narrative, and as Chronicles (chapter xiii.) copies that narrative, it also contradicts itself (xiii. 10), and that all the more strikingly as by the addition in xiii. 2 it represents the accompanying clergy as tacitly approving the carrying of the ark on the ox-cart.  Then due participation in the sacred procession having been thus once secured them, 1Chronicles xv. positively revels in priests and Levites, of whom not a sing]e word is to be found in 2 Samuel vi., and moreover a sort of musical service is instituted by David himself before the ark, and a festal cantata made up by him out of post-exilian psalms is quoted (chapter xvi.).  In this way, out of the original narrative, the scattered fragments of which now show themselves very strangely in the new connection, something quite different has grown.  “In the former everything is free, simply the affair of king and people, here all is priestly ceremonial; there the people with their king shout and dance with joy before the ark,, here the levites are the musicians and singers in formal order.  To seek to combine the two versions is wholly against the laws of historical interpretation.  If the first were curt and condensed the unification of the two might perhaps be possible, but no story could be more particular or graphic, and could it have been that the Levites alone should be passed over in silence if they had played so very important a part?  The author of Chronicles was able to introduce them only by distorting and mutilating his original and landing himself in contradiction after all.  He cannot allow anything to happen without Levites; and was the ark of the covenant to be fetched to Jerusalem without them? was the Law to be even a second time broken under the pious king David?  This seemed to him impossible.  That Uzzah perished in the first attempt to fetch the ark, and that on the second occasion—­when only a quite short journey is spoken of—­the ark was carried, 2Samuel vi. 13, may have been the suggestions by which he was led.  Fertile in combinations, he profited by the hint.”  So, justly, De Wette (Beitraege, i. 88-91).

The narrative of 2Samuel vi. having been broken off at the first half of ver. 19 (1Chronicles xvi. 3), the second half of the verse and the beginning of the next are reproduced (xvi. 43) after the interpolation of xvi. 4-42, and then 2Samuel vii. is appended word for word (1Chronicles xvii.),—­the resolution of David to build a house for the ark, and what Jehovah said to him about the subject through Nathan.  The point of the prophet’s address turns on the antithesis (2Samuel vii.).  “Thou wilt build a house FOR ME? rather will I build a house FOR THEE;” the house of David is of course the Davidic dynasty.  But an interpolation has already crept into the text of Samuel (vii. 13), which apprehends the antithesis thus:  “THOU wilt build a house for me?  Nay, THY SON shall build a house for me.”  Now Chronicles, for which David comes into consideration merely as the proper founder