Give us a King! Samuel, Saul, and David

From the perspective of someone who has both taught [Samuel, Saul] to beginners in biblical Hebrew and engaged with it as a scholar of Hebrew narrative, the translation is a success. Nuances of Hebrew style are regularly preserved, as intact as translation allows. Compared to other translations, this is an achievement and an advance that non-Hebrew readers will profit from. The one great improvement that might be made would be to use the verse layout to mirror large-scale structures of repetition instead of wasting this significant technical potential on the trivial representation of "free verse" (for an attempt at such a layout see the four-volume commentary on the books of Samuel [1981-90] by Jan Fokkelman.) Scholars will always quibble over the nuances of meaning in text and translation. I will not trouble readers here except to indicate one deviation from the "leading word" translation principles on which Fox works. In 1 Samuel 8.9 God tells Samuel to "designate" (higgadta, i.e., dictate) the constitution of the king that God will allow in response to the people's request for a king. The underlying idea is that this monarchy is one dictated by God's terms, not the people's.