Daniel H. King, Sr. is now preaching for the Locust St. Church of Christ in Mt. Pleasant, TN. Contact him at danielhking@hotmail.com.

When Saul began to have his repeated episodes of insanity, his servants had suggested that he bring in someone to play some soothing music for him to aid in quieting his spirit. One of the young men suggested David, son of Jesse who was said to be “skilful in playing” (1 Sam. 16:18). David was sent for, and whenever Saul was troubled by the evil spirit from God, David played upon the harp and King Saul was refreshed and well, and the evil spirit departed from him (v. 23). During his visits with the king, Saul became quite fond of David and even assigned him duties as his armor bearer (v. 21).

When the two of them next meet, on the occasion of the slaying of Goliath, the Philistine giant of Gath, the king seems not to know him and inquires as to whose son he is (17:55-58). This he may have asked in order to ascertain whether or not there may have been other sons in the same family with such fighting skills as David had (cf. 14:52). Some who read the text have suggested that this was all the king meant by what he said, not that he did not know the young man, but that he had merely forgotten from what family he had derived and wanted to know in order to inquire about whether there were brothers who could be brought into service as warriors to fight the Philistine menace. This might also explain the fact that Abner, the son of Ner, Saul’s uncle, did not seem to know him either.

Several other factors probably also entered into the picture. Some of them are as follows:

1. Some considerable time may have passed and David may have matured. Young people change as they mature. They do not look the same at 16 as they do later when they are 21. The precise age of David during either one of these encounters is impossible to ascertain because the author does not provide us with a precise time line of events. The narrative only spaces them out as being one after the other in the order now broken up as chapters 16 and 17. Even that division did not appear in the original Hebrew manuscripts. So, a few years may have intervened between these early instances and the occasion of the killing of the giant. All of us, at one time or another, have failed to recognize a young person whom we knew in earlier years, perhaps even knew well, but when they are “all grown up” we seem not at first to remember them. This may have been what happened to King Saul, and perhaps Abner as well.

2. Saul no doubt had many servants at the time, and failing to recognize a single one of them would not have been unusual. Even though he may have grown fond of David, this does not mean that he knew him well enough to remember him in a vastly different setting. Before the occasion with the giant, Saul had little reason to give much consideration to who this fellow was or to care much about from whence he came or what the name of his father was.

3. Before David had appeared to him as a musician, in the later scene he was a war hero. Have you ever seen someone and seemed to recognize him, but because he is out of his regular place or circumstance, you did not know who he was? I did this not long ago. I saw a fellow in a restaurant, and the face seemed very familiar, but I could not remember where we had met before. It took me took days to remember where I had seen him before. He was the postal clerk in a post office that I have frequented many times. But because he was “out of his element,” so to speak, I did not know who he was. This may have happened to Saul. Because David was not playing on the lyre, Saul did not know him.

4. When Saul had encountered David on these earlier occasions he was sick. Saul was not himself when David was called in to play for the king, so the sickness itself may have kept Saul from knowing or even caring who was around him at the time. He may have appreciated the solace at the time, but have given little thought to who this fellow was who brought it to him. Note that neither Saul nor Abner associate David on the second occasion in chapter 17 with his duties as a musician for the king. Often when people are very ill, they do not know or care much about what is going on around them.

5. The nature of Saul’s illness may account for his failure to recognize young David. Saul was deeply depressed and despondent because Samuel had informed him that his kingdom would soon come to an end. God had rejected him from being king over Israel on account of his stubbornness and unwillingness to yield his own will to that of God (15:23). So he knew that he would not have either a legacy or a dynasty in Israel. This state of depression over his rejection by God was punctuated by fits of utter lunacy. Many scholars who read the account given in 1 Samuel see these episodes as evidence of a man whose mental condition was deteriorating over time; he was becoming progressively more ill and may have been clinically insane. A form of dementia may also have been associated with his flare-ups. As a result of his mental disease he may have remembered little about what happened or who attended him during these periods of mania.

Since the writer of the text of 1 Samuel does not tell us why Saul did not remember David from their earlier encounters, it is impossible for us to be sure about the reason. Any one or all of the possible reasons listed above could explain his failure to recognize the young man. Some scholars from the liberal school of textual criticism suggest that the writer has brought together two different narratives which provide two “first encounter” stories that are at odds with one another. This solution to the problem is altogether unsatisfactory because it fails to explain how this secondary editor was so blind to what he was setting down on paper that he did not see the seeming “contradiction” in the two accounts. No, the historian simply recorded the facts of what happened on these two occasions without explaining the reason for the king’s dunderheadedness. He left it to us to try to figure out why Saul may have failed to identify someone who he ought to have known. This may actually have been one aspect of the author’s purpose in telling us this part of the story. He does intend to tell us about the faltering mental facilities of King Saul and his consequent ineptitude as a leader. So this may well enter into his reasoning behind telling us the story precisely as he does.