Psalm 40:6-8 → 1 Samuel 15:22

Samuel's oracle to Saul is the fountainhead of the OT's own self-critical voice on the cult: "Does the LORD delight (ḥāp̄ēṣ) in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obedience to His voice? Behold, obedience is better than sacrifice" (1 Sam 15:22). Spoken at the moment a king is rejected for substituting ritual (the spared Amalekite flocks "to sacrifice to the LORD") for hearing the LORD's word, it sets the whole sacrificial vocabulary — zebaḥ (sacrifice), minḥâ (offering), ʿōlâ (burnt offering) — beneath the one thing God truly delights in: the obedient ear. Psalm 40:6-8, a later Davidic text (Psalms by book order follows 1 Samuel), stands in precisely this stream and shares its grammar: the same divine not-desiring of the same fourfold cult ("Sacrifice and offering You did not desire... Burnt offerings and sin offerings You did not require"), pivoting on the same root of divine pleasure, and resolving into the same superior reality — "my ears You have opened... I delight to do Your will." The opened ear of Ps 40:6 is materially Samuel's "obedience to His voice": the organ of hearing made the seat of the desired response. This is Echo, not allusion or quotation — there are no markers of deliberate citation; rather, Ps 40 voices, in a king's first-person delight, the critique Samuel had pronounced over a king's disobedience, and the two are siblings within one Spirit-led chorus (so the ATN names 1 Sam 15:22 the psalm's "closest sibling"). The connecting method is therefore Longitudinal Theme — the obedience-over-sacrifice motif advancing from prophetic rebuke to psalmic profession — with a Redemptive-Historical Progression edge: where Saul's failed obedience forfeits the kingdom, Ps 40's coming king delights to do the very will Saul despised. This is not typology (Samuel is no type of David, and neither is here typed to Christ); it is a theme moving forward toward the one in whom it lands. For Hebrews 10 places Ps 40:6-8 on the lips of the incarnate Son — "a body You have prepared for Me... I have come to do Your will, O God" — so that the obedience Samuel said God preferred is at last fully rendered, not as a colder alternative to sacrifice but as the warm, willing self-offering that is the true sacrifice. The chorus that began as a word of judgment over a king ends in a Son who finds His joy in the Father's will, and that is the obedience the ear was opened to long for: Christ not merely required but desired, the will of God become the gladness of the heart.