King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “Hearken unto the voice of the people,” God instructed Samuel, “for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7)

  God, like the frustrated father of a stubborn and greedy child, was always ready to punish the Chosen People by the simple expedient of giving them exactly what they thought they wanted. During the years of wandering in the wilderness, for example, God fed the Israelites on the miraculous gift of manna, but when they tired of the monotonous diet of “bread from heaven” and yearned instead for roasted flesh, God provided them with quail in such abundance that the Israelites would be tempted to eat the stuff “until it comes out at your nostrils.” (Exod. 16:4, Num. 11:19–20) Now God took a similar stance: if the people of Israel preferred a mortal king to the King of the Universe, God allowed, he would give them one—but they would live to regret it.

  “YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS HE WILL TAKE”

  At God's direction, Samuel delivered an oration to the people of Israel that fairly sizzled with contempt for the idea of monarchy. It was an indictment of kings that still reads like a revolutionary manifesto rather than pious prophecy. “This,” warns Samuel, “will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you.”

  He will take your sons to be his horsemen and to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and they shall run before his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be perfumers, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and give to his officers. And he will take your men-servants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and ye shall be his servants.

  (1 Sam. 8:11–17)8

  Samuel's catalog of the sins of kings against their people seems strangely out of place in a book that celebrates the kingship of David. The Book of Judges, as we have already seen, can be understood as “ex post facto royalist propaganda,”9 a series of atrocity stories that were meant to convince the original readers of the Bible that human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves in the absence of a king. The core of both Judges and Samuel was composed by chroniclers of the Davidic kings who clearly regarded the coming of kingship as a wholly benign revolution— the Israelites were now sophisticated and sensible enough to throw off the rule of the tribal chieftains and charismatic holy men who had ruled them and to submit themselves to a national monarchy like the ones they saw all around them.

  “Instead of the special theocracy [Samuel] has overseen to this point,” writes Bible scholar Jan Wojcik, “the people now want sound economics, a strong military establishment, and a secure environment.”10

  But as we have seen, the Bible also preserves the fingerprints of authors who disdained the rule of kings. If David himself was capable of excessive and even outrageous conduct in both his public and private life, most of the kings who came after him were regarded with ever greater horror in the prophetic circles of ancient Israel. Indeed, the kings who succeeded David presided over a succession of political and military catastrophes that ended only with the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians carried the ruling elite of the Davidic monarchy into exile. For that reason, some passages of the Book of Samuel may be regarded an “epitaph over the corpse of Israel buried in Babylon,” as Bible scholar Robert Polzin puts it. “Kingship, despite all its glories, constituted for Israel communal suicide.”11

  That is why a tirade against kingship was put into Samuel's mouth by a later biblical source who had come to distrust and even detest earthly kings, a pious naysayer who still believed in old-fashioned theocracy rather than a newfangled monarchy. Long after David was dead and gone, this writer took the liberty of slipping a manifesto against monarchy into the same pages of the Bible where David, the greatest king of all, is celebrated with such ardor.

  THE ANOINTED ONE

  God gave the people of Israel the king they demanded—but his name was not David.

  “I will send you a man out of the land of Benjamin,” God told Samuel, “and you will anoint him to be prince over my people Israel, and he shall save my people from out of the hand of the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 9:16)12

  So it was that Yahweh chose a handsome but hapless fellow named Saul to ascend the throne of Israel as its first king, or so the Bible says. Saul may have been “young and goodly,” and “a head taller than any of his fellows,” but he was star-crossed from the beginning. (1 Sam. 9:2)13 As a Benjaminite, he came from the smallest of the twelve tribes of Israel and the one responsible for the incident of gang rape and murder that nearly resulted in its extermination. Moreover, he belonged to the clan called Matri, “the humblest clan of all the tribe of Benjamin,” as Saul himself put it, thus reminding us that the identity of an Israelite was still defined in terms of tribe and clan rather than nationality. (1 Sam. 9:21) (AB)

  Saul's very first exploit, as reported in the Book of Samuel, encourages us to see him as something of a dullard. Sent by his father to find some stray asses from the family herd, Saul wandered aimlessly around the countryside until his provisions ran out. Finally Saul sought out a local seer in the desperate hope that he might know where to find the asses. The seer was Samuel.

