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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “Thou hast done foolishly,” scolded Samuel. If Saul had only heeded the command of Yahweh as conveyed by Samuel, his kingdom would have lasted forever. “But now thy kingdom shall not continue,” the old prophet warned. “The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath appointed him to be prince over his people.” (1 Sam. 13:13–14)

  The reign of King Saul was already in sharp decline, and those who had so recently anointed him—God and Samuel—were ready to abandon him. A man of God's own choosing, a man after God's own heart, his identity as yet unrevealed, would replace him on the throne of Israel.

  The man who would be king is David.

  “SPARE NO ONE!”

  Saul and his army triumphed over the Philistines in the battle of Michmash in spite of his botched sacrifice to Yahweh and the dire words of Samuel. Saul then continued to campaign successfully against all the traditional enemies of Israel, not only the Philistines but also the armies of Moab, Edom, and Ammon,23 three kingdoms that lay along the eastern frontier of the land of Israel. He fought, too, against the feared and hated Amalekites, a nomadic tribe of the Judean desert that had harried the Israelites during their wanderings in the wilderness. But as it turned out, Saul's campaign against the Amalekites was the occasion for one final blunder, and Saul forfeited the favor of God once and for all.

  Samuel had passed along to Saul some very specific and exceedingly bloodthirsty instructions on how to wage war against the Amalekites. “I am resolved to punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel, how they attacked them on the way up from Egypt,” God instructed Samuel to tell Saul. “Go now and fall upon the Amalekites and destroy them, and put their property under ban.” (1 Sam. 15:2) (NEB) The “ban” to which the biblical text refers—the Hebrew word is herem—was “the grimmest of the rules of Israelite holy war,”24 and the functional equivalent of what the modern world calls genocide, as Yahweh himself made plain. “Spare no one,” Samuel commanded Saul in the name of God. