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1 Samuel 16:21-23 has David enter Saul's court as a beloved armor-bearer and harpist whom Saul personally requests from Jesse. One chapter later, 1 Samuel 17:55-58 has Saul not knowing who David is after the Goliath fight, asking Abner whose son this youth is, and then asking David himself. The same king either knows David well or has never seen him.
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Cited passages
David came to Saul, and stood before him. He loved him greatly; and he became his armor bearer. Saul sent to Jesse, saying, “Please let David stand before me; for he has found favor in my sight.” When the spirit from God was on Saul, David took the harp, and played with his hand; so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.
Cited passages
When Saul saw David go out against the Philistine, he said to Abner, the captain of the army, “Abner, whose son is this youth?” Abner said, “As your soul lives, O king, I can’t tell.” The king said, “Inquire whose son the young man is!” As David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand. Saul said to him, “Whose son are you, you young man?” David answered, “I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.”
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This is the same doublet problem as the Goliath-introduction entry, now viewed from Saul's angle, and it is one of the most discussed seams in the Deuteronomistic History. 1 Samuel 16:14-23 establishes a deep, established relationship: an evil spirit torments Saul, his servants recommend a skilled lyre-player, and David is summoned. The text could hardly be more emphatic. David "came to Saul, and stood before him," Saul "loved him greatly," and David "became his armourbearer" (kelî, his weapons-bearer — a position of intimate court proximity). Saul then sends a formal request to Jesse that David remain permanently at court, and David becomes the personal music-therapist who calms Saul's episodes. By the time chapter 17 opens, David should be a familiar fixture of the royal entourage.
Then 1 Samuel 17:55 shatters that. Watching David advance on Goliath, Saul turns to Abner and asks, "whose son is this youth?" The Hebrew, ben-mî zeh hanna'ar, is the idiom of personal identification, not genealogical record-keeping. Abner — śar-hatsāḇā', commander of the entire army, the man under whom an armor-bearer would serve — answers under oath, "As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell." After the fight Saul puts the question to David himself: "Whose son art thou, thou young man?" Three layers of non-recognition (Saul, Abner, the court) follow directly on a chapter that made David Saul's intimate.
The apologetic harmonization comes in two flavors. The first (Archer, Kaiser) holds that Saul was not asking who David was but about his lineage, because the reward of 17:25 — the king's daughter and tax-exemption for the victor's father's house — required knowing the family. The second (Tsumura, Youngblood) appeals to Saul's documented mental deterioration: a man tormented by an evil spirit might fail to recognize his own retainer, especially after a gap in which a maturing David's appearance changed.
Flavor one fights the grammar. If the question were about the household for a marriage-contract, Abner's sworn confession of total ignorance is inexplicable; a general would know the family of the king's own armor-bearer. "I cannot tell" answers "who is he?", not "what is his tax status?" Flavor two must extend Saul's amnesia to Abner and to the whole court, none of whom suffer from an evil spirit, and it cannot explain why the narrator frames the scene as a genuine first identification.
The text-critical data decides the matter. The Old Greek of Codex Vaticanus (LXX-B) lacks a large block of the Hebrew here, including 17:12-31 and the crucial 17:55-18:5, producing a far smoother narrative in which David is already Saul's musician and no double-introduction occurs. The Masoretic Text preserves the longer, conflated form. The dominant critical view (McCarter, Auld, Hertzberg, building on Wellhausen and Driver) is that 16:14-23 and chapter 17 began as two independent traditions of David's arrival at court — one as court musician, one as giant-slayer plucked from obscurity — that a redactor set side by side. The shorter LXX-B reflects a Hebrew Vorlage from before the full conflation; the MT reflects the conflated stage. Tov treats the divergence as a paradigm case of literary editions developing within the textual transmission itself, not mere scribal slips.
That compositional account predicts exactly what we find: two incompatible "first encounters," each internally coherent, joined without harmonization. A single author writing continuous history would not have Saul personally recruit, love, and arm a young man and then, one chapter later, fail to recognize him while his own general swears ignorance. The non-recognition is not a psychological subtlety; it is the visible seam between two sources.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, the residue of two stitched-together traditions.
Sources for this reading