To immerse oneself in the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures is to be absorbed into a literary world, a world in which the events of many thousands of years past are relived and relived in the imagination of those who read and those who listen. Within this rich capacity to form our imagination there are techniques and characteristics identified through scholarship and used by authors to evoke, reflect, instruct and suggest this reality in its fullness, and this is how these are used in the narrative of 1 Samuel 9:1-21 to which we will now turn our attention. Identified in the NRSV translation of the Bible as the story in which “Saul [is] chosen to be king,” we find in this text the first story of Saul's call to the kingdom and the circumstances surrounding it. Throughout this narrative, the author, or perhaps more accurately, the editor, evokes a number of literary characteristics to construct a story and portray the character of Saul. In this essay we will focus on the folkloric character of the narrative, the use of the type scene, the presence of suspense and anticipation, and the motif of providence, exploring how these influence the story and how they describe the character of Saul. Before beginning this essay proper, it is important to roughly outline the methodology behind the narrative criticism that will be used in our interpretation of 1 Samuel 9:1-21. Narrative criticism, unlike many other forms of biblical criticism, focuses primarily on the world of the text, that is, the world of history created by the narrative. This leads the interpreter to immerse themselves in this world, suspending disbelief as one would in a fictional story to elicit the author's intended meaning with fewer references to the story... middle of the paper... ok by Samuel: one literary study of comparative structures, analogies, and parallels. Jerusalem: Rubin Mass Ltd, 1990. Gilmour, Rachelle. “Suspense and Foreshadowing in 1 Samuel 9:1-14.” The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9 (January 2009). LaSor, William Sanford, David Allan Hubbard and Frederic William Bush. Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form, and Context of the Old Testament. 2nd edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing co., 1996.Mark, Strom. The Symphony of Scripture: Making Sense of the Bible's Many Themes. Phillpsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001.Powell, Mark Allan. What is narrative criticism? Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990. Robert, Alter. The art of biblical storytelling. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981. Rogerson, J. W. and Judith M. (eds.) Lieu. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.