  “Here is the man of whom I spoke to you,” God whispered to Samuel when Saul showed up. “This man shall rule my people.” (1 Sam. 9:17) (NEB)

  At dawn on the next day, Samuel roused Saul from sleep and anointed the young man who had come in search of his lost asses as the first king of Israel. The ceremony was simple and straightforward, which may seem surprising when we begin to ponder the soul-shaking and history-making implications of the word “messiah,” the familiar English rendering of mashiach, the Hebrew word for “the anointed one.” From a small flask, probably fashioned of fired clay,14 Samuel poured oil upon Saul's head—olive oil spiced with myrrh, cinnamon, cassia, and aromatic cane, according to a recipe for anointing oil found in the Book of Exodus (Exod. 30:22–25)15—and then bestowed a kiss upon Saul and intoned a few short pronouncements that began with a rhetorical question.

  “Has not Yahweh anointed you prince over his people Israel?” recited Samuel. “It is you who will muster the people of Yahweh! It is you who will free them from the grip of their enemies all around!” (1 Sam. 19:1) (AB)16

  Although the practice of anointing kings and their vassals may have been borrowed from the court rituals of ancient Egypt, the Bible confirms that the Israelites found a great many reasons and opportunities to anoint both people and things.17 The altar of sacrifice was smeared with consecrated oil, and so were the tabernacle and the sacred paraphernalia used in ceremonies of worship. Aaron, the brother of Moses, was anointed as the first high priest of Israel, and anointment was the rite of initiation for the generations of high priests who came after him. (Exod. 40:10–12, 15) Even lepers were anointed with a “sevenfold” sprinkling of oil in a ritual of purification. (Lev. 14:15–18) Starting with Saul, however, the ancient ritual took on a new and enduring meaning for the people of Israel. Anointment became the essential and enduring symbol of kingship, a faintly magical rite in which the strength, wisdom, and power of Yahweh were symbolically conveyed to the mortal monarch.

  God may have agreed to give the Israelites the king they had demanded, but Saul turned out to be the wrong one.

  SAUL AMONG THE BAGGAGE

  God's choice of Saul remained a secret until Samuel staged a convocation with the apparent purpose of drumming up public enthusiasm for the man whom he had privately anointed as king. Samuel summoned the people of Israel to Mizpah, one of the traditional gathering places and sites of worship in ancient Israel. The old man opened the proceedings by reminding the crowd of their clamor for a king and pointing out rather irritably why he still thought it was a terrible idea.

  Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: “I brought up Israel out of Egypt, a
nd I delivered you out of the hands of all the kingdoms that oppressed you.” But you have this day rejected your God, who himself saves you out of all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said unto him: “Nay, but set a king over us!”

  (1 Sam. 10:18–19)18

  Then, curiously, Samuel conducted a drawing of lots among the twelve tribes of Israel with the apparent purpose of selecting the man who would be king.19 Since God had already directed Samuel to anoint Saul as king,20 the lottery was something of a sham. Still, the people watched as the first lot fell to the tribe of Benjamin, the second lot fell to the clan of Matri, and then the drawing of lots continued among the members of the clan, man by man, until the young man named Saul was finally selected, just as Samuel had known all along.

  But at the moment of his selection, Saul was nowhere to be seen. As if to signal the sorry fate that awaits Saul, the biblical author gives us a moment of burlesque that makes Saul seem like a fool rather than an anointed king.

  “Will the man be coming back?” a befuddled Samuel asked God.

