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Alexander Maclaren. The Life of David: As Reflected in His Psalms
The Life of David: As Reflected in His Psalms
Table of Contents
I.—INTRODUCTION
II.—EARLY DAYS
III.—EARLY DAYS—continued
IV.—THE EXILE
V.—THE EXILE—continued
VI.—THE EXILE—continued
VII.—THE EXILE—continued
VIII.—THE EXILE—continued
IX.—THE KING
X.—THE KING—continued
XI.—THE KING—continued
XII.—THE KING—continued
XIII.—THE TEARS OF THE PENITENT
XIV.—CHASTISEMENTS
XV. THE SONGS OF THE FUGITIVE
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
Alexander Maclaren
Published by Good Press, 2019
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We have but faint incidental traces of his life up to his anointing by Samuel, with which the narrative in the historical books opens. But perhaps the fact that the story begins with that consecration to office, is of more value than the missing biography of his childhood could have been. It teaches us the point of view from which Scripture regards its greatest names—as nothing, except in so far as they are God's instruments. Hence its carelessness, notwithstanding that so much of it is history, of all that merely illustrates the personal character of its heroes. Hence, too, the clearness with which, notwithstanding that indifference, the living men are set before us—the image cut with half a dozen strokes of the chisel.
We do not know the age of David when Samuel appeared in the little village with the horn of sacred oil in his hand. The only approximation to it is furnished by the fact, that he was thirty at the beginning of his reign. (2 Sam. v. 4.) If we take into account that his exile must have lasted for a very considerable period (one portion of it, his second flight to the Philistines, was sixteen months, 1 Sam. xxvii. 7)—that the previous residence at the court of Saul must have been long enough to give time for his gradual rise to popularity, and thereafter for the gradual development of the king's insane hatred—that further back still there was an indefinite period, between the fight with Goliath, and the first visit as a minstrel-physician to the palace, which was spent at Bethlehem, and that that visit itself cannot have been very brief, since in its course he became very dear and familiar to Saul—it will not seem that all these events could be crowded into less than some twelve or fifteen years, or that he could have been more than a lad of some sixteen years of age when Samuel's hand smoothed the sacred oil on his clustering curls.
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