Although Bill Clinton is no Jack Kennedy, the same phenomenon was at work during the public frenzy that attended the disclosure of his sexual misadventures. Despite the best efforts of his political enemies to rouse public opinion against him, Clinton's adolescent gropings in the Oval Office did not truly surprise or shock anyone in America except the most puritanical of preachers and prosecutors. His performance as president received the highest public approval ratings at the very moment that the media were reporting the most scandalous details of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
One man who knows the life story of David quite well was invited to the White House to minister to the President and the First Family in the aftermath of the messy affair. Indeed, the Reverend Jesse Jackson obliquely recalled the far messier affairs of King David by reciting the words of the Fifty-first Psalm, a bit of biblical poetry that is understood to represent David's plea for forgiveness after his fateful act of adultery with Bathsheba: “Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,” intoned the Reverend Jackson,14 echoing the words traditionally (but wrongly) attributed to David (Psalm 51:4)—and, not incidentally, making the ironic point that Bill Clinton seems like a choirboy when compared to King David.
THE ULTIMATE MYSTERY
Strangely, but tellingly, the Bible depicts God himself as ready and willing to overlook the bloodiest deeds and nastiest sins of King David. The punishing deity who dictated so many stern laws of moral conduct to Moses does not appear to much care, for example, that David seduced and impregnated a married woman while her husband was serving as a soldier on the front lines and then conspired to murder the husband—thereby violating at least three of the Ten Commandments in one sorry episode.
“Yahweh,” explains Harold Bloom in The Book of J, “is the God who fell in love with David.”15
And here is where we glimpse a clue to one of the ultimate mysteries of the Bible. Why is God shown to be so much more enamored of David than of Moses or any other towering figure of the Hebrew Bible? Why is the life of David reported in such intimate, even titillating detail? Why were these sometimes troubling texts preserved with such care over the millennia? Why did the later biblical editors fail in their efforts to censor the life story of David? The answer to these questions may suggest the reason why the Bible was written, how it has endured for more than three thousand years, and why we still find ourselves so fascinated by it.
The authorship of the Bible remains a Gordian knot after some two thousand years of pious study and a century or so of modern scholarship. One theory proposes that the core of the Hebrew Bible originated as a formal biography of King David and the rest of the biblical text came to be attached to his life story in bits and pieces over the centuries. If this proposal is correct, we are confronted with the intriguing but unsettling notion that the Bible as we know it today might not have come into existence at all but for an anonymous chronicler who set out to write a history of the king in whose court he served.
Let's entertain the idea, as many scholars do, that the biography of King David as we find it in the Book of Samuel was first composed during the reign of David himself (circa 1005–965 B.C.E.)* or perhaps during the Solomonic Enlightenment, as the reign of his son and successor, King Solomon, is sometimes called. And let's call the principal author of the royal biography “the Court Historian,” even if we cannot know his (or her) name or the circumstances under which he (or she) lived and worked.
We know from what we find in the Bible that the Court Historian was an artful and watchful biographer of the royal household he served and celebrated. In stark contrast to what passed for history and biography elsewhere in the ancient Near East— king lists and battle lists, inventories of plunder and tribute, praise-songs and epic poetry—the biblical text shows that the Court Historian was as interested in the intimate private life of David and his highly dysfunctional family as in official dynastic history.
At roughly the same time, some scholars propose, another biblical author was at work on a companion volume to accompany the Court History, a “primal history” of ancient Israel that would explain how the Israelites had come to the land of Canaan. The author is known as the Yahwist (or “J”)† because he (or she) preferred to call God by his personal name, Yahweh.‡ Drawing on the legend and lore that had been preserved in the rich oral traditions of the twelve tribes of Israel, and various texts that are now lost to history, the Yahwist wove a vast narrative tapestry, an epic that begins with the very moment of creation and explains in rich detail how a people who were descended from a single restless nomad ended up as the conquerors and rulers of the land of Canaan.
Threads of the biblical narrative that are conventionally attributed to J can readily be traced through the so-called Five Books of Moses,* especially Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, and portions of Joshua and Judges. And the work of J can be seen as the “back-story” to the Court Historian's biography of David that begins in the Book of Samuel. When read as a continuous narrative—as the Bible invites us to read them—the two works both point to a single crucial and inevitable figure, King David. Indeed, Richard Elliott Friedman makes a convincing argument in The Hidden Book in the Bible that the Yahwist and the Court Historian were actually one and the same person,16 and Harold Bloom in The Book of J imagines that the two sources were contemporaries and colleagues in the court of the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem.
David is not mentioned in the Bible until the Book of Samuel, but we can begin to hear the strains of the “undersong” that Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad detected in the earliest passages of the Yahwist's primal history. In fact, the Five Books of Moses are seeded with clues that anticipate the coming of King David long before we actually encounter him. And these clues suggest that the Bible was first and always intended by its original authors to be a celebration of King David and the line of Davidic kings who sat on the throne of Israel and Judah during a reign that spanned five centuries, the longest-reigning dynasty in the ancient Near East and one of the longest-reigning in world history.
