Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions

Selected Essays of Robert P. Gordon

Robert P. Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Robert Gordon gathers together his most important essays on the Old Testament and on the ancient versions, adding an introduction which gives background comment and reflections on each essay. The Old Testament essays are divided into three groups: The Narrative Tradition', 'Prophecy from East to West', and 'Across, Behind and Beyond the Text'. The essays on the ancient versions are divided into two sections: 'The Text and the Versions' and 'The Targums, Chiefly to the Prophets'.

Part I
Hebrew BibleThe Narrative Tradition

Chapter 1
David’s Rise and Saul’s Demise: Narrative Analogy in 1 Samuel 24–26

The narrative segment which is the subject of this paper belongs to the so-called “Story of David’s Rise”, to use Leonhard Rost’s title for the second of the three major compositional units that he detected in the books of Samuel.¹ In the event, the world of Old Testament scholarship was much more interested in Rost’s arguments for the existence of an originally independent Narrative of Succession – 2 Samuel 9–20; 1 Kings 1–2, according to the classic formulation. When, in the late 1950s, the unitary potential of David’s Vorgeschichte began to be recognized – witness the monographs by Nübel (1959), Mildenberger (1962), Ward (1967) and Grønbaek (1971)² – Rost’s starting-point for it was advanced from 1 Sam. 23:1 to 16:14, or, with Grønbaek, to 15:1, and his fragmentary approach gave way to a more positive evaluation of the material making up the narrative.³

Even so, “David’s Rise” does not represent the same homogeneous blending of sources as is the case with the Narrative of Succession.⁴ As we read, we are more conscious of the individual narrative blocks making up the whole, and of the tensions which their conjoining has imposed on the composite work.⁵ But this is not the whole story. For whether or not we subscribe to the theory of a large narrative unit separable from the rest of 1 and 2 Samuel, we have to reckon with a high degree of interplay among the various sub-units contained in these chapters. J. T. Willis’s study of “comprehensive anticipatory redactional joints” in 1 Samuel 16–18 neatly illustrates the point: even 16:14–23, which has stoutly defied attempts at harmonization with 17:1–18:5, can be shown to function programmatically in relation to the larger context of the struggle between Saul and David.⁶ In other words, some of the principal elements in the story are passed in review before the account proper gets under way.

Since agreement about the existence of an independent, self-contained account of David’s early career is not crucial for our study, we shall use “David’s Rise” simply as a convenience-term. It is in any case indisputable that the second half of 1 Samuel is focused principally on David: “the stories of Saul and David are really stories about David”.⁷ Humphreys’ portrayal of 1 Samuel 9–31 as a three-part story about Saul highlights a subsidiary theme, but makes a useful point at the risk of distorting the image which the section seems more naturally to project.⁸ The motif to which all else in these chapters is subservient is that of David’s progress towards the throne. And, in the way of biblical narrative, the question is not whether he will become king, but how he will become king.⁹ He is from the outset God’s nominee, and therefore the rightful claimant; Jonathan early acknowledges the fact and so, eventually, does Saul.

The “how” of David’s accession comes to the fore at that point where the initiative seems to be passing from Saul to his fugitive servant. From chapter 24 on, the narrator is at pains to show that, despite the opportunities given, David did not take the law into his own hands. He emphatically was not implicated in Saul’s death, nor in the deaths of Abner and Eshbaal. And it is not difficult to discover a likely reason for this emphasis. Sympathy for Saul and his house did not die easily in Israel, and certainly not during David’s reign. The Gibeonite episode recounted in 2 Samuel 21 offers one reason, and there must have been many who agreed with Shimei’s denunciation of David as a “man of blood”: “Begone, begone, you man of blood, you worthless fellow! The Lord has avenged upon you all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead you have reigned” (2 Sam. 16:7f). As late as 2 Samuel 20 we read of a revolt of the men of Israel under the leadership of the Benjaminite Sheba ben Bichri. That this was an attempted coup by the pro-Saul faction seems more than likely.¹⁰ At a later stage Solomon’s maladministration can only have given credibility to the Saulide cause. It is small wonder, then, that David’s non-complicity in the deaths of Saul and his family has been given such coverage in these chapters,¹¹ and still less wonder if “David’s Rise” was produced under royal auspices and “represents the official interpretation of the Jerusalem palace”.¹² Nowhere is this question of David’s avoidance of blood-guilt addressed more directly than in 1 Samuel 24–26.

The Narrative Unit

I began by referring to 1 Samuel 24–26 as a “narrative segment”, though strictly speaking the “wilderness cycle”, as the “segment” may fairly be called,¹³ begins at 23:14. It is a beginning which, to quote Klaus Koch, “is not markedly typical of the start to a Hebrew story”,¹⁴ but that need not detain us. The issue of blood-guilt is first raised at 24:1ff and it is from this point on that the narrator applies his skills to the development of his all-important theme. On almost any analysis of these chapters 26:25 marks the closing bracket; Saul, having blessed David, “returned to his place”.¹⁵ 27:1 reports David’s decision to take refuge with the Philistines, and we enter a new phase in his story. Further justification for treating 23:14 (effectively 24:1)–26:25 as a narrative unit would therefore appear unnecessary.

