Book excerpt: Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel is the vast undertaking to interpret all the material in Samuel. Everything that the text has to offer can only be understood and appreciated to the full, and its interpretation can only lay claim to full validity by means of an integral view. Therefore the author has developed a textual model which regards and covers the composition of the Samuel books as a hierarchy of twelve levels. The Hebrew text is the long section which inextricably interweaves the demise of king Saul and the rise of David into a subtle and complicated dialectic of election and rejection. The author’s model of the ‘semiotic scale’ enables him to chart the different levels of the textual hierarchy and exactly determine the weight and range of action of each formal fact within the whole.