Let our lord now command thy servants, which are before thee, to seek out a man, who is a cunning player on an harp: and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well."

And Saul said unto his servants, can play well, and bring him to me."

"Provide me now a man that

Then answered one of the servants, and said, "Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person, and the Lord is with him."

Wherefore Saul sent messengers unto Jesse, and said "Send me David thy son, which is with the sheep."

And Jesse took an ass laden with bread, and a bottle of wine, and a kid, and sent them by David his son unto Saul.

:

And David came to Saul, and stood before him and he loved him greatly; and he became his armour-bearer.

It is difficult to reconcile this with the account given in the 17th chapter of the same book, where are related the circumstances which preceded and followed the battle between David and Goliath. The reader will remember that the two armies were drawn up in array, when Goliath of Gath challenges the Israelites to single combat. At this moment, the stripling David comes to see his brothers, and asks what shall be given to the man who should kill the Philistine. Then follows this narrative:

I SAMUEL xvii, 28. And Eliab his eldest brother heard when he spake unto the men; and Eliab's anger was kindled against David, and he said, "Why camest thou down hither? and with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart; for thou art come down that thou mightest see the battle." And David said, "What have I now done? Is there not a cause ?" And he turned from him toward another, and spake after the same manner: and the people answered him again after the former manner. And when the words were heard which David spake, they rehearsed them before Saul: and he sent for him. And David said to Saul "Let no man's heart fail because of him; thy servant will go and fight with this Philistine. &c."

The account of the battle in which David slays the Philistine, needs not to be extracted; at verse 55 we read:

And when Saul saw David go forth against the Philistine, he said unto Abner, the captain of the host, "Abner, whose son is this youth?” And Abner said, "As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell." And the king said, "Enquire thou whose son the stripling is." And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him, and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand, And Saul said to him, "Whose son art thou, thou young man ?" And. David answered, "I am the son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite."

These two accounts do not agree together. If David, according to the first of them, was already "a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters," before he played on the harp to Saul, how could he be afterwards described as a "stripling" and as unused to armour, when he fought with the Philistine? Again: If David had been the armour-bearer of Saul who "loved him greatly," how should Saul afterwards have been ignorant of his very name? The explanation of the discrepancy may be this. The two accounts were originally independent of one another, and were afterwards united by some compiler who did not perceive that they were irreconcilable in the points above mentioned, though in their main features, equally founded upon fact.

It is not, however, impossible that the compiler has added details by way of ornament to his narrative: for he gives us a dialogue as having passed between the champions: but does not tell us in what language they spoke. The Philistines and Israelites certainly did not at this time speak the same language: or we should not find them speaking a different language four or five centuries afterwards, as we read in Nehemiah, xiii, 23:

In those days also saw I [i. e. Nehemiah] Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab. And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews' language, but according to the language of each people.

Ashdod was one of the five cities of the Philistines, and its inhabitants, having always maintained their independence, retained also their native language, still distinct from that of the Israelites as late as the time of Nehemiah.

The dialogue between David and Goliath is similar to those which we find in Homer as passing between the various champions of Greece and Troy: but neither can these be received as other than the embellishments of the poet: for Hector and Achilles, Ajax and Æneas, spoke different languages, and could not have understood a word of the taunts and threats which they so liberally discharged the one against the other.

5. Inaccuracy concerning Jacob's children.

In Genesis xxxv, 26, we read-after a list of Jacob's children

These are the sons of Jacob, which were born to him in PadanAram.

But it is well known that Benjamin was born, some years after Jacob returned to Canaan. The text therefore is inaccurate, and creates a serious difficulty, if we suppose that Moses, writing in the presence of God, could have been liable to such an error. If, again," some careless or injudicious transcriber," as Dr Shuckford supposes, "finding the words in Padan-Aram in Gen. xlvi, 15, might add them here also &c. &c." our want of confidence is merely transferred from Moses to the book itself; it is impossible to fix limits to this work of interpolation, and the only safe ground for the enquirer is that furnished by the supposition that the compiler put together his account long after the events had happened, and when no more certain information could be procured.

An error is found also in the other catalogue of Jacob's children, who accompanied him into Egypt. The names

occupy from verse 8 to 25 of Genesis xlvi. In verse 26 it is said;

All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, which came out of bis loins, besides Jacob's sons' wives, all the souls were three score and six.

This total is erroneous, for the names, added properly, amount to sixty seven; and a still greater difference is found between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint in the 27th verse: the former makes "all the souls of the house of Jacob" to be "three score and ten :" whereas the latter states them to have been seventy five.

We might set aside the authority of the Septuagint as inferior to that of the Hebrew in such a matter, were it not that in St Stephen's speech, in the Acts of the Apostles, vii, 14, the number 75 is repeated, and an awkward dilemma is created, from which it is impossible to extricate ourselves, if these conflicting accounts, both written by inspiration, are to be considered as having come down to us in their original state. This may with justice be called in question; for Dean Shuckford, who supposes that the transcribers have added something in chapter xxxv, accuses them of having omitted something in chapter xlvi, of having added a verse in xlvi, 27, of the Septuagint, which is more full than the Hebrew, and lastly of having altered 70 into 75 in chapter vii of the Acts. It is difficult to imagine how a book, with which such liberties have been taken, can properly be regarded as an immaculate record. But the same mode of interpretation is entirely inapplicable to explain the remarkable fact that among those who accompanied Jacob into Egypt, are enumerated, in Gen. xlvi, 21, ten sons of Benjamin, and, in v. 12, two grandsons of Judah, Hezron and Hamul. Jacob surely went into Egypt soon after the famine began, and Benjamin was then a lad, if we may trust the chronologers, under twenty years of age. The grandsons of Judah, through his son Pharez,

could not have been born until many years later; for Pharez their father was only two or three years old, when the whole family first entered the land of their servitude. 6. Excessive accounts of the population of the Holy Land.

In II SAMUEL chap. xxiv, verse 9, we meet with the astonishing assertion that the number of soldiers in David's army was one million three hundred thousand men ;

And Joab gave up the sum of the number of the people unto the king and there were in Israel eight hundred thousand valiant men that drew the sword; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand

men.

:

If these numbers are correct, we must suppose that all the men in Israel and Judah capable of bearing arms, whether soldiers by profession or not, were included in the calculation. Now, computing those capable of bearing arms as one out of three-a very large proportionit results that the whole number of males in Israel and Judah was nearly 4 millions. There would be in the next place, the same number of females of all ages, or rather the number of females would be greater, as is found to be the case in all countries. We may then conclude that the population of David's dominions amounted to at least 8 millions, a very large number indeed for so small a country as Judæa, which is in size hardly greater than Holland or Belgium, and yet these two kingdoms, though thickly peopled, contain, together, little more than half of the above mentioned estimate taken from the census of King David's dominions. Let us now compare with this the account given in I Chron. xxi, 5 :

And Joab gave the sum of the number of the people unto David, And all they of Israel were a thousand thousand and an hundred thousand men that drew sword: and Judah was four hundred three score and ten thousand men that drew sword.

These numbers make a total of one million five hundred