We meet David for the first time in this chapter, and I think first impressions are important. Future posts will cover more than one passage at a time, but the narrative comes to a really natural stopping place between 16:13 and verse 14, so that’s what I’m going with. Today, I’m going to focus solely on 1 Samuel 16:1-13 because this post is meant to lay some foundation for how we’ll be working through this story and some basic “rules” for Old Testament study. Open your Bible and read 1 Samuel 16:1-13. At the very least, this photograph gives us an image to set our minds on as we go through today’s piece of the biblical text.
If you’ve ever contemplated the vast expanse of history, then that should blow your mind. If we had a photo of David from 1,000 B.C., it would look just like this kid. The shepherd boy picture is cool because the boy and his sheep would fit right in if we plucked them from 2016 and dropped them into Ancient Palestine. The most we can do is arrive at an approximation from the best of our limited understanding. The cold truth, however, is that we cannot experience the world as it was, and we cannot think or feel as the ancients thought or felt. We can try very hard to put ourselves into their context. We can study the remnants they left behind and make educated guesses. And, guys? We’re talking about three thousand years when we talk about David.Īre you seeing the chasm of time here, now? We cannot relate in any kind of real, personal way to any of those eras. Shakespeare wrote his plays and Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, sat on the English throne 450 years ago. The United States of America was founded 250 years ago. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were writing their famous fiction 200 years ago. Nothing looks or feels the same today as it did even 50 years ago, so let’s try to put some perspective on this story we’re about to dive into. If we venture any further back than that, the world and all of the people who were in it become alien beings, entirely separated from us and our experiences.
Our attention span for intimate relationship with time is really only about a century long. Sure, we can count that high, and we can study the artifacts and the history, but we cannot really wrap our minds around people or events from that long ago. That span of time is pretty much incomprehensible to a human being. Here’s why it’s cool:ĭavid lived about 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, give or take, so that means that David lived roughly 3,000 years ago. I saw this photograph of a young Pakistani shepherd and I thought, “I bet this is exactly what David looked like.” How crazy cool is that? Maybe it’s just because I’m a history freak, and maybe you find this sort of thing obvious or boring, but indulge me for a minute. He published it, along with many other breathtaking photos, in his article on Swat for the Dawn website. This beautiful photograph was taken by Syed Mehdi Bukhari in the Swat Valley region of northern Pakistan in 2016.
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