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begin with no foreknowledge of who David is, such that we have to be introduced to him, and to his family: his father, his three eldest brothers, and his four unnamed brothers. Both describe how David comes to Saul’s attention: through his skill at playing the lyre, and through his bravery on the battlefield. Both have Saul being pleased with David: because he soothes Saul’s spirit, and because he is victorious against Goliath. And both conclude with the explicit notice that Saul took David into his permanent service, thereby severing David from his home in Bethlehem.
    In short, what we have in these two chapters are two stories of David’s rise to prominence in Saul’s court—two stories that are identical in function and parallel in structure, but thoroughly incompatible as sequential episodes in a historical narrative. The parallel and independent existence of the two accounts is, remarkably, proved by the evidence of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the third century BCE , the Septuagint. For in the Greek text of 1 Samuel 17, huge chunks of the Goliath story we know from the Hebrew Bible are missing—and those chunks are precisely the ones that contain almost all of the contradictions with 1 Samuel 16 noted above. 10 The Hebrew version preserves a fully separate account of David’s defeat of Goliath, one that likely circulated independently—hence its reintroduction of the main characters, its distinctive description of David, its ignorance of David’s established relationship with Saul, and structural parallels with 1 Samuel 16. Only at a much later point was this independent story of David’s victory over Goliath combined with the alternative story found in the Septuagint, thereby creating the literary mess that is the canonical text of 1 Samuel 16–17. 11 We therefore have two independent and truly irreconcilable stories about how David emerged from obscurity to become a presence in the royal court of Saul.
    It is easy enough to see why both would be valuable to the biblical authors. As we have already seen, both stories present David in a flattering light as a young man faithful to both his king and his God. But both cannot be historically true, for they contradict each other at almost every turn. These contradictions illustrate one of the main difficulties with reading the Bible as history: the Bible preserves disparate and frequently irreconcilable traditions, even about a single figure. These traditions may have great value from a theological perspective—and after all, the Bible is nothing if not a theological work—but they cannot provide us with firm grounds for historical reconstruction. In a situation like that presented by these two chapters, we are forced to make a decision as to which tradition seems more likely to have any historical value, a decision that we can make only on the basis of a close analysis of each tradition independently.
    Unfortunately, when we look closely at these two famous biblical traditions about David—as the musically gifted author of the psalms and as the uniquely courageous slayer of Goliath—we find that not only can both not be historically true, but in fact neither is historically true.
     
     
    The Author of the Psalms?
     
    S O MUCH OF OUR standard image of David depends on the words of the psalms. These words of faith and devotion that David is said to have composed in his times of crisis and triumph color the traditional characterization of him and allow us to relate to him on an emotional and a spiritual level. It is therefore more than mere historical detail that is at stake here—David’s connection with the psalms is integral to his status in Judeo-Christian culture.
    Any discussion of the authorship of the psalms must logically begin with the book of Psalms itself. There we find, as noted above, that 73 of the 150 psalms in the Hebrew Bible have David’s name in their superscriptions, in the Hebrew phrase le-David. Tradition takes this