l&ddened by the death of his beloved but unfilial son. The question thus arises u to what were the materials at the disposal of the compiler of these Books. § 3. MATERIALS, First then end foremost there were the Acts or Memoirs of Samuel himself. For the words of 1 Chron. xxix. 29 literally are, "And the Acts (or mattel'II) of David the king, behold, they are written upon the Acts of Samuel the Roe'h, and upon the Acts of Nathan the Nabi, and upon the Acts of Gad the Chozeh." It is interesting to find in these words the archaic title of Roeb (see 1 Sam. ix. 9) still clinging to Samuel, but still more so to find that records were kept appar- ently by himself. He had been educated at Shiloh among all the learning of the priesthood, and the place, protected by the powerful tribe of Ephraim, had remained unravaged by war, so tha.t whatever records had been laid up with the ark, or written since the days of Joshua, himself no mean scribe, had accumu- lated there. We may well believe that a youth •with such great natura1 abilities as Samuel had made no ordinary use of such opportunities, and what- ever was saved for the use of future times from the wreck of Shiloh was most probably xemoved through his exertions and wise forethought. In 1 Chron. xxvii 24 we also read of "tb.e qhronicles of King David," or, more literally, " the Acts of the Days of King David," i. e. a digest of his acts ananged in chronological order. But when we read in 2 Sam. viii. 16, 17 of two officers of David's couxt, of whom one, Jehoshaphat, was recorder, the other, Seraiah, was scribe, we must not rashly conclude that their duties were historical. The recorder, or, as the word means, remembrancer, was more probably a judge, whose business it was to enrol and publish royal decrees; while the scribe was a state secretary, concerned with the army and with the king's exchequer. It seems to have fallen to the lot of the prophets to write histories, probably for the llie of the prophetic schools, and· ~ertainly as the result of the bent given to their minds by their studies in those institutions. Th us henceforward the prophets, and not the priests, became the custodians of Israel's literature. In the Books of Chronicles a numerous list of authors is given, who almost to a man are expressly saii:l to have been prophets or seers. At every prophetic college there would be gathered stores of such writings, and also of psalms and poems. David probably arranged the ritual of the temple after the fashion of Samuel's services (1 Sam. xix. 20), for which reason doubt- less psalmody, as we have seen, was called prophesying, and consequently the temple would also have its library of hymns and musical compositions. More- -0ver, the prophet Gad is also supposed by many to have made the collection of songs and ballads called the Book of Jasher, i. e: the Upright, whence was taken David's spirited elegy over Saul and Jonathan. As Gad was David's companion in his wanderings from the time he took refuge in M.oab (1 Sam. mi 5) till his death, his Acts must have contained full information of all the more important events of David's life. THE BOORS OF SAMUEL. xi
But it is easy to over-estimate the completeness and extent of these contem- porary records. Literature depends very much upon the nature of the materilll available for wrHing. Printing followed at once upon the discovery of paper. The copious materials now being brought to Europe illustrative of Assyrian his- tory are the result of the use that people made of cheap tablets of clay. The materials most frequently referred to in the Bible are tablets of metal. With •no cheaper or more convenient writing materials Gad's records would be but scanty, and David's psalms must have been for several years chiefly preserved by memory. Tne Canaanites had certainly known how to preparn skins for writing, and when Samuel's schools had caused a revival of learning, the art was probably restored. PerhaJJS it had never been entirely lost, and Samuel may have obtained such skins for writing his book upon "the manner of the kingdom" (1 Sam. x. 25); but we can hardly imagine that writing materials were easy to procure until the prosperous days of David's kingdom. With skins of animals or plates of metal still used in Isaiah's days (Isa. viii. 1, where tablet is wrongly translated roll), the narratives would be short and each complete in itself. This fact has often been noticed iri the Com- mentary. Thus the narrative in 1 Sam. vii. carries the history down to Samuel's death. The narrative in eh. xiv. carries Saul's history down to the end of his victorious wars. That in eh. xvi. gives us David's history up to the time when Saul began to envy and hate him. We may safely conclude that the Acts of Samuel, of Nathan; of Gad, an_d even the Chronicles of King David, were not well-digested histories, but a series of brief stories each complete in itself. These the compiler, in days when they had not merely skins, but even rolls made of many skins sewn together, seems to have arranged, adding a note here and there, blending perhaps occasionally several narratives into one, but never attempting to form out of them a consecutive history, such as a Thucydides or a modern writer, formed upon classical models, would have done.
§ 4. DATE.
The next question refers to the compiler's date, and here some of our materials are sufficiently decisive. When we are told that " Ziklag pertaineth unto the kings of Judah unto this day" (1 Sam. xxvii. 6), it is plain that he lived after the disruption of Solomon's kingdom. When he thinks it necessary to apologise for Samuel being called a roeh, it is plain that the name had ceased to be honourable, and, by that degradation which happens to so many titles of office or sex, had become a term of dubious respectability. There is too the frequent recurrence of the phrase " unto this day; " the change of the name of Saul's successor from Ishbaal to Ishbosheth; the distinction between Israel and Judah in passages like 1 Sam. xviii. 16, where nothing but subsequent usage would have made a writer so express himself; the note that even princesses wore the same dress as men (the mei:l) in 2 Sam. xiii. 18, and so on. But :1:ii INTRODUCTION TO