********************************************* 2.  Only in one direction does he set limits to his self-denial:  he makes the future king solemnly promise to spare his family.  Here manifests itself an interest belonging to the time of the narrator.  The oriental custom according to which the new ruler extirpates the preceding dynasty, was not systematically carried out by David, and a special exception was made in favour of a son left by Jonathan.  “All my father’s house,” says Meribaal (2Samuel xix. 28), “were dead men before my lord the king yet thou didst set me at thy table:  what right have I therefore yet to complain unto the king (even about injustice)?” Now this son of Jonathan was the ancestor of a Jerusalem family which flourished till after the exile.  Older traits in 1Samuel xx. are the importance attached to the new moon, the family sacrifice at Bethlehem, perhaps the stone )BN )CL which appears to have implied something inconsistent with later orthodoxy, the name being in two passages so singularly corrupted. *************************************************

Chapter xviii. 6 seq. manifests tendency in a bad sense, even apart from the additions of the Masoretic text.  Here Saul’s enmity against David is carried back to the very beginning of their relations together, and even his friendship is represented as dissembled hatred.  All the honours with which the king covers his armour-bearer are interpreted as practices to get rid of him.  He makes him his son-in-law in order to expose him to deadly danger in his efforts to procure the hundred foreskins of the Philistines which were the price of the daughter.  The connection cannot dispense with xviii. 6 seq, but at the same time it is beyond doubt that the venomous way of interpreting the facts is a mark of later revision.  For Saul here practices his perfidies with the cognisance of his servants, who must therefore have been well aware of his disposition towards David; but the old narrator proceeds on the opposite assumption, that his hatred appeared all at once, and that David had been held by all up to that time to be one of the king’s favourite servants:  cf. xxi. 2-xxii. 14 seq., not to speak of chapter xx.  And this alone agrees with the nature of Saul as it is everywhere described to us.

It is a characteristic circumstance that the corruption of the tradition is greatest in those narratives in which Samuel enters into the history of David.  There are two insertions of this kind.  According to xix. 18-24 David flees to the old man at Ramah, where the school of the prophets is; Saul sends messengers to take him, but these, when they come near Samuel and see him in command of a troop of ecstatic enthusiasts, are seized by the frenzy like the rest.  The second set of messengers whom Saul sends, and the third, fare no better; and Saul has at last to come himself.  But he also is drawn into the vortex, tears off his clothes and dances before Samuel and David, the only