Saul and David—Fear; Sword and Spear

AbstractImmediately following the slaying of Goliath and Saul's mystifying query about who that young slayer was, David becomes the object of Saul's fear and murderous jealousy, a mini‐drama of cat‐and‐mouse that takes up the last half of I Samuel and Saul's suicide. The contrast between David and Saul continues to be spelled out, implicitly but surely, through various repetitions of narrative detail, most conspicuously the motifs of fear and of sword‐and‐spear use. Still another and striking pattern, to be taken up in the following chapter, occurs in the middle of David's fleeing from Saul, when twice David spares the king's life—and spares, as well, the life of a common fool. The two motifs of this chapter plus the triadic pattern of the next serve to further illustrate just what distinguishes David from Saul. Such advancing clarity, of course, functions also to explain better the mind of God in fastening on David rather than Saul.