's failure.

Ezekiel will say the same of a far more guilty generation: I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name's sake (36:22). When a believer has nothing to plead, the name of God is still something to plead. Verse 20 has already set the tone: Fear not: ye have done all this wickedness: yet turn not aside — grace that admits the sin fully and refuses to let the sinner give up.

The people had asked, cease not to cry unto the LORD our God for us (7:8); Samuel, dismissed from leadership, treats ceasing to pray for them as a sin against the LORD. Intercession was not a function of his office but a duty of his love, and it outlasts the office. The man who has just been set aside promises to keep praying for the people who set him aside.

Two things he will not stop doing: pray for you and teach you. Prayer without instruction leaves people ignorant; instruction without prayer leaves them unmoved. The good and the right way is the Law's way (v. 24) — not a new programme, but the old path walked with a warm heart.

Only — one thing is needful, and Samuel states it in three verbs: fear, serve, consider. Fear is reverence; service in truth with all your heart is sincerity; and consider how great things he hath done is memory. The whole chapter has been an exercise in that last verb — from Egypt to the thunder they have just heard.

Verse 25 ends the speech with the warning kept honest: if ye shall still do wickedly, ye shall be consumed, both ye and your king. Samuel does not soften the alternative to make his comfort sweeter. The next chapters will show a king who did not fear and serve in truth; the nation would learn, over centuries, that the farewell at Gilgal meant exactly what it said.