Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover?

The Third Discourseman

I’ve often found the phrase ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ a bit odd. After all, the cover is still part of a book, and has still had some sort of paid designer/artist behind it, who has hopefully put effort into making it grab people’s attention and compel them to read on. So when this effort has failed, why shouldn’t their work be judged? At the very least, we should be able to judge the cover, along with the rest of the book, as a piece of art.

And psychologically, we know just how hard it is for humans not to judge a book by its cover. Whether a budding author writing their first chapter, visionary director shooting their first scene, politician crafting their first line, or anyone meeting someone for the first time, we all know that first impressions matter. That a bad first impression can be insurmountable. Despite the saying, how many of us have glanced uninterested over a book with a boring cover, or have dropped a book after the first uninspired chapter?

Of course, there is wisdom in the saying. You never know what you might be missing out on by dismissing something out of hand. You should never presume to know everything about a person just by looking at them. You should never rush to hasty and uninformed judgements based only on physical appearances. I guess this is good advice- though whether it’s psychologically possible for humans to heed it is another matter…

1 Samuel 16:7 is often seen as the Bible’s version of this saying. Samuel is about to anoint a new king, one who will replace the disobedient Saul. And, as with Saul, it is God who is going to choose this king. So Samuel is led by God to the house of Jesse, where he is met by Jesse’s son Eliab. Samuel reckons Eliab a shoe-in for the throne, but God’s verdict is different. We read God telling Samuel that he should not ‘…look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’ Here, we suppose, is God’s resounding ‘Amen’ to the concept that looks can be deceiving and that books should not be judged by their covers- silly Samuel assumes that the most impressive looking son will be king, and God knowingly informs him otherwise.

And this could perhaps be justified from the rest of 1 Samuel. After all, Saul’s defining traits are that he’s the tallest and most handsome Israelite around (9:2). He is the prototypical king that the nations desire, the sort of king Israel wrongly demanded when they said ‘Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations…there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations’ (8:5, 8:19-20). And he was a disaster, ultimately rejected by God as king of Israel for his repeated disobedience to God. The king you’d go for by looking only at the cover proves to be the wrong option.

David on the other hand is the youngest (or perhaps smallest) of Jesse’s sons (16:11), and he proves to (almost) be the king God’s people needed- a humble king that would rely on God, that would suffer with the marginalised before entering the glory of his kingdom. And so, should we be looking to find some sort of moralistic application of 1 Samuel 16:7, we’d probably land at something like ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. Of course, we may then be unsure what to make of the fact that David is actually described as handsome (16:12), and proves himself to be a fierce and formidable warrior throughout 1-2 Samuel. But perhaps that’s just furthering the point- just as you shouldn’t assume that a handsome man will make a good king, you shouldn’t assume that he’ll make a bad one either. The thing that matters is the heart.

But is this really what the verse is talking about? After all, the verse doesn’t say that man shouldn’t look on the outward appearance, but that he does. This is where moralism in Bible reading can often go wrong, when we assume that God is always an example for us to follow. But he isn’t- theologians distinguish between the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God, which basically means they notice that some aspects of who God is are (in part) shared by humanity (we’re personal, rational and, at times, merciful, loving, just etc), while others aren’t (we’re not eternal, omnipresent, omniscient etc). Some aspects of God are things we should try to imitate (though as sinners we often fail to) because we’re made in his image and are trying to be holy as he is. Others are things we should never try to imitate, because they are attributes of God alone, and as his creatures even to dare to try to imitate them would be blasphemous.

So under our initial reading, the claim would be that man should aim, like God does, not to judge by appearances but by the heart, and that when the verse says ‘man’ it means ‘sinful man’- ‘human beings tend to judge by appearances, which they shouldn’t do, because it is wrong and sinful. So try to be more like God and don’t judge a book by its cover.’

Another possibility is that ‘man’ means precisely that- all humans, all the time. That all Samuel knew about Eliab, David and the rest of Jesse’s sons was what they appeared to be like, and he had nothing else to go on. That even if he wanted to, he couldn’t have discerned the difference between Eliab and David just by looking at them. And that all humans are the same- we cannot look on the heart like God does. We can only go by appearances- what we see, hear and observe. It helps to remember that ‘outward appearance’ may not be as narrow as just height and handsomeness. Actually, whether we judge someone to be kind, clever, funny, mean, critical or anything else is always based on how they appear to us- the things that we see them doing and saying. These are all outward things- none of us has a window into the human heart.