THE REAL BIBLE CODE
An intriguing and illuminating game can be played with the characters and stories that we find in the Bible. It is no mere parlor game, but rather a way to crack a kind of code that is deeply embedded in the Bible. Cracking the real Bible code is not a matter of teasing out prophesies and predictions of the far distant future by crunching randomly selected Hebrew letters into words and phrases. The original biblical authors salted the text with clues that were meant to stoke our anticipation for the coming of King David and our appreciation of his achievements as a man and a monarch; they seem to invite readers to search out the linkages between King David and the other figures and events in the earlier books of the Bible.
For example, the Bible opens with a famous scene of seduction, Adam lured by Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit. Much later in the biblical narrative, there is another apparent seduction at the outset of the scandalous love affair between David and Bathsheba. Was the tale of Adam and Eve, as some scholars propose, meant by the biblical author to prepare us for the fateful sexual encounter between David and Bathsheba?
The same kind of foreshadowing can be detected in dozens of other biblical scenes. The rape of Dinah, daughter of the patriarch Jacob, by a prince called Shechem anticipates the rape of Tamar, daughter of King David, by her half brother, a prince called Amnon. The murder of Abel by his brother Cain anticipates the murder of Amnon by his half brother, Absalom, who sought to avenge the rape of Tamar. And when the Bible depicts the matriarch Rebekah conspiring with her son Jacob to steal the birthright of her firstborn son, Esau, by persuading the patriarch Isaac to give the blessing of the firstborn to the younger son, perhaps we are intended to see Bathsheba in conspiracy with Solomon to persuade the aging David to designate his younger son as king of Israel in place of Solomon's older brother.
Such linkages are not merely fanciful. Rather, they reflect the peculiar logic of biblical narrative, a dreamy and someti
mes even phantasmagorical quality in which one scene may hark back or look forward to another scene at any given point in the text. Thus the Book of Genesis includes an odd and unexplained incident in which Reuben, firstborn son of the patriarch Jacob, crawls into bed with Jacob's concubine, Bilhah. The Bible does not pause to explain the cause or significance of the episode, but perhaps we are meant to think of Reuben when, much later, we come upon Absalom, son of King David, conducting a public orgy with David's concubines on the roof of the palace in Jerusalem.
At other moments, the encoded messages in the biblical text are straightforward and precise. The boundaries of the Promised Land, for example, are specified in several passages of the Bible, and in several different ways, but the very first description is found in the opening chapters of Genesis, where God is shown to promise the land of Canaan as a homeland to Abraham and his descendants. “Unto thy seed have I given this land,” says God to Abraham, “from the river of Egypt* unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” (Gen. 15:18) Not until the reign of David, however, does the Bible report that the kingdom of Israel actually approached these imperial dimensions—and the dynasty's sovereignty began to recede from that high-water mark on the death of his son Solomon. Some scholars see the passage in Genesis as the handiwork of a biblical source who has been characterized as “David's theologian,”17 a royal apologist who sought to justify and celebrate the conquests of King David by backdating them to the earliest passages of the Bible
Thus, as the Bible is decoded, a stunning possibility emerges: perhaps the Bible exists today only because the Court Historian sat down to write the biography of King David in the royal palace at Jerusalem in the tenth century B.C.E. And perhaps another author of genius was inspired by the Court Historian's example to write a kind of prequel, collecting the myth and legend of tribal Israel and working the oldest traditions into a companion volume to the Court History. Later generations of biblical authors and editors added to these core works, decorating them with fairy tales and folktales, putting a theological spin on even the earthiest incidents of David's life. David was slowly transformed in their hands: the ruthless bandit and the rude tribal chieftain was turned into a king, then an emperor, and finally a messiah.
The Bible, of course, bulked up over the centuries as new books were added to the ones that had crystalized around the life story of David. But even some of the later books were linked to David and the monarchy that he founded; the Book of Psalms, for example, is traditionally thought of as authored by David, and the Book of Proverbs by his son Solomon. That is why David can be regarded as the axial figure of the Bible—some of the biblical authors look back into primal history, some look forward to the end times, but all of them seem to be standing in the court of King David.
THE REAL LIFE OF DAVID
So David shines out across the centuries and millennia, and he still exerts a powerful allure for real men and women who struggle to make sense of their own stressful and messy lives. While it may come as a rude shock to the Bible-thumpers who rely on Holy Writ to condemn what they call humanism, the fact is that humanism begins with the biblical David and is still defined by his example. Indeed, the life story of David as we find it in the Book of Samuel offers the earliest and the longest-enduring definition of what it means to be a human being.
