Week 17 2 Samuel 21-24
While I’m finishing up 2 Samuel it registers with me that the last four chapters seem like a set of miscellaneous add-ons.
It’s like this… The story of the life of David seems to basically progress through the first eight or nine chapters of the book. Things are on the upswing to that point. Then they stall and start regressing in chapter ten (and especially eleven) and keep right on getting worse through to chapter twenty. But then the last four chapters seem more like a random collection of odds-and-ends. Well…maybe not odds-and-ends exactly. There could be more to it than a jumbled muddle – more than what I’m seeing. But that’s what it looks like.
I found six main items:
A three-year famine & the Gibeonite Story
Philistine Battles & Four Brave Soldiers
A 51-verse Psalm
David’s Last Words
A list of David’s Top-Rated Soldiers
An illegal census & the Plague Story
Unrelated add-ons.
I figure I could diagram chapters 1-20 pretty easily. On a blank page – starting on the lower left corner – I’d draw a line that angled up at about 45-degrees (that’d be the first nine chapters). Then I’d start angling down (chapter ten to chapter twenty). So far so good. A neat tipi: The Life-and-Times of David.
But then I get to 21-24 and stop diagramming. I’ve got my up-line…then my down-line…and then a garb-bag of un-diagrammable variables.
So I leave my sketch unfinished. A neat – but incomplete – inverted-V.