How (not) to murder a king: Variations on a theme in 1 sam 24; 26

1 Sam 24 and 26 are widely regarded as doublets, and it is frequently assumed that one of the narratives is an editorial reworking of the other. This paper examines the validity of this assumption and addresses the question of the function of double stories within a larger narrative context. In the first part, methodological guidelines are established for distinguishing literary dependency from other types of interrelationships between texts, such as common genre, type-scenes, variants, and use of common motif. In the second part, the criteria proposed are utilized to clarify the nature of the relationship between the two narratives and to shed light on their sources and function.