4 ideas
Michal, daughter of Saul, loves David and saves him by lowering him through a window when her father's men come to kill him. She is then given to another husband, Paltiel. After Saul's death David demands her back, and Paltiel follows weeping until he is sent away.
A victors' chronicle shows where it is vulnerable by what it insists did not happen. When the text keeps saying David was absent, grieved, or innocent at each convenient death of a rival (Saul, Abner, Ish-bosheth), treat the repeated alibi as evidence of the accusation it answers. Read against the grain, the text is propaganda, and its defensive passages point to the suppressed story.
A usurping dynasty secures itself by removing the old royal house while presenting each step as justice, piety, or mercy. The novel reads David's handing of seven of Saul's descendants to the Gibeonites for execution, framed as appeasing a famine, and his keeping of the lame Mephibosheth 'at the king's table' as purge and surveillance dressed as kindness. On this reading, the moral vocabulary is the cover for the political act.
A losing group, here the tribe of Benjamin and Saul's household, keeps an alternative account of events that circulates privately beside the canonical record. The official version wins the written record, but the defeated keep a rival story alive through family and tribal memory. The novel treats recovering that suppressed story as a way to restore dignity to those history cast as villains.