Some modern scholars say that people loyal to King David took it upon themselves to rewrite 1 Samuel in order to validate and glorify his anointing of king…
And they were also motivated to paint Saul in a negative light and establish he had no legit right to the throne in order to make his downfall before David more acceptable.
In academic circles, this seems to be the trendy line of thinking at the moment.
Well, I’ll tell you right now, I believe that theory, which is based on taking a literary criticism approach to the Scriptures, is a bunch of BS.
Why?
There are three reasons.
FIRST, it ignores the bigger picture of how God is working through history to bring about his Will.
SECOND, it ignores the divine patterns and principles that began in the book of Genesis.
THIRD, it ignores the fundamental theology that binds all the stories in the Bible together.
Listen, there’s only one difference between the history of Israel and the hundreds of histories of the gentile nations rising up and then descending into chaos since the beginning of civilization.
And that one key difference is the spiritual perspective that we bring to our study of God’s word.
Remove the divine element and all we’ve got are a bunch of disjointed stories that’ll fall flat and seem nonsensical and contradictory.
Now the takeaway here is…
…couldn’t we also say the same thing about the story of our lives?
Remove the divine element or God from our lives and existence becomes hopeless and meaningless.
Over and out.
P.S. Thanks to all of you who answered my question “Did God want Israel to have a king or not?”
The overwhelming consensus seems to be that He did not.
We’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of this soon.
Stay tuned!
I am writing a book about the Bible (I am still working on the title) and when I went into the difference between Kings and Chronicles, I found that Kings was focused mainly on Israel and how God tried, through punishment, to get Israel to repent and return to him, with Judea mentioned as it related to Israel.
However, in Chronicles, the writer focused more on Israel and David’s line, and mentioned Israel as it related to Judea, also being more lenient in it’s treatment of the Judean kings, even mentioning how Manasseh, truly the most evil Southern Kingdom king of all, repented in his final days.
This fits in with your statement that the book was written with a desire to place King David (in Chronicles) and his descendants in a more favorable light.
Interesting how human bias has been inserted into the Holy Scriptures which we’d normal consider to be impartial and not prone to favoritism.