Hitherto most treatments of 1 Samuel 24–26 have concentrated on the question of the relationship between chapters 24 and 26, usually to demonstrate that these are sibling accounts of a single incident. Literary criticism attributed the accounts to separate written sources.¹⁶ Form criticism, on the other hand, envisages a period of separate development within the oral tradition.¹⁷ But whereas Koch, who holds that we have “two versions of the same story”, appeals to oral tradition in order to account for the differences between them,¹⁸ Grønbaek maintains that we are dealing with two originally independent traditions whose similarities are best explained as having arisen during a period of parallel development within the oral tradition.¹⁹ The similarities certainly call for some explanation, though, it need hardly be said, this is but one aspect of a more general problem of parallel accounts in 1 Samuel. In what follows we shall not be discussing the origin or life-setting of the individual units, but rather their function within the narrative composite of “David’s Rise”.

Narrative Analogy

At some point the traditions relating to David’s early career were brought together to form a connected narrative corresponding grosso modo to what we have in the MT. In this connection we can hardly avoid talking of an “editor”, however we envisage his role. By his shaping and deployment of the material available to him this editor has infused his own spirit into the stories that he recounts. It is to him that we owe the overarching themes and dominant emphases which give the narrative its connectedness, and not just at the lowly level of topical or chronological arrangement. Current interest in “the Bible as literature”, with attention being paid to the larger narrative unit, the development of plot, characterization and the like, has ensured for the editor a more honourable status than heretofore. And rightly so, even if we do not subscribe to the view that the Old Testament is “a large chiasmus constructed one New Year’s Day in the Exile”.²⁰

One of the outstanding features of biblical narrative, and perhaps the one which is most open to misinterpretation, is its tendency to laconicism, just at those points where the modern reader looks to the author to spell out his intention or, maybe, to moralize on the action of the story.²¹ Where the reader’s sensibilities are offended this taciturnity may be put down to moral indifference on the part of the author, or simply – and this has special relevance to “David’s Rise” – to undisguised hero-worship. But Hebrew narrative is much more subtle than that, using a wide range of narrative techniques to perform the functions of the explicit commentaries in the more transparent narrative types. Prominent among these techniques is that of narrative analogy. Narrative analogy is a device whereby the author can provide an internal commentary on the action which he is describing, usually by means of cross-reference to an earlier action or speech.²² Thus narratives are made to interact in ways which may not be immediately apparent; ironic parallelism abounds wherever this technique is applied.

Narrative analogy, we submit, provides an important clue to the relationship between 1 Samuel 25, which tells the story of Nabal, and the contiguous chapters, which treat of David’s sparing of Saul. The point can be expressed in the simple equation: Nabal = Saul. Saul does not vanish from view in 1 Samuel 25;²³ he is Nabal’s alter ego.

Predisposing Factors

Why should Nabal serve as a narrative function of Saul? Several predisposing factors are suggested by a surface reading of 1 Samuel 24–26, but by far the most important is the shared motif of David’s magnanimity towards his enemies: “In each case, David perceives a powerful advantage in killing, but is restrained by a theological consideration.”²⁴ Nabal, no less than Saul, poses the question, Will David incur blood-guilt on his way to the throne? Considerations such as that Nabal is not “the Lord’s anointed” and that to kill him would not be a violation of royal sacrosanctity are temporarily set aside. The point is made in Abigail’s speech that blood-guilt for anyone – even for a Nabal – could cast a shadow over David’s throne at a later stage (25:30f).

Time and place are also enabling factors in the rôle-identification of Nabal with Saul. While the Nabal story is in its proper setting inasmuch as it recounts an episode from the period of David’s outlawry in the Judaean wilderness,²⁵ it is also significant that the two places mentioned in 25:2 in connection with Nabal have strong associations with Saul. Maon is named three times in 23:24f as the area where David hid and where Saul came within an ace of apprehending him. Carmel, where Nabal had his estate, was the place where Saul erected his stele in celebration of his victory over the Amalekites (15:12).²⁶

Then there is Nabal’s social status. He was a wealthy individual whose style of life could even have been the envy of Saul; he is therefore fit to stand as a narrative surrogate of Saul. Levenson, in declaring him “no commoner”, ventures the opinion that he was “the rõ’š bêt ’ãb or the nãśî’ of the Calebite clan, a status to which David laid claim through his marriage to Nabal’s lady”.²⁷ And were we to indulge Levenson a little further in his speculations we should discover that the correspondence between Saul and Nabal does not end there, for Levenson surmises that the Ahinoam mentioned in 25:43 is none other than Saul’s wife, the only other bearer of the name in the Old Testament. But perhaps it is too much a flight of fancy to imagine that “David swaggered into Hebron with the wife of a Ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Place of Previous Publication
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I Hebrew Bible
• II Ancient Versions
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Authors Cited