time; but the opinion is present, though unexpressed, that the king was not entitled to sacrifice, either before the expiry of the seven days or at any time:  his sacrificing is regarded as sacrilege.  And thus the autonomous theocracy stands all at once before our eyes, which no one thought of before Ezekiel.  We are reminded of the stories of Joash and Uzziah in the Chronicles.  The incidents in 1Samuel xv. xxviii. are similar, but the spirit of the narrative is different and more antique.  The rejection does not come here with such mad haste, and we do not get the impression that Samuel is glad of the opportunity to wash his hands of the king.  On the contrary, he honours him before the people, he mourns that Jehovah has rejected him; and Saul, who never again sees him alive, turns to him dead in the hour of his extremity, and does not regard him as his implacable enemy.  Again, in the former case the king’s offence is that he has too low an estimate of the sacredness of sacrifice, and fails to regard the altar as unapproachable to the laity:  while in the latter case he is reproached with attaching. to sacrifice far too high a value.  In the former case, in fine, the Deity and the representative of the Deity act with absolute caprice, confront men stiffly with commands of incredible smallness, and challenge them to opposition; in the latter, the conduct of Samuel is not (supposing it to have been the custom to devote enemies to destruction) unintelligible, nor his demeanour devoid of natural spirit; he appeals not to an irresponsible position, but to the manifest truth that obedience is better than the fat of rams.

Not that chapters xv. and xxviii. belong to the original growth of the tradition.  In the case of xxviii. 3-25 it is easy to show the insertion:  the thread of xxviii. 1, 2, coming from chapter xxvii. is continued at xxix. 1.  According to xxviii. 4 the Philistines have advanced as far as Shunem in Jezreel; in xxix. 1 they are only at Aphek in Sharon, and they do not go on to Jezreel till xxix. 11.  To prove an insertion in the case of chap. xv. we might point to the fact that there is a direct connection between xiv. 52 and xvi. 14; but this must be proved somewhat circumstantially.  Let it suffice, then, to say that in the preceding narrative of Saul’s history, the war with the Amalekites appears in quite a different light (ix. 1-X. 16, xi. xiii. xiv.; cf. also Numbers xxiv. 7).  The occasion of it, according to xiv. 48, lay in the needs of the time, and the object was the very practical one of “saving Israel out of the hands of them that spoiled them.”  There is nothing here to suggest that the campaign was undertaken in consequence of a religious command, to punish the Amalekites for an offence over which long ages had passed, and information about which could only be gathered from historical books dealing with the age of Moses.  Both the narratives, chap. xv. as well as chap. xxviii, are preludes of events afterwards to happen.  At chap. xvi.