As noted, the juxtaposition of the two
versions created several conflicts. The fact that the editor created these
conflicts, sometimes in important details, should not cause much surprise,
because also elsewhere in the OT did expansions or interpolations created similar
problems. The following difficulties may be observed:
1. David is depicted in different ways
in the two versions. In verse 1 he is Saul’s armor-bearer (16,21) and in that
capacity he fights Goliath. In version 2 he is an unknown shepherd who happens
to be on the spot when Goliath calls the Israelites to a duel.
2. The most conspicuous difficulty is,
as explained on p. 38, that after David has been introduced to Saul and has
been in his court (16,17-23, version 1), in version 2 (17,55-58) he is still
unknown to Saul who asks Abner and David after the latter had defeated Goliath.
3. According to version 1, David
marries Michal, “the daughter” of Saul (18,20-26) but in version 2 Saul
offers David his eldest daughter, Merab, in accordance with another section of
version 2 (17,25).
4. In the first sentence of version 2
(17,12), David and Jesse are introduced to the reader, but David was already known
from version 1 (ch. 16) and his father had been introduced as well (16,1.10).
5. The detail in version 2 that
Goliath paid a daily visit to the camp for forty days (17,16) is apparently not
known to the author of 17,11 (version 1).
6. According to version 2 (17,25ff.),
he who defeats Goliath will be given the king’s daughter. Apparently this
promise is not known to version 1 (18,20ff.), since Saul looks for pretexts
that would convince David to marry his daughter.
7. If indeed Eliab was present at the
time of David’s anointing (16,13 = version 1), it is hard to understand why he should
utter such harsh words to David (17,28 = version 2).
8. Twice David is made an offer in
Saul’s army, once in version 1 (18,13) and once in version 2 (18,5). (Emanuel
Tov, “The Nature of the Differences Between MT and the LXX in 1 Sam. 17-18[1],”
in The Story of David and Goliath: Texutal and Literary Criticism, ed. Dominique
Barthélemy, David W. Gooding, Johan Lust, and Emanuel Tov [Orbis Biblicus Et
Orientalis 73; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986], 42-43)