By taking a long stride across the latter portions of I Samuel, I skipped one of the most famous--well worn and assimilated--Old Testament stories: David versus Goliath. Read in the context of what surrounds it, this incident is just one of many in a rather shapeless glob of material concerning the rivalry between Saul, Israel's first king, and David, its second. Much of this matter, including David and Goliath, seems as if it might have been written by, say, David's mother, for the evident intention is to make of David a species of fair-haired boy--he's always standing on a higher riser than the neurotic Saul, who ends a suicide. If you wanted to try and summarize I Samuel chapters 13 to 31, you could perhaps do no better than to quote the celebratory song sung by some Hebrew women after a military victory (I Samuel 18:7):
"Saul has slain his thousands,
And David his ten thousands."
Since one of my themes has been the implausibility of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, I should observe that many details in the history found in I Samuel are contradicted by the history found in II Samuel. And they aren't necessarily trivial ones. For example, I said Saul committed suicide. That's true, according to the last chapter of I Samuel, in which the king is wounded in battle by Philistine archers. Unwilling to allow the enemy the pleasure of finishing him off (and then perhaps having some fun with his corpse}, Saul instructs his "armor-bearer" to run him through with a sword; when the armor-bearer declines to raise his hand against the king, Saul falls on his own sword. In the very next chapter, the first in the book of II Samuel, Saul dies again, and, according to this account, it was not by his own hand but by that of an Amalekite man who obeys an order similar to the one Saul gave the armor-bearer in the previous chapter. The famous story of David and Goliath is subject to the same kind of contradictory double-telling. The familiar version is found in I Samuel 17. But in II Samuel 21 Israel is beset by Philistine giants, including one "who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot." (Sure he did!) The telling of this tale includes the detail that "Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, the Bethlehemite, slew Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam." The editor of the The Oxford Annotated Bible explains, "It may be supposed that this name [i.e., Goliath] became erroneously attached to David's victim, whose name was unknown."
So, to be strictly accurate, "David versus the Giant erroneously referred to as Goliath"? I am sure that the fighting fundamentalists would say that once you are talking about "what may be supposed" to be errors in the biblical text, the next step is to deny that any of these tales concerning preternaturally imposing foes who are miraculously vanquished in battle belong to history.
Although I think you'd make fewer mistakes if you did just that, it's also true that the heart of the book of II Samuel is a sustained, wrought narrative on the history of King David's reign. Considering the royal hagiography that precedes and follows, the author's objectivity about the king's personal failings make for something like what lawyers call a "statement against interest," the probative value of which is high. Few have doubted that the broad outline of the narrative is historically accurate, that the narrative is the work of a single author, and that this author was a writer of considerable skill who also may have been a member of the king's court (such is his evident access to, and sure handling of, intimate details). Some have gone so far as to call him "the father of historical writing," and his "court history," as it's called, which comprises chapters 9 through 20, is regarded as "the prose masterpiece of the Old Testament." (I'm putting quotation marks around phrases that tend to recur in the commentaries.)
The story moves very swiftly, especially at the outset. David happens to see a beautiful woman--Bathsheeba, the wife of Uriah, a soldier. He arranges for her to be delivered to him, they have sex, and she conceives. The pregnancy is a problem that David attempts to resolve, first, by calling Uriah home from the war. But he's a good soldier and honors the code of abstaining from sex while his fellows remain at war--to such a degree that he doesn't even go into his home. David then wines and dines him, in the expectation that a little buzz will help him forget his scruples. Uriah eats and drinks but, when the fun is done, he sleeps on the step outside the door of his house. David sends him back to war carrying a written order that he be placed in the front of the fighting, and that his fellows then suddenly retreat, so that Uriah will certainly be killed. This scheme works. Upon receiving word of Uriah's death, David takes Bathsheeba as his wife.
If challenged to state what is so remarkable about this, I think I'd say that it's the effect made by the sensational subject matter together with the author's restraint. You'll notice that he is silent about such details as David's state of mind as his successive plans are foiled by his dutiful victim. Is it with exasperation or a shrug that the king gives up on Plan A and Plan B and simply orders the man to be killed? There is no access to David's mind, only to his deeds, and one feels that if it were otherwise some of the chill would be lost.
God has a low profile in the court history--that's another area in which the author exhibits artful restraint. At the beginning of Genesis, God is depicted as walking to and fro in His garden, and His interrogation of the first humans commences about three seconds after Their First Big Mistake. And that is pretty much the way it goes until we arrive at the court history, the economy of which is abetted by God's absence from the narrative. Only that isn't quite right. When Uriah is dead and David married to his widow, so that he would appear to be in the clear, God finally gets a mention:
But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.
This is a hinge. The door swings open on the second part of the narrative, about rebellion and death within David's own family, including preeminently the story of his son Absalom, all of which is accomplished in the same swift, vigorous, secular-seeming fashion. The Deuteronomist's wooden theology of rewards and punishments isn't rejected but the wooden story-telling is replaced by . . . the prose masterpiece of the Old Testament.
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