Whose Son Is This?

“Whose son is this?” (1 Sam. 17:55) Saul’s question at the end of the David/Goliath story is perhaps the key theme of the whole story of David: Whose son is David? Who exactly is this man? Is he the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite? Will he turn out to be a son to Saul? Can he possibly be the son of God?But Saul’s question should strike us as strange. Saul has not only just spoken to David before he defeated Goliath, but David has long been been playing the harp for Saul in his palace. But there’s more that makes Saul’s question so strange. After all, kings might easily forget the names of their servants. What makes Saul’s question about the identity of David so odd is that we have been told just the chapter before that Saul loved David. Is Saul losing his mind? Perhaps. But the narrator of 1 Samuel is doing something deeper. David as a character in the narrative is elusive. He’s hard to pin down. Saul’s question becomes our question as readers: Whose son is this? Who exactly is this man?David is complex. He is filled with contradiction. He contains multitudes. David is a man after God’s own heart and he is calculating, self-serving, and ambitious. More often than not he is both simultaneously. Many if not most of us have been given flattened and simplistic readings of the David story. we’ve been given a story that is more manageable. But these flat readings deny the complexity and the messiness (i.e. the humanness!) of the life of David. I don’t think it’s an accident that precisely because we read scripture in this flat, simplistic way, we so often find it difficult to appreciate the complexity, the messiness, and the beauty of our own lives and the lives of our neighbors.the storytellers of Israel have something to teach us if we will give them our full attention instead of writing them off as ancient, simple narrators.Kurt Vonnegut diagrams: “The Shape of Stories” (from A Man Without a Country)* “Man in Hole”* “Boy Meets Girl”* Cinderella* Kafka* Hamlet This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com