  “There he is,” said God, “hiding among the baggage.” (1 Sam. 10:22) (NEB)

  At the very moment when he was to be acclaimed as the first king of Israel, Saul was cowering behind the baggage that was piled up around the encampment of the Israelites at Mizpah. Thus tipped to Saul's whereabouts by God himself, Samuel flushed the reluctant king out of his hiding place and presented him to the crowd.

  “Do you see him whom Yahweh has chosen,” asked Samuel, calling attention to the tall young man who now stood in plain sight and loomed head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, “that there is no one else like him among all the people?”

  “Long live the king!” cried the mob, satisfied at last to have a king of their own like all the other nations of the world. (1 Sam. 10:22–25) (AB)

  Still, Saul was not acclaimed by every man among the people of Israel. Rabbinic tradition depicts him as a giant, tall and imposing, but we may suspect that some doubters in the crowd looked on him and saw only a gawky youth. The ancient rabbis regarded Saul as a model of humility because he hid from his own coronation, but some of the Israelites would have seen it as a sign of timidity or perhaps even cowardice. To them, the ass-herder who stumbled into kingship hardly seemed worthy of the honor.

  “Saul went to his house in Gibeah, and there went with him men of valour, whose hearts God had touched,” the Bible reports. “But certain base fellows said: ‘How shall this man save us?’ And they despised him.” (1 Sam. 10:26–27)

  THE SLAUGHTERED OXEN

  Saul's kingship was quickly put to the proof by an act of aggression and a threatened atrocity from one of the traditional enemies of Israel, the king of neighboring Ammon.21 The army of the Ammonite king boldly encamped outside Jabesh-Gilead, one of the frontier towns of Israel on the far side of the Jordan River, and the enemy king threatened to attack and destroy the town. Panic-stricken by the sight of the approaching army, the townspeople offered to submit to the rule of Ammon, but the enemy king responded with contempt to their offer to make peace through abject surrender.

  “On this condition will I make it with you,” the king of Ammon taunted, “that all your right eyes be put out.” (1 Sam. 11:2)

  The town elders begged for a respite of seven days in which to consider the grotesque offer, and the king of Ammon inexplicably consented. Messengers were promptly dispatched to Saul with a desperate plea for rescue. They found the newly crowned king at work in the fields of Gibeah, trudging behind a brace of oxen.

  What King Saul did next offers a glimpse into the unsettled politics of ancient Israel in the earliest days of monarchy. Israel was still only a loose and informal confederation of tribes, not a national state, and the newly minted king could not count on mustering up an army by issuing a call to arms to the various tribes. So Saul chose to use threat and coercion to create a national army to go to the rescue of the besieged border town of Jabesh.

  And he took a yoke of oxen, and cut them in pieces, and sent them throughout all the borders of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying: “Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen.”

  (1 Sam. 11:7)

  The same bloody gesture had been used once before to raise an army in Israel, when the Levite traveler hacked the dead body of his concubine into pieces in the very same town of Gibeah to incite a punitive campaign against the tribe of Benjamin. Now the first king of Israel—ironically, a Benjaminite—used a similar signal to raise a national army to go to war against the Ammonites. The grotesque call to arms had worked once before, and according to the Bible it worked again.

  “And the dread of the Lord fell on the people,” the Bible confirms, crediting the fear of God rather than the more palpable threat issued by Saul himself, “and they came out as one man.” (1 Sam. 11:7)

  “SHALL SAUL REIGN OVER US?”

  An army of 330,000 soldiers rallied to the king's call. Saul, suddenly transformed from a plodding farmer into a daring battlefield commander, was inspired to send the embattled people of Jabesh a message that rang with kingly bravado. “Tomorrow, by the time the sun is hot,” Saul promised them, “ye shall have deliverance.” (1 Sam. 11:9)

  Saul proved to be an able tactician. The enemy was put to rout by a surprise attack, “so that two of them were not left together.” (1 Sam. 11:11) Yet even at the moment of triumph, Saul was reminded that his political adversaries remained at large in Israel. A crowd approached Samuel and demanded the blood of the Israelites who had dared to oppose Saul's kingship. “Who is he that said: ‘Shall Saul reign over us?’ ” they railed at the old prophet. “Bring the men, that we may put them to death.”

