SAMUEL
A different division is adopted in the present books of Judges and
Samuel, in which the stories of Eli and of Samuel are not made the
close of the period of the judges but the prelude to the history of
the kingdom. The Greek Bible divides this history into four books of
the Kingdoms, or rather of the Reigns of the Kings; the Hebrew, into
two, Samuel and Kings; the modern translations employ the latter names
but adopt the subdivisions of the Greek, thus making two books of
Samuel and two of Kings. First Samuel shows how the conquest and
occupation of central Palestine by the Philistines led to the
establishment of a national kingdom under Saul, a Benjamite; narrates
the rise of his rival, the Judæan David, and the feud between them,
down to the disastrous battle with the Philistines at Mt. Gilboa in
which Saul and his gallant sons fell. Second Samuel is the history of
David's reign and the tragedy of his house, the conclusion of which,
the intrigue which raised Solomon to the throne and the death of the
aged king, is treated as the prelude to Solomon's reign and carried
over into 1 Kings; one recension of the Greek Bible, however, joins
these chapters (1 Kings 1-2) to the preceding book. The two Books of
Kings recount the reign of Solomon; the division of the kingdom after
his death into two, on the old line, Israel and Judah; the parallel
history of the two kingdoms to the end of Israel in 721 B.C.; and the
rest of the history of Judah to its fall in 586.
In the account of how Saul became king there are two contradictory
representations. One of these, which agrees with 1 Sam. 12 in treating
the desire of the people for a king as the wanton repudiation of
Jehovah their king and of Samuel their divinely appointed judge, is
contained in cc. 8; x. 17-27; 12. The other, according to which God,
seeing the distress the people were in because of the Philistines, of
his own motion resolves to give them a king to deliver them from their
oppressors, is in 1 Sam. ix. 1-x. 16; 11. In c. 9 Samuel appears as a
seer with a neighbourhood reputation of being able to tell where
people's stray asses have gone, not as the prophet and judge, the
first man of his time.
These strands can be followed in both directions beyond the chapters
named: 1 Sam. xiii. 1-xiv. 66 belongs to the second, which we may call
the national version of the matter; c. 15 attaches itself to the
other, say theocratic, representation, though it is of a somewhat
different texture. On the other side, vii. 3-17 plainly goes with c.
8; while iv. 1^b-vii. 2 are akin to the national version, showing how
grievous the situation was and how urgent the need of a king. Chapters
1-3 have a twofold motive; they tell of the wonderful childhood of a
great man, and they explain the disasters of Eli's house. The latter
has reference to cc. 4-6; the former, a favourite theme of popular
tales, is an appropriate introduction to Samuel the prophet.
Of the two accounts of the origin of the kingdom, it takes no great
critical discernment to see that what we have called the national
version is the older and more historical; the other, which condemns
the monarchy as a kind of apostasy, takes the standpoint of Hosea. The
picture of the monarch in 1 Sam. 12 is drawn from sorry experience.
Even in the older narrative not all is of one piece. Chapter 9, in
which Saul is a young man in his father's house, does not tally with
c. 14, where he has a grown-up son. The author of this narrative made
it up from traditions of diverse origin, some of them more strictly
historical, others embellished with legendary traits. In its main
features, however, it gives us a trustworthy account of the
establishment of the kingdom. In c. 13, the breach with Samuel, vs.
7^b-15^a (with x. 8 which prepares for it), are not part of the
original narrative; c. 15 gives another account of the origin of this
breach, which was evidently a standing feature of tradition. In the
remaining chapters of 1 Samuel the central interest is the relations
of David to Saul. Here also there are not only two main literary
sources but evidence of variant traditions underlying the oldest
narrative, and of the additions by later editors, sometimes of their
conception, sometimes taken from old and good sources.
It is impossible here to pursue the analysis of the sources further.
It must suffice to say that the further on we go, the more the older
and better of the histories predominates. In 2 Samuel almost the whole
is from this source (c. 7 is a notable exception, in the spirit and
manner of the seventh century). Abridgment and transposition have
brought matters into disorder at some points; but 2 Sam. 9-20 is a
well-preserved piece of continuous narrative, of which 1 Kings 1-2 is
the sequel. 2 Sam. xxi. 1-14 and c. 24 are from the same source, but
must originally have stood at an earlier point in the history; their
present position is best explained by supposing that they were once
omitted--which their contents make very natural--and subsequently
restored from a completer copy, not in their proper connection but in
an appendix. Chapter xxiii. 8-39 is a very ancient roster of David's
"valiant men," the companions of his days as an outlawed freebooter on
the Philistine border; xxi. 15-22 is of the same character. Two poems
attributed to David are also included in this appendix, c. 22, which,
with many variants, is found also in the Psalter (Ps. 18), and xxiii.
1-7.
The history of Saul and David gave little invitation to a moralizing
improvement such as we have found in Judges and shall find again in
Kings. Whatever faults those heroes had, a propensity to the worship
of heathen gods could not be laid to them. The national uprising
against the Philistines was, in fact, a revival of religion. If in
times of peace men sought the blessing of the gods of the soil (the
Baals) upon their tillage, in war their only reliance was on Jehovah,
the god of Israel. Nor was the worship of Jehovah at the village
sanctuaries (high places) or upon altars erected for the nonce,
illegitimate, even in deuteronomic theory, till God had taken up his
sole abode in Solomon's temple. Accordingly there is, after 1 Sam. 12,
once the close of a history of the judges, small trace of the motives
or phrases of the seventh-century school of historians; and only in a
few passages can the hand of post-exilic editors be suspected. For the
rest we have in our hands a product of the oldest Hebrew
historiography.
