of Issachar (Jos 19:18), but the one in the mountains of Judah (Jos 15:56).
Verse 44
But Saul had taken his daughter Michal away from David, and given her to Palti of Gallim. Palti is called Paltiel in 2Sa 3:15. According to Isa 10:30, Gallim was a place between Gibeah of Saul and Jerusalem. Valentiner supposes it to be the hill to the south of Tuleil el Phul (Gibeah of Saul) called Khirbet el Jisr. After the death of Saul, however, David persuaded Ishbosheth to give him Michal back again (see 2Sa 3:14.). The repetition not only of the treachery of the Ziphites, but also of the sparing of Saul by David, furnishes no proof in itself that the account contained in this chapter is only another legend of the occurrences already related in 1 Samuel 23:19-24:22. As the pursuit of David by Saul lasted for several years, in so small a district as the desert of Judah, there is nothing strange in the repetition of the same scenes. And the assertion made by Thenius, that “Saul would have been a moral monster, which he evidently was not, if he had pursued David with quiet deliberation, and through the medium of the same persons, and had sought his life again, after his own life had been so magnanimously spared by him,” not only betrays a superficial acquaintance with the human heart, but is also founded upon the mere assertion, for which there is no proof, that Saul was evidently no so; and it is proved to be worthless by the fact, that after the first occasion on which his life was so magnanimously spared by David, he did not leave off seeking him up and down in the land, and that David was obliged to seek refuge with the Philistines in consequence, as may be seen from 1Sa 27:1-12, which Thenius himself assigns to the same source as 1 Samuel 24. The agreement between the two accounts reduces it entirely to outward and unessential things. It consists chiefly in the fact that the Ziphites came twice to Saul at Gibeah, and informed him that David was stopping in their neighbourhood, in the hill Hachilah, and also that Saul went out twice in pursuit of David with 3000 men. But the three thousand were the standing body of men that Saul had raised