  Saul himself silenced their call for vengeance, adopting the statesmanlike stance that a victor in battle can afford to strike. “There shall not a man be put to death this day,” he declared, “for today the Lord hath wrought deliverance in Israel.” (1 Sam. 11:13) Saul resolved to take advantage of the momentary surge of enthusiasm among the people: a second convocation was held, this time in the city of Gilgal, and “there they made Saul king before the Lord.” (1 Sam. 11:15)*

  All of these ceremonials and convocations, of course, are profoundly at odds with what we have been taught to believe about the deity who is described in the Hebrew Bible. God is supposed to be all-powerful, but it turned out that his designation of Saul to be king of Israel was not enough to make it so—Samuel was obliged to engage in politicking and public relations in order to put Saul on the throne and keep him there. God is supposed to be all-knowing, but the Almighty apparently did not foresee that Saul would bungle the kingship that Samuel procured for him. God, it seems, is perfectly capable of making a mistake, and he made one when he instructed Samuel to anoint Saul. The twice-crowned king of Israel was already doomed.

  A MAN AFTER GOD'S HEART

  Saul's tactical victory in a skirmish with the king of Ammon did nothing to warn off the enemy that represented a far greater threat to Israel—the Philistines. The Bible suggests that the Philistines so dominated Israel that they were able to forbid metalsmithing lest the Israelites make swords or spears for themselves. “No blacksmith was to be found in the whole of Israel,” the Bible reports. “The Israelites had to go down to the Philistines for their ploughshares, mattocks, axes, and sickles to be sharpened.” Only Saul and his son Jonathan possessed proper weapons, and the rest of the Israelites were forced to content themselves with crude darts and flint-edged weapons. (1 Sam. 13:19–20, 22, 14:13) (NEB)

  The kingdom of Saul, in fact, was occupied territory. Even Gibeah, the town where Saul lived and reigned, remained under the authority of a governor appointed by the Philistines. And Saul was unable or unwilling to engage in a war of liberation against the Philistines. He had dismissed the bulk of his army after the encounter with the Ammonites, and he commanded only three units of picked men. But his son Jonathan, brave but impulsive, acted on his own initiative and singlehandedly assassinate
d the governor of Gibeah. Word quickly reached the Philistines: “The Hebrews have revolted.” (1 Sam. 13:3)

  Jonathan's act of political terrorism forced his father's hand. Saul summoned the demobilized soldiers of his army to rally at a place called Michmash. But the Philistines fielded a far more powerful force, and Saul's fresh muster began to slip out of camp. At last, Saul found himself with an army of only six hundred men, and he faced three thousand charioteers, six thousand cavalrymen, and “an army like the sand on the seashore in number.” (1 Sam. 13:5) (AB) To strengthen the resolve of the few who remained under his command, Saul decided to make a blood offering to Yahweh.

  His pious impulse, however, took a bad bounce. Samuel had already instructed the king to await his arrival so that the holy man himself could officiate over the solemn ritual of sacrifice. Saul was to wait seven days, but a full week passed and Samuel had not yet arrived. So the king, full of anxiety and out of patience, acted on his own initiative. “Bring the holocaust22 and the communion offering to me!” he ordered. (1 Sam. 13:9) (AB) And then, just as the victims of sacrifice were going up in smoke on the altar of Yahweh, Samuel showed up.

  “What have you done?” Samuel demanded in horror at the sight of the burnt-offering.

  “When I saw that the army had begun to drift away from me and that you did not come in the appointed number of days and that the Philistines were gathering at Michmash,” the young king burbled in a desperate effort at self-justification, “I said to myself, ‘Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal—but I have not entreated the Lord's favor!’ So I took it upon myself to offer up the holocaust.”