We see this problem operating in David as he’s forced to make judgements, and can only do so based on appearances. For example, at the end of 1 Samuel Saul kills himself. At the start of 2 Samuel, a soldier comes to David claiming credit for the killing, hoping that David will reward him for taking out the rival king. Instead David executes him for daring to kill God’s anointed. I think we’re supposed to agree with David that killing Saul should be punished- but I also think we’re supposed to see the sadness of David’s limitations. Yes, the man’s own testimony declared him guilty of Saul’s death (2 Samuel 1:16), but in the end David kills a man for a crime he didn’t commit. But what else could David do? All he could go on was how the situation appeared.

We see a similar problem later on. David has two people giving him conflicting stories- Ziba tells him that his master Mephibosheth has betrayed David, in response to which David gives him Mephibosheth’s estate (2 Samuel 16:1-4). But when David meets Mephibosheth, he is decrepit and unkempt. He claims that Ziba deceived him and left him behind, and that he could do nothing about it because of his crippled legs. That Ziba lied about him. I think we’re supposed to believe Mephibosheth- but David goes with the 50/50 and simply divides the estate in half between the two of them. Again, he cannot see past appearances to work out who is in the right.

While these two cases may be in part due to David’s sinfulness, they are at least in part due to his finiteness. They’re due to the fact that, as a human and a creature, David doesn’t know everything. He cannot see everything. He can only make decisions based on the data his eyes and ears receive- that’s the only information his brain has available to him.

So maybe the point is not that we should evaluate people rightly, but that we can’t. Only God can, because only God can look on the heart. So it’s not that we need to throw away our outdated judgements based purely on looks and start judging people based on their personalities instead. Rather, it’s that any judgement we make, whether we’re judging someone’s attractiveness, height or personality, must necessarily be based on appearances, because that’s all we have to go on. In this way humans simply aren’t fit to choose their own king, because we have no way of making sure we choose rightly. We can certainly make some sensible choices based on appearances, but we can never know for sure when someone is a faker. And so we need God to choose for us.

This I think is more true to the text (it takes it at face value rather than assuming that when it says ‘man looks at the heart’, that only refers to a subset of mankind) and is more God-centred. It shows us a deeper problem in ourselves- not only that we’re prone to choose badly, but that we’re actually unable to make genuinely true evaluations of people based purely on what we see of them. It reinforces the distinction introduced in the Bible’s first pages between the Creator and his creation- that he sees what we are blind to, that he knows what we cannot comprehend.

And as we come to the final King God chose- the Lord Jesus- it adds an important nuance. Option 1: we’ve been given several choices of king that look good on the outside, and then Jesus who looks bad on the outside but really is good. And so we’re given this verse, and the rest of 1-2 Samuel, so that we can learn to choose well, not based on outward appearances but based on the heart. 1-2 Samuel is a sort of how-to guide to choosing kings- choose one like David, not Saul.

Option 2: God is the true sovereign king. He will dethrone rulers that rebel against him, and will establish forever the king that he chooses- a king like David. And yes, we should see that this is the sort of king we should want, a king that brings mercy and justice, who trusts and worships God. But we should also see that we’re not the ones who choose him or enthrone him. That he’s king whether we want him to be or not.

There’s a vital difference between saying we should choose Jesus to be king over us because if we look at his personality we see that he’s pretty good, versus saying God has chosen Jesus to be king over us because God knows what Jesus is really like, and so we should be loyal to God’s choice because a) God knows what’s best for us and b) God’s king will reign -whether we like him or not.

So it’s fine to judge by appearances, so long as you’re using all the available data. The only way you can judge anything, whether a person or a book, is based on how they appear to you. That’s part of our limitations as creatures. And it’s why we are not fit to determine who should be king over us. Which is why it’s so great that God has declared Jesus to be Christ and Lord. He is the one God has determined to be king over us. And he is a great king- something we can be sure of, not just because of human testimony (which is important, see John 1:7, 8, 15, 19, etc.), but because God himself has declared him to be (Acts 2:36, 5:31, 10:38, 42, 17:31, Romans 1:4 etc.). This is in fact the thing that the Apostles testify to, that God has appointed (/raised/declared to be Lord/chosen) Jesus Christ- even though men rejected him.

‘For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’