Kavanot: Yawning Chiasm

After the verse (שמואל א כה:א)‎ וימת שמואל ויקבצו כל ישראל ויספדו לו ויקברהו בביתו ברמה; ויקם דוד וירד אל מדבר פארן, there is a long (42 psukim) story about נבל and אביגיל. The author (not שמואל at this point because וימת שמואל) clearly felt it was important, going into so much detail. It is one of the longest stories in שמואל. Compare the last pasuk in the story (שמואל א כה:מג)‎ ואת אחינעם לקח דוד מיזרעאל; ותהיין גם שתיהן לו לנשים. That’s all the detail we get about David’s marriage to אחינעם and her family is important; her son is אמנן of the story of אמנן and תמר.‎ אביגיל's son is דניאל, and we never hear from him. Plus, it’s a story that most of us know so little about it. So I’m going to skip it. For now.

Let’s go to the very end of the perek:

I’m going to leave a discussion of exactly what happened with Michal for now, and just look at the grammar: שָׁאוּל נָתַן is in the past perfect, which means it happened before the story in context (in this case, the story of Avigail). This sort of grammatical construct is common in תנ״ך, as a sort of “meanwhile…”.

So Saul giving away Michal is really a return to the previous narrative, “he had given Michal his daughter”. דעת מקרא points out that this cuts the connection between Saul and David. In the previous perek, David call Saul אבי, and Saul calls him בני דוד. But now Saul is annulling Michal’s marriage. As a result of the death of Samuel and Saul’s losing his chance of regaining the מלכות, he completely breaks with David.

And as we scan forward, we notice something interesting:

כו:א—The Ziphites betray David to Saul. We’ve seen this before.

כו:ה-ט—David has a chance to kill Saul but overrides the advice of his men and spares Saul. We’ve seen this before as well.

כז:א—David runs to the land of the Philistines, to the king of Gath. That is exactly how David’s journey in מדבר יהודה started! What’s is going on with all the repetition?

One explanation of the repetition is that the book we have in front of us is an amalgamation of older fragments of stories, each incomplete retellings of older tales. This is the Documentary Hypothesis. As believing Jews, this is anathema when applied to the Torah, but it’s not so unreasonable for נ״ך. We would all agree that תהילים‎ is composed of multiple works, and דברי הימים is generally understood to have been assembled from older chronologies:

(It should be noted that the commentator printed as רש״י on דברי הימים is most likely not actually רש״י, but similar sentiments are recorded by other Rishonim)

But the biggest problem with the documentary hypothesis is that it is irrelevant. It inverts the role of the author and the source. What we have before us is a text, composed by one or more authors as a unitary work. The documentary hypothesis relegates what has been called the “redactor” to a blind monkey with scissors and paste. Meir Sternberg describes:

We look at the ספר as a literary work, one written by a human being with divine inspiration, and can see how the text itself is composed to further the author’s aims.

As believing Jews, we have it easier in one way than the academics, since we have a definitive, true, text to work with: the Masoretic Text of תנ״ך. It means that we reject the possibility of “scribal misadventure”—typos—in the words we have today and will have to deal with the text as it is.

One literary form that helps pull the text together is chiasmus, meaning “shaped like a Greek chi, or Χ”. Ιt’s a form of parallelism where the second part is reversed from the first. It’s usually used in a single verse or stanza, to pull the whole thought together in a poetic way (similar to rhyme in English poetry):

But there’s a form of literary chiasmus as well, where the themes of successive paragraphs are arranged as a sequence that goes back on itself. For example, the narrative after יציאת מצרים:

There is much discussion in the modern literature about the meaning, even the existence, of much of this chiastic structure, but there’s generally a sense of progression; something happens that brings us back to where we started but with a difference. Here we might talk about the change of בני ישראל from passive observers to active participants, ואכמ״ל.

There’s also a form of literary chiasmus with a central element that is not paralleled (what Rabbi Grossman calls “concentric”). This serves to draw attention to that central element, presumably the axis around which the reversal takes place. For instance, in מגלת אסתר:

I would propose that the narrative of David’s peregrination has a similar chiastic structure, but in pairs:

The progression is clear: Saul’s authority and kingship is receding as David’s is increasing. The apex story here is that of אביגיל, and we will have to spend a fair amount of time on it.