romantic story of i Samuel xvii., which claims this honour for
David? The difficulty created by this discrepancy was felt as early
as the times of the chronicler, who surmounts it by asserting that
it was the brother of Goliath whom Elhanan slew (1 Chron. xx. 5).
Connected with this story are other difficulties affecting the
relation of David to Saul. In this chapter, Saul is unacquainted
with David, 1 Samuel xvii. 56, whereas in the preceding chapter
David is not only present at his court, but has already won the
monarch's love, xvi. 21. The David of the one chapter is quite
unlike the David of the other; in xvi. 18 he is a mature man, a
skilled and versatile minstrel-warrior, and the armour-bearer of the
king; in xvii. 38, 39, he is a young shepherd boy who cannot wield a
sword, and who cuts a sorry figure in a coat of mail. Many of these
undoubted difficulties are removed by the Septuagint[1] which omits
xvii. 12-31 ,41, 50, 55-xviii. 5, and the question is raised whether
the Septuagint omitted these verses to secure a more consistent
narrative, or whether they were wanting, as seems more probable, in
the Hebrew text from which the Greek was translated. In that case
these verses, which give an idyllic turn (cf. ch. xvi.) to the story
of David, may have been added after the Greek version was written,
i.e, hardly earlier than 250 B.C., and a curious light would thus be
shed upon the history of the text and on the freedom with which it
was treated by later Jewish scholars. Equally striking and important
are the conflicting conceptions of the monarchy entertained in the
earlier part of the book. One source regards it as a blessing and a
gift of Jehovah; the first king is anointed by divine commission "to
be prince over my people Israel, and he shall save my people out of
the hand of the Philistines," 1 Sam. ix. 16; the other regards the
request for an earthly king as a rejection of the divine king, and
the monarchy as destined to prove a vexation, if not a curse