The first season of House of David has just concluded.

Its eight episodes, streaming on Amazon Prime, covered only three chapters in the Bible: God’s rejection of King Saul in 1 Samuel 15, Samuel’s anointing of David in 1 Samuel 16, and David’s defeat of Goliath in 1 Samuel 17.

To fill in the plot, flesh out characters, and give their story more biblical and historical context, the show’s writers invented subplots, many of which draw on other parts of the Bible as well as later Jewish traditions.

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Some viewers have wondered how much of this narrative is true to the Bible and how much is pure fiction—maybe even revision. Here’s a look at some of House of David’s central elements and how they match up (or don’t) with the biblical source material. (Spoilers ahead.)

David’s family

Let’s start with David’s family. In House of David, he is living with his father Jesse, five older half brothers, and some other people, including a young girl named Avva. It’s not entirely clear how these other people are related to Jesse—children? grandchildren? extended family?—but the show’s press kit says Avva, at least, is Jesse’s daughter and David’s sister. David and Avva’s mother, Nitzevet, is dead before the series begins, though we see her in flashbacks.

The biblical David’s immediate family was a bit different. He had more older brothers—either six or seven, depending on which passage you read (six according to 1 Chronicles 2:13–15, seven according to 1 Samuel 16:10 and 17:12). And his mother was still alive well into his adulthood; David arranged for both his parents to stay in Moab while he was hiding from King Saul (1 Sam. 22:3–4).

The biblical David also had two sisters, named Zeruiah and Abigail (1 Chron. 2:16–17); “Avva,” the name of the girl in the series, might be intended as a variation on “Abigail.” Interestingly, the biblical Zeruiah was the mother of Joab, one of David’s top generals—so the biblical Joab was basically David’s nephew. But in the series, Joab is noticeably older than David and is merely a “cousin” of his. (Joab is also, at this point in the series, one of the top soldiers in King Saul’s army.)

In House of David, David is called a “bastard” by his brothers and neighbors, and Jesse says he married David’s mother “unlawfully.” This backstory isn’t spelled out in the Bible but is loosely based on a Jewish tradition that says David was an outcast within his own family because of the circumstances of his birth. This tradition (or the filmmakers who used it) may have been inspired by passages from the Psalms in which David says his mother conceived him in sin (Ps. 51:5, ESV) and he was a stranger to his brothers, mocked by the people who sat in the city gate (69:8–12).

King Saul’s family

In the series, King Saul has a wife named Ahinoam, two sons named Jonathan and Eshbaal, and two daughters named Mirab and Michal. When Eshbaal, who is something of a libertine, suggests that he and Saul go to a tavern and meet some women, Saul replies, “You expect me to disrespect your mother?”

The impression we get is that Saul is a faithful monogamist. But the biblical Saul was not. Like other kings and wealthy men of the period, he had multiple wives (2 Sam. 12:8)—including, yes, Ahinoam (1 Sam. 14:50). He had at least one concubine whose name we know, Rizpah (2 Sam. 3:7; 21:8–13).

Saul also had at least seven sons that we know of: two by Rizpah, named Armoni and Mephibosheth, and five whose mothers are not specified, including Jonathan, Ishvi, Malki-Shua, Abinadab, and Eshbaal (1 Sam. 14:49; 1 Chron. 8:33), the last of whom was also known as Ish-Bosheth (2 Sam. 2–4). The biblical Saul had at least two daughters, named Merab and Michal (1 Sam. 14:49).

In the series, Saul calls his general Abner an “old friend.” The biblical Abner wasn’t just a friend. He was family, Saul’s first cousin (1 Sam. 14:50–51). The series also implies that Abner’s mother is the Witch of Endor, a medium who, in the Bible at least, summoned the spirit of Samuel at Saul’s request shortly before Saul’s death (1 Sam. 28:3–25). This connection between Abner and the witch is not made in the Bible but comes from rabbinic tradition.

The first season of House of David ends with Eshbaal putting himself on the throne while Saul is away on the battlefield. There is no basis for this in the Bible; in fact, Eshbaal isn’t even mentioned in the Bible until after Saul’s death (2 Sam. 2:8–10). Most of the show’s fictitious elements are meant to fill the gaps in the biblical narrative; this one threatens to throw the narrative off course. But we’ll see what happens next season.

Saul isn’t the only monogamist in House of David. At one point, a man named Adriel says to Michal, “If my wife were dead, I would marry you myself and wake up every day a happy man.” But there was no reason—not in that culture—that Adriel would have had to wait for his wife to die before marrying Michal. As it is, the biblical Adriel married Michal’s sister Merab (1 Sam. 18:19; 2 Sam. 21:8).

