The Sword of Goliath: David in Heroic Literature.

• Author: Holm, Tawny
• Position: Book review

The Sword of Goliath: David in Heroic Literature. By STANLEY ISSER. Studies in Biblical Literature, vol. 6. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2003. Pp. ix + 196. $29.95 (paper).

Isser's work is a refreshing shift from recent scholarship that has concentrated so much on the issue of the historicity of the biblical Davidic narratives. While Isser allows that there perhaps existed some historical David (just as scholars of the medieval Arthurian tradition admit a King Arthur), the stories about him in Samuel-1 Kings 2 are best understood as folkloric, popular stories belonging to the genre of heroic literature. They are not manifestly historical or biographical in nature, but neither are they to be thought a mere invention of the Persian period. Rather, the biblical traditions about David "represent the popular literature through which residents of Judah and/or Israel understood and celebrated the past, much in the way that the Homeric epics informed the culture of ancient Greece" (p. 183).

These stories from mixed sources were collected and edited into the Deuteronomistic History, some merely as abbreviated versions of longer stories that must have been well known to the populace at large. While Isser does not discuss issues of dating in any categorical way, he takes an approach close to that of John Van Seters: different kinds of early legendary material, similar to the logoi incorporated by Herodotus, were fixed in the late monarchy, and brought together by the Deuteronomistic Historian roughly four hundred years after the time of David. Regardless of date, the material cannot be shown to have been written in the typical styles of ancient Near Eastern primary documentation, that is, in the manner of annals or, with the exception of perhaps 2 Sam. 8, in the fashion of inscriptions or stelae. The narratives are instead full of extraneous features common to folkloric and heroic literature, such as extensive dialogues or episodes, the inner life of characters, and delightful details of the hero in all his faltering glory, warts and all.

After the introduction, Isser surveys the so-called maximalist versus minimalist controversy, and generally argues against the views of those who assert that the Davidic narratives reveal actual events in reigns of a historical David or Solomon. This is a very helpful and concise section, but is also rather selective--one notes that there is no mention of Israel Finkelstein in this chapter, and none at...