“How men and women imagine their lives today begins with the mature David,” insists poet and Bible translator David Rosenberg. “To be able to hold in mind—side by side—laughter and tears, objectivity and fear, affords a fullness. And this quality, so original in David, allows us to be fulfilled when the ambiguous loyalties in others and in ourselves threaten to tear us in two.”18
Nowadays the stresses and strains of human life—the hard tug between our best and worst impulses—are explored and explained in the language of psychology and genetics rather than the exalted words and phrases of the Bible. But the biographers of David seem to have penetrated the innermost secrets of the human heart and mind several thousand years ahead of Freud. For them—and for us—the figure of King David is both thrilling and unsettling, both comforting and troubling; it is larger than life and at the same time an enduring example of a life lived on a human scale. And perhaps that is why, as we shall come to see, David “lives and endures to this day.”
* All biblical quotations are taken from The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961) unless otherwise indicated by an abbreviation that identifies another translation. The Masoretic Text, which is regarded as the definitive version of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish usage, is the work of a school of rabbis and scribes who organized and standardized the biblical text over a period of several centuries starting around 500 C.E. See “A Note on Bibles and Biblical Usage” in the bibliography, page 347.
* The terms “Jews” and “Judaism” derive from the Hebrew Yehudah, which was the name of the fourth son of the patriarch Jacob and the founder of the tribe of Judah.
* See Chronology, page 315.
† The Yahwist is known in scholarly circles by the letter-code “J” because the pioneering scholars who first proposed his (or her) existence wrote in German and thus spelled “Yahweh” with a J. For a fuller discussion of this topic, including all strands of Bible authorship, see appendix, “The Biblical Biographers of David,” page 307.
‡ “Yahweh,” sometimes rendered as “YHWH” or “YHVH,” is an English transliteration of the four Hebrew consonants that spell out the personal name of God in the Hebrew Bible. See “A Note on Bibles and Biblical Usage,” page 347.
* The first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are variously known as the Five Books of Moses (because their authorship is traditionally attributed to Moses), the Pentateuch (Five Scrolls), or the Torah (Law or Instruction).
* The “River of Egypt” is not the Nile but rather the Wadi el-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula.
Chapter Two
THE WRONG KING
Monarchy was a newcomer in Israel,
born out of season.
—GERHARD VON RAD, OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
An intriguing idea about David is offered by a few bold practitioners of modern Bible scholarship: King David was still alive on the day, some three thousand years ago, when the biblical author known as the Court Historian first picked up a goose-quill pen and started setting down on parchment the earliest account of his remarkable life. If so, David's original biographer was writing about a flesh-and-blood figure who could be seen striding down the corridors of the royal palace, whose voice could be heard in the throne room or at the banquet table, and whose exploits, some heroic and some scandalous, were gossiped about in Jerusalem.
Not every Bible scholar is convinced that David still reigned when his life story was first recorded. Some suggest that the oldest passages of the Book of Samuel were composed during the reign of Solomon, shortly after David's death. Others argue that David had already passed from history into legend by the time the biblical author wrote what is now the core of Samuel. A few revisionists even insist that the biblical David never existed; they regard the man we encounter in the pages of the Bible as purely mythic.
Of one thing, however, we can be absolutely sure. If David still lived and still reigned when the Court Historian set to work on his life story, the king did not resemble the iconic figure whom we find in illuminated Bibles of the Middle Ages, in the high art of the Renaissance, or in the TV advertisements of our own era. David was no longer—and may never have been—the boy who bested Goliath in single combat with only a slingshot. David was, instead, someone far more potent. David as the Court Historian may have known him is careworn and perhaps a bit thickset, but still charming, still handsome, still alluring to the men and women who seek his favor in the royal court at Jerusalem. At the same time, he still enjoys a reputation for ruthlessness in the pursuit of power. Those—including his own sons—who dare to conspire against him warn themselves against
underestimating the old king who has shed so much blood in making his way from the sheepcote to the throne.
At this moment, David is not only the reigning king of all Israel but also the conqueror of an empire that stretches from Egypt to the Euphrates—no ruler of Israel who came before him enjoyed the same imperial reach, nor would any who came after. He reigns from a palace of fragrant cedarwood, a rarity and a luxury in the ancient world, and the palace stands on a fortified hilltop in Jerusalem, a place that David conquered by force of arms. His favorite wife is the charming Bathsheba, but a dozen or so other wives and concubines await his pleasure in the bustling harem. As if to emphasize that all of these glories are the result of his own ruthless will, he has named his royal capital after himself: it is called the City of David.
The Court Historian is of course familiar with the official biography of King David, the exploits of courage and derring-do, the victories and conquests, the reforms and innovations. He has heard the courtiers praise David's artistry at the lyre and in the dance, in the elegy and the psalm, and he has heard the priests celebrate David's piety and his observance of ritual, celebrating him as “a man after God's own heart.” But the Court Historian knows other tales that are told only in hushed tones and behind closed doors—David's fugitive years as a bandit and an outlaw, his stint as a mercenary in service to the enemies of Israel, his habit of seducing other men's wives.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 2