Joseph’s Reviews > The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary – Volume 2: Prophets > Status Update

Elhanan... struck down Goliath the Gittite. This is one of the most famous contradictions in the Book of Samuel. Various attempts, both ancient and modern, have been made to harmonize the contradiction — such as the contention that “Goliath” is not a name but a Philistine title — but none of these efforts is convincing. Of the two reports, this one may well be the more plausible. […]

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The bond between men in this warrior culture could easily be stronger than the bond between men and women.

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More wondrous... than the love of women. Repeated, unconvincing attempts have been made to read a homoerotic implication into these words. The reported details of the David story suggest that his various attachments to women are motivated by pragmatic rather than emotional concerns — and in one instance, by lust. This disposition, however, tells us little about David’s sexual orientation.

look, it is written down in the Book of Jashar. This lost work, mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, was obviously familiar to the ancient audience. The title probably means “Book of the Upright”, though another reading of yashar, as a verb rather than as a noun, yields “Book of Songs”. (This, however, requires revocalizing the word.) It might have been an anthology of archaic Hebrew poems.

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End of "1 Samuel"

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(It would be rather like the invention of a story that Winston Churchill spent 1914-1918 in Berlin, currying the favor of the kaiser.) The compelling inference is that the writer had authentic knowledge of a period when David collaborated with the Philistines; he was unwilling to omit this uncomfortable information, though he did try to mitigate it.

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2. he crossed over... to Achish... king of Gath. For those scholars who have argued that David is no more a historical figure than King Arthur, this whole episode constitutes a problem: why would a much later, legendary, and supposedly glorifying tradition attribute this act of national treachery to David?

[…] In the Greek tradition, there were competing versions of the same myths, but never in a single text. Modern Western narrative generally insists on verisimilar consistency. In the Bible, however, the variants of a single story are sometimes placed in a kind of implicit dialogue with one another (compare the two accounts of creation at the beginning of Genesis). […]

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31. Samuel turned back from Saul. All English versions render this, erroneously, to indicate that Samuel nevertheless accompanied Saul to the sacrifice. But the expression “turn back with” (shuv ‘im), as in verse 30, and “turn back from [literally, after]” (shuv ‘aḥarei) are antonyms, the latter meaning unambiguously “to abandon”.

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[…] What we have in this great story, as I have proposed elsewhere, is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays. […]

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