After this the contradictions about the connexion of Saul and David are of small moment. In chap. xvi., 18—23, David is brought to play the harp to Saul, and he is described as “a mighty valiant man and a man of war,” and he became Saul’s arm or-bearer as well as musician. In the next chapter David leaves him (v. 15) and goes back to feed his father’s sheep, when a war breaks out; a curious proceeding for a “mighty valiant man.” Six weeks later David carries some food to his brethren in the camp, and hearing the Philistine giant Goliath utter a challenge, he offers to go and fight him. Saul points out to the man who six weeks before was “mighty valiant” and “a man of war,” that he could not fight the Philistine, for he was “but a youth,” while Goliath was “a man of war from his youth.” David then relates the story of a struggle he had with a curious composite animal, a “lion and a bear,” who stole a lamb, and “I went out after him and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth, and when he arose against me I caught him by the beard and slew him.” Saul then put his armor on him, but the former armor-bearer and man of war had forgotten how to use armor, and refused to wear it. He then killed the Philistine, and Saul, in whose court he had lived six weeks before, and who “loved him greatly” (xvi., 21), asked one of his captains who he was, and bade him “inquire whose son the stripling is” (xvii., 55, 56). We can only understand the king’s loss of memory when we think how much changed David was; the “man of war” had become a “stripling,” the “mighty valiant man,” the armor-bearer, had changed into a “youth” who could not wear armor. No wonder poor Saul was puzzled, and if he could not understand it when he was on the spot, how cruel to threaten us with imprisonment and damnation if we blunder about it 3,000 years afterwards. Almost immediately after David is playing away on his harp “as at other times” (xviii., 10).
The bloodthirsty, treacherous, profligate character of David is so well known that I will not deal with it here, further than to call attention to the fact that this deep-dyed criminal was the man “after God’s own heart,” the man who “did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, and turned not aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite” (1 Kings xv., 5).