Alter makes the case that the Books of Samuel were originally one book, divided for pragmatic reasons—the maximum length of an ancient scroll. “No one knows with certainty when the main part of the original narrative was written, though there is good reason to place it, as a recurrent scholarly view does, quite close to David’s own time, in the first half of the tenth century B.C.E.” In his introduction, Alter posits, “The story of David is probably the greatest single narrative representation in Antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.” Next, Alter gives a pen portrait of Samuel, “The prophet Samuel may have God on his side, but he is also an implacable irascible man, and often a palpably self-interested one as well. His resistance to the establishment of the monarch may express a commitment to the noble ideal of the direct kingship of God over Israel, but it is also motivated by resentment that he must surrender authority, and the second of his two antimonarchic speeches is informed by belligerent self-defensiveness about his own career as national leader…. Samuel is invested with prophetic power by an act of God. But the writer understands that he is also a man, all too human, and that any kind of power, including spiritual power, can lead to abuse.”
In 1 Samuel 2, Alter begins by explicating the context of the poem within the larger narrative work, “Hannah’s psalm has been set into the story at a later stage in the editorial process than the original tale…. The reference to the anointed king at the end of the poem assumes the institution of the monarchy, not established until two generations after the moment when Hannah is said to have pronounced this prayer…. But the larger thematic assertion in the poem of God’s power to reverse fortunes, plunging the high to the depths and exalting the lowly, is a fitting introduction to the whole Saul-David history…. There is a sequence of body parts at the beginning of the first three versets of the poem, two literal and the middle one metaphorical: “my heart,” “my horn,” “my mouth.” The raising high of the horn is crucial to the thematic unfolding of the poem, which reiterates a pattern of vertical movement, elevation and descent, that manifests God’s power to reverse the fortunes of humankind.”
In 1 Samuel 6:14, Alter points out a thematic link between the main line of this book and a previous episode in the Torah, “the cows they offered up. One connection between the Ark Narrative, with its concern for sanctity, and the Samuel-Saul-David cycle, with its preoccupation with politics, is a kind of brooding sense of the cruel price exacted for dedication to the higher cause. The milch cows are burned on the improvised alter; Hannah and her son, Samuel, must be separated in his dedication to the sanctuary; and later both Saul and David will pay terrible costs in their personal lives for their adhesion to power.”
In this book, Alter makes the case that Samuel, the prophet, is stood up as a counterpoint to the institution of monarchy. In 1 Samuel 8:11, Alter relates an explicitly anti-monarchial speech, “Your sons he will take. Samuel’s speech is solidly constructed as a hammering piece of antimonarchic rhetoric. All the cherished possessions to be expropriated by the king are placed emphatically at the beginning of each clause…. The speech moves systematically from the expropriation of sons and daughters to land and produce to slaves and beasts of burden, ending with the climactic “you will become his slaves.”
In 1 Samuel 17:10, Alter highlights a translation choice that he makes that conflicts with the standard versions, “I am the one who has insulted the Israelite lines. Nearly all the English versions render the verb here as “defied,” which is one end of the semantic range of the Hebrew heref. But the verb is transparently linked withe noun herpah—insult, disgrace, shame. By his taunting words, Goliath has laid an insult on Israel that only a victorious champion can “take away.””
Alter describes the two conflicting introductions of David into the narrative in 1 Samuel 17:55, “Whose son is the lad, Abner? It is at this point that the evident contradiction between the two stories of David’s debut is most striking. If David had been attending Saul in court as his personal music therapist, with Saul having explicitly sent a communication to Jesse regarding David’s entering his service, how could he, and Abner as well, now be ignorant of David’s identity? Efforts to harmonize the two stories in terms of the logic of later conventions of realism seem unconvincing…. The prevalent scholarly view that chapters 16 and 17 represent two different traditions about David’s beginnings is persuasive…. In the Greek tradition, there were competing versions of the same myths, but never in a single text…. Here, in the first, vertically oriented story, with its explicit instructions from God to man, David is emphatically elected by God, is associated with the spirit and with song, and gains entrée in the court of Saul by using song to master the spirit. In the second story, with its horizontal deployment in space, David makes his way into Saul’s presence through martial prowess, exhibiting shrewdness, calculation, and rhetorical skill.”
