(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Despite a cluster of contrary indications, scholars have routinely interpreted the story of the three-year famine in 2 Sam 21:1-14 as an internally consistent, homogeneous narrative.1 This perception of the story may derive in part from its place as a link in 2 Sam 21-24, the chain of chapters closing the book of Samuel. Since Julius Wellhausen noted the palistrophe in chs. 21-24 over a century ago, this appendix compiled from disparate elements has tended to invite several kinds of literary approaches: structural analysis concerned primarily with its organization; interest in the lemmatic and thematic links governing its different parts; and a broader redactional view that seeks its meaning within the wider frameworks of the Succession Narrative, 2 Samuel, the complete book of Samuel, and the Deuteronomistic History.2 At least with regard to the Gibeonite episode, the focus on the literary shape and function of the appendix as a whole seems to have distracted scholars somewhat from the task of an internal literary analysis.3 Other studies, whether seeking literary, historical, or cultic significance in the story, by and large fall into one of two categories. Either they attempt to locate the episode as a complete unit within some broader context, such as the historical role played by Gibeon in ancient Israel, or they concentrate on an obscure matter within it, specifically, the manner and meaning of the deaths of the seven Saulides and the significance of Rizpah's actions.4 Of course, such a thumbnail sketch cannot do justice to the studies available, several of which have joined many interests under one rubric to yield a rich mine of analyses and ideas. However, they do all share in having failed to execute a careful literary-critical analysis, which, it turns out, could have led to the edited quality of the text. Two studies have in fact divided the text into sources, but not on the basis of defined, reusable criteria, on something beyond mere intuition.5 In one of the clearest, most comprehensive, yet most concise pieces available on identifying sources, Richard Friedman provides a detailed list of ten such criteria: doublets, terminology, contradictions, consistent characteristics of each group of texts, narrative flow, historical referents, linguistic classification, identifiable relationships among sources, references in other biblical books, and marks of editorial work.6 After applying them to the Pentatuech, he concludes compellingly: The strength of the identification of the four major sources of the Torah is not any single one of the categories enumerated. . . . Rather it is the convergence of all of these bodies of evidence that is the most powerful argument for this view of the Pentateuch (Friedman's italics).7 Werner Schmidt offers a more distilled programmatic outline for scholarly analysis of biblical texts: a) analysis of the text for possible literary unevenness or tension; b) alignment of the textual components obtained into the most likely story or plot lines, namely, not into fragments, which could not have existed independently; c) comparison with the immediate and farther contexts and, with that, fitting them into a broader flow; d) interpretation of the final form of the text.8 The investigation below of 2 Sam 21:1-14 will take its literary-critical cues specifically from disjunctures in both grammar and syntax, on one hand, and narrative flow, on the other. It will follow diction and theme, enlisting the often untapped resource of textual criticism, to establish two independent threads (section I), then relate each one to the larger book of Samuel (sections II-IV).9 Finally, it will assess how intertwining the two threads has had an impact on each one of them, from a variety of standpoints (section V). This analysis has relevance for understanding the methods by which ancient editors brought together multiple textual sources and for evaluating the emergent product. …