David and Shaul

Parshat Shmini

This week we'll look very tangentially at the haftorah which is a touching story of the friendship between David and Yonatan (Jonathan) the son of Shaul (Saul), which is read anytime that Shabbat precedes a Rosh Chodesh (new moon).  In the story, Yonatan tells David to hide away while he tries to determine whether his father means to kill David.  After Yonatan decides that his father does want David's life, he is able to secretly warn him to flee.  The actual story is a little silly as they hatch an elaborate warning system with arrows, and then meet up and talk to each other face to face after anyway, but that's besides the point.  This week we're going to look at the stories that preceded this one, how David and Shaul met, and why at this point, Shaul wanted to kill David.

Once Again: Multiple Traditions

Just as we've seen in the Torah itself, in the stories that span from 1 Samuel 16-18, just like in many places in the Torah, it appears that multiple storylines are present that can be separated into individual narratives.  Once separated, numerous contradictions are resolved and seemingly repetitive statements are eliminated.  I won't explicitly do the separation here, but at the end of this post, I'll point you to where you can find them (actually I'll point to the inspiration for this post, which does a thorough job of delineating them).  Instead, I'll briefly mention the various contradictions in these chapters.

• 1 Sam 17:12 introduces David, even though he was already introduced in the previous chapter
• 1 Sam 17:17 has Yishai (Jesse) send David on a mission to the battle site, even though in the previous chapter he was employed as the royal musician in Shaul's court.
• 1 Sam 17:28 has David's older brother Eliav get angry at him for not tending to the flocks even though he's actually in the employ of Shaul and was previously anointed as the new king by Shmuel (Samuel) in the sight of his siblings in the previous chapter.
• 1 Sam 17:49-51 has very repetitive phrasing of David prevailing over Galyat (Goliath).
• 1 Sam 17:55 Shaul has no idea who David is!  Neither does his commander Avner.  Again David was Shaul's personal court musician.  The only one who could play well enough to soothe him. 
• 1 Sam 18:13 Shaul appoints David as a commander, even though he already did this in 18:5
• 1 Sam 18:17-29 David is reluctant to enter into Shaul's family by marrying Merav but seems eager to marry his other daughter Michal.  (Perhaps this can be explained by Merav being ugly...)
• 2 Sam 21:8 Michal, the daughter of Shaul is described as having bore 5 children to Adriel ben Barzillai, even though it was Merav who married Adriel in 1 Sam 18:19

When I read through the Tanach on my own, the blatant contradiction of Shaul not knowing who David was jumped out at me as something very strange in the story.  Indeed, of the issues mentioned above, it's the only one (along with the Merab/Michal problem) that appears to be a blatant contradiction.  The rest can be explained with some deft maneuvering.  However, it turns out that you can actually separate out two consistent story strands that resolve all of them.

A Common Complaint

One of the common complaints that many people have with the Documentary Hypothesis is that there are no versions around of a single document.  There are no separate J and E documents for example.  Their existence is implied from the final form.  They will say, "Show me a strand of a J document, and I'll change my mind." This isn't a ridiculous objection, although religious people lean on this because they know how unlikely it is to find a single document of such old age.  However, perhaps if you could show a separated document for one section of the Tanach, you could gain confidence of the application to other sections.

It turns out that this story, with David and Shaul actually has a version that exists today with only one of the story strands.  The version is the Septuagint, and you can read the relevant chapters here.  Before we go further, we need to briefly state what the Septuagint is.

The Septuagint is a version of the Tanach that was translated into Greek by the Egyptian Jewish community in roughly the third century BCE.  The name derives from a legendary story about how 70 rabbis translated it independently and came up with the exact same translation.  It's clear that the translators of the Septuagint either had a slightly different version of the Tanach or made some very bizarre decisions in addition and subtraction.  For example, we saw in an earlier week that the Septuagint translation of Esther had additional sections.  Also, the book of Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) is significantly shorter in the Septuagint, and various chapters are shuffled around.  In the past, scholars had thought that the Septuagint was a later alteration, and that the Masoretic text written in Jewish books and Torah scrolls today was a more authentic version.  However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of these opinions have been revised, and it appears that the Septuagint was translated from an earlier version of Tanach, and that both versions probably had different changes in the intervening years.  In some books (like Esther) the Septuagint likely has additions, and at other points (like here) the Septuagint represents an earlier version of the text.

The presence of an alternate version of a biblical story which preserves a single account is a huge thorn in the side of critics of the Documentary Hypothesis who argue on the grounds that such a combination of different source texts is unlikely.  Furthermore, it makes some of the common apologetic or academic explanations with regard to resolving contradictions less likely.   

The post that inspired this one, and is a more detailed and thorough read from what I wrote above can be found here.