1 Samuel is a national autobiography of the Hebrew people. David Jobling reads 1 Samuel as a story that is complete in itself, although it is part of a much larger narrative. He examines it as a historical document in a double sense: (1) as a document originating from ancient Israel and (2) as a telling of the past. Organizing the text through the three interlocking themes of class, race, and gender, Jobling asks how this historical - and canonical - story relates to a modern world in which these themes continue to be of crucial importance. While drawing on the resources of biblical narratology," Jobling deviates from mainstream methodology. He adopts a "critical narratology" informed by such cultural practices as feminism and psychoanalysis. He follows a structuralist tradition which finds meaning more in the text's large-scale mythic patterns than in close reading of particular passages, and seeks methods specific to 1 Samuel rather than ones applicable to biblical narrative in general.
"There are three things to celebrate here: the emergence of the second volume in this promising series, growth in the commentary genre, and Jobling's careful reconsideration of three decades of work on 1 Samuel."
The Catholic Biblical Quarterly
". . . a very valuable contribution with many well thought out and fascinating insights on 1 Samuel itself and on its canonical formation as an interpretative process. Perhaps most significantly, Jobling achieves much in advancing methodological pluralism as not only viable but necessary in biblical studies."