In 1 Samuel 27:2-3, Alter makes the supposition of historical accuracy based on the unflattering portrayal of David, “he crossed over … to Achish … king of Gath…. David stayed with Achish in Gath … each man with his household…. Why would a much later, legendary, and supposedly glorifying tradition attribute this act of national treachery to David? The compelling inference is that the writer had authentic knowledge of a period when David collaborated withe Philistines…. Now he comes with six hundred men under his command, a fighting unit that could be of great use to Achish, and essentially offers to become Achish’s vassal.”
In 2 Samuel 1:17, the narrative repeats the detail of David’s relationship with music, “And David sang this lament. We have been aware since 1 Samuel 16 of David’s gift as a lyre player and (presumably) as a singer. Only now do we hear him in action as a singer-poet. This grandly resonant lament, cast in archaic epic diction, marks a great moment of transition in the larger narrative, as the David-Saul story becomes the David story. It is also another public utterance of David’s that beautifully serves his political purposes, celebrating his dead rival as it mourns his loss and thus testifying that David could never have desired Saul’s death.”
Alter points out a notable instance of military description in 2 Samuel 10:9, “there was a battle line against him in front and behind…. Such attention to military detail is quite untypical of biblical narrative…. The point of such detail is surely to show Joab as a superbly competent and resolute field commander, just before the great pivotal episode in the next chapter in which Joab maintains the siege against Rabbath-Ammon while his commander in chief slumbers, and lusts, in Jerusalem.”
The appearance and significance of blood is a recurring motif in the Torah. Alter, in 2 Samuel 16:7, describes how blood has stained the spotless image of David as he ages. “Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless fellow. The blood that, according to the narrative itself, David has on his hands is that of Uriah the Hittite, and of the fighting men of Israel who perished at Rabbath-Ammon with Uriah. But the Benjaminite Shimei clearly believes what David himself, and the narrative with him, has taken pains to refute—that the blood of the house of Saul is on David’s hands: Abner, Ish-Bosheth, and perhaps even Saul and Jonathan (for David was collaborating with the Philistine Achish when they fell at Gilboa). Hence the phrase Shimei hurls at David in his next sentence, “all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you became king,” suggesting a conjunction of murder and usurpation.”
Alter often points out when the Hebrew wording adds significant meaning, style, or context. In 2 Samuel 18:28, “All is well. This is one word in Hebrew, shalom. That word is the last two syllables of Absalom’s name in Hebrew, ‘Avshalom, a link David will reinforce when he nervously asks, “Is it well [shalom] with the lad Absalom [‘Avshalom]?””
Alter returns to the theme of song in 2 Samuel 22:1, “And David spoke to the LORD the words of this song. It was a common literary practice in ancient Israel to place a long poem or “song” (shirah) at or near the end of a narrative book—compare Jacob’s Testament, Genesis 49, and the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32…. There is, of course, a persistent biblical notion of David the poet as well as of David the warrior-king, and the idea that he actually composed this poem, though unlikely, cannot be categorically dismissed…. The archaic character of the language makes the meaning of many terms conjectural. Even in the ancient period, some of the older locutions may already have been obscure to the scribes, who seem to have scrambled many phrases in transmission…. It should be noted that this same poem occurs in the Book of Psalms as Psalm 18 with a good many minor textual variants.”
Finally, Alter suggests the provenance of 2 Samuel 23:8, “These are the names of the warrior of David. This list of military heroes and their exploits is perhaps the strongest candidate of any passage in the Book of Samuel to be considered a text actually written in David’s lifetime. The language is crabbed, and the very abundance of textual difficulties, uncharacteristic for prose, reflects the great antiquity of the list. These fragmentary recollections of particular heroic exploits do not sound like the invention of any later writer but, on the contrary, like memories of remarkable martial acts familiar to the audience.”
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