From a literary point of view the older source in the history of David
is unsurpassed. It has in perfection all the qualities that
distinguish the best Hebrew prose such as are conspicuous in the
Judæan author of the patriarchal stories in Genesis. In the art of
narrative Herodotus himself could do no better.
Its historical value is also very high. The account of David's later
years in 2 Sam. 9-20; 2 Kings 1-2 bears all the marks of contemporary
origin. It comes from one who not only knew the large political events
of the reign, but was intimately informed about the life of the court,
and the scandals, crimes, and intrigues in the king's household which
clouded the end of his glorious career. These things are narrated with
an objectivity and impartiality which cannot fail to impress the
reader. The author has a high admiration for David, but this does not
lead him to gloze over his faults or even his grave sins, nor to
disguise the weakness of his rule in his own house which was the cause
of so much unhappiness. His development of this domestic tragedy is,
indeed, truly dramatic, and the discrimination of the characters--say
of Absalom and Adonijah--shows fine insight. He tells without comment
how only the distrust of some of the Philistine chiefs kept David, as
a vassal of Achish of Gath, from fighting upon the Philistine side
against Saul in the fatal battle of Mt. Gilboa. So, too, he is loyally
minded to Solomon, but he does not conceal the strings of the
harem-intrigue by which the doting old King David was brought to
declare for his succession, or to pass over the ominous beginning of
Solomon's "new course," with the execution of Adonijah, the deposition
of the priest Abiathar, and the murder, at altar where he had sought
asylum, of Joab, to whom more than any other the house of Jesse owed
the throne. The official pretexts are duly recorded, but the facts
speak for themselves. In 1 Kings ii. 5 f. the death of Joab is
enjoined in David's testament; opinions differ whether these verses
are from the same source with ii. 12 ff., or are by the late
seventh-century writer to whom vs. 1-4 are ascribed by all. Without
idealizing David, we may at least allow ourselves the conjecture that,
if his last words decided the death of his old companion in arms and
most loyal servant, Nathan or Bathsheba was at his dying ear.
The crisis in the history of the Israelite tribes which the Philistine
invasion created; the long struggle with these foes, very different
from their conflicts with their petty neighbours; the emergence in
this struggle of a national consciousness at once political and
religious; the union of the tribes in a national kingdom; the conquest
of independence; the following wars of expansion and the foundation
of a short-lived Israelite empire--these were achievements to stir the
soul of a people and be celebrated in song and story. The leaders too,
in these memorable doings were such heroes as ancient history loves to
have in the middle of its stage--Saul with his chivalric son Jonathan;
David with Joab, Abner, and the rest of his gallant band.
The making of great history has often given a first impulse to the
writing of history, and we may well believe that it was so in Israel,
and that the beginning of Hebrew historical literature, in the proper
sense of the word, was made with Saul and David. Around such figures
the popular imagination always weaves a more or less translucent
tissue of legend, and particularly about their youth before they come
out on the stage of history, or the manner of their first appearance.
The historians gathered up tribal tales such as the exploits of the
judges (that is, in the original sense, deliverers, or defenders), the
sacred legends of holy places, the traditions of a wonderful escape
from the Egyptians, a visit to the Mount of God and an agreement to
worship the god of the place as their god, of another sanctuary in the
desert at Kadesh, conflicts with the Bedouins, and attempts to force
an entry into Canaan--in short, all the diverse material which is
preserved in the older narratives in Exodus and Numbers--and combined
them as best they could into a continuous history of the people of
Israel.
The continuity is, however, only a narrative continuity; historically
there are great gaps in it, or, more exactly, the traditions cluster
about only a few points, such as the exodus and the invasion of
Palestine, and these are embellished with a wealth of legendary and
mythical circumstance beneath which the facts are effectually hidden.
The nature of this material may be judged from the fact that between
Joshua and Eli there are only the episodes of the judges, strung on a
chronological string, generalized as experiences of all Israel, and
put under a theological judgment--invaluable as pictures of
civilization, but as a history of a couple of centuries (the
chronology says four) evidently insufficient. On the other side of the
exodus are, according to the genealogies, three or four generations
(the chronology again makes it four hundred years) of total ignorance;
beyond that lies the patriarchal story, the realm of pure legend.
Out of such materials Judæan authors in the tenth and following
centuries constructed the history of their people from the remotest
antiquity, and, as commonly happens with the first precipitation of
national traditions, preformed all subsequent representations.
This earliest book of history is commonly designated in the Pentateuch
and Joshua by the symbol J. It is disputed whether the oldest history
of the founding of the kingdom in Samuel should be regarded as a
continuation of J. If it were meant thereby to affirm unity of
authorship of this strand from Genesis to Samuel, that would be saying
much more than the facts warrant; but there is through the whole so
noteworthy a congruity of conception and sameness of excellence in
style that it is not inappropriate to use for it the one symbol J in
the sense of the oldest Judæan history.