The present commentary represents a very elegant application to 1 and 2 Samuel of Auld's distinctive approach to the books of the former prophets, developed by him in a series of works over several decades. Scholarship on this biblical corpus has been dominated by Martin Noth's thesis of an exilic Deuteronomistic Historian who assembled the whole block of material from Joshua through Kings and composed key texts framing the whole – a thesis refined in different directions especially by Rudolf Smend and Frank Moore Cross. Auld has for some time championed an alternative hypothesis rooted in a comparison of Samuel–Kings to parallel accounts in Chronicles and to variant editions represented in the versions and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Rather than viewing the Deuteronomistic History as the primary source of the book of Chronicles, he has argued that both reflect a common source, which already contained an outline of Judah's history and which was developed in different ways in what is commonly called the Deuteronomistic History and in Chronicles. His thesis has implications for reconstructing not only the editorial history of this biblical corpus but also several hundred years of Israel's and Judah's history.

Auld makes several important claims in the present volume. Two ancient forms of Samuel existed, one now reflected in MT and the other now reflected in LXX, Chronicles, Josephus and 4QSam^a, which all bear a certain family resemblance to one another. Samuel's main source, which Auld dubs the Book of Two Houses, told the story of the house of Yahweh and the house of David from the death of Saul to the fall of Jerusalem. The editor of Samuel reshaped a large section of this material to form 2 Samuel, and created 1 Samuel as an entirely fresh introduction to the whole. 1 Samuel, then, was not an independent history of Samuel and Saul but already had an end in sight: the reign of David. David is thus the central character of all of Samuel. The first draft of 1 Samuel comprised 1 Sam 9:1–25:1, which was later supplemented on either end to produce the current shape of the book. While Auld shares some of the common ground between Noth and Cross, he argues that much less source material was available to the editors of Samuel than Noth had supposed and that they engaged in imaginative composition at several points. He also proposes that the Book of Two Houses offers more criticism of the house of David than Cross had imagined for his Dtr¹.

Following a brief introduction sketching these main theses, Auld offers a deliberately literal translation of the text broken up into sections of no more than a few chapters, with brief textual and text-critical notes and more extensive commentary on each section. Several short excursuses treat themes which emerge from examining larger textual units and a larger one treats the themes and growth of the book as a whole. Distinctive here compared to other commentaries on Samuel is Auld's decision to render his translation of the common text of MT and the versions in regular type and to mark the discrepancies between them with italics, square brackets and parallel columns. Also distinctive is his decision to refrain from discussing the vast secondary literature on Samuel – though Auld clearly has mastery over it – and to offer instead his own views argued directly from the primary evidence.

The chief advantage of Auld's approach is that it offers an explanation of the parallels which now exist between Samuel–Kings and Chronicles. Much of the distinctly Deuteronomistic language in Samuel–Kings is missing in Chronicles. If one rejects Auld's thesis one has to posit that the Chronicler deliberately isolated and removed such language, a difficult thesis to accept despite the widely acknowledged tendency of the Chronicler to abridge his source material. Yet, I disagree with Auld's analysis at points. For example, to my mind, Judges 19–21 and 1 Sam 9–11 may originally have formed a continuous narrative describing the demise and re-emergence of Benjamin in Israel, with one of their own, Saul, rising to the kingship. In other words, 1 Sam may reflect more source material and less imaginative composition than Auld allows. In this regard, I would have welcomed from Auld a fuller explanation of how such composed pieces reflect the social, political and historical settings of their authors. This thoughtful and well-argued volume is a most welcome addition to Auld's important and original body of work on the former prophets.