The show’s reluctance to depict the polygamy of the times makes you wonder how it will deal with David’s many marriages. The series leans heavily into David’s romance with Michal, but after the biblical David married Michal (1 Sam. 18:20–27), he went on to have at least six other wives or concubines before he moved to Jerusalem (2 Sam. 3:2–5). The fact that he had children by all these different women was a contributing factor in the events that led up to the civil war between David and his son Absalom (see 2 Samuel 13, especially).

Saul says he grew up in a “poor village,” and a few characters say that Gibeah—the capital city of Israel—is a former Philistine stronghold that Saul captured. He is now busy purging the palace of all the pagan art that the Philistines put there.

It is true that the Philistines had an outpost in Gibeah, though I doubt they had a full palace there (1 Sam. 10:5), and it appears that the biblical Saul may have actually come from that town (v. 26), which had been part of the tribe of Benjamin since Joshua’s day (Josh. 18:21–28).

Gibeah was, in fact, notorious, the site of an atrocity that sparked a civil war that almost resulted in the tribe of Benjamin’s complete destruction (Judges 19–21). So when the biblical Saul told Samuel he was “from the smallest tribe of Israel” (1 Sam. 9:21) … well, there was a reason for that. And it’s not insignificant that, when the people asked Samuel to give them a king and Samuel warned them about all the ways a monarchy could go wrong (1 Sam. 8), Samuel, under God’s direction, responded by giving them a king from that tribe.

The Philistine king Achish says his people “came from across the Great Sea” centuries ago to try to conquer Egypt. He also says the armor he is giving Goliath was “crafted by the finest Mycenaean blacksmith.”

All of this is historically sound. The Bible says the Philistines came from an island or coastal region known as Caphtor—now widely thought to have been Crete or Cyprus—around the same time that the Israelites arrived in Canaan (Deut. 2:23; Jer. 47:4; Amos 9:7). Most modern historians also identify the Philistines with the Peleset, one of the ethnic groups known as “sea peoples” who attacked Egypt in the 12th century BC.

The Mycenaeans were Bronze Age Greeks, and scholars have noted for years that Goliath’s armor and weaponry seem to have had certain Greek characteristics, like the bronze greaves that Goliath wore on his legs (1 Sam. 17:6) or the spear with a shaft “like a weaver’s rod” (v. 7), which many think is a nod to the looped cord that Greeks and others attached to their weapons to increase their range and accuracy when they threw them.

The fact that Goliath challenges the Israelites to resolve their standoff through a duel between two champions is also reminiscent of some of the clashes that we see in the Iliad. It’s a very Greek way to try to settle a battle.

Finally, the giants. In House of David, the giants are identified as descendants of fallen angels who mated with human women in the days before the Flood, as per Genesis 6:1–4. They also have more recent human ancestors; Goliath and his brothers live with their regular-sized mother, whose name is Orpah.

The link between Goliath and the fallen angels has a pretty solid biblical basis. The children of the angels and their human wives were called the Nephilim (Gen. 6:4). The Nephilim were identified with a race of giants known as the Anakim, or the descendants of Anak (Num. 13:33). After Joshua defeated them, the Anakim lived in a handful of Philistine cities like Gath (Josh. 11:22). And Goliath, like some of the other giants who fought David and his men, came from Gath (1 Sam. 17:4; 2 Sam. 21:15–22; 1 Chron. 20:4–8).

The Bible says nothing about Goliath’s mother, though. That detail comes from a Jewish tradition that says Goliath and his brothers were the children of Orpah, the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi who did not go to Bethlehem with her (Ruth 1:8–15). Because Naomi’s other Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth, was the great-grandmother of David (4:13–17), the legend linking Orpah to the giants basically imagines that the fight between David and Goliath was a fight between two branches of Naomi’s extended family.

In House of David, the giants are living in a cave and mostly hiding from human society until Achish finds them and forges an alliance with them. In the Bible, the giants appear to have lived quite openly in a handful of Philistine cities after Joshua drove them out of the hill country of Israel (Josh. 11:21–22).

Also, the giants in the series are very, very tall—roughly twice the height of regular humans. Depending on the interview, the show’s producers have said their Goliath is supposed to be anywhere from 10 to 14 feet tall. The biblical Goliath was shorter than that, possibly by a lot. Most modern Bibles say Goliath was “six cubits and a span” (1 Sam. 17:4), or nine feet, nine inches, because that’s the height he has in the Masoretic text, an 11th-century manuscript that is the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible.

But the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are over a thousand years older) and some other ancient texts say he was “four cubits and a span,” or six feet, nine inches—just one inch taller than Martyn Ford, the actor who plays him! That still would have seemed very large at a time when the average person probably wasn’t much more than five feet tall.

There are many other details and much more foreshadowing to explore—for brevity’s sake, this will have to do for now. Cameras are already rolling on House of David season 2; we’ll have more biblical material to sort through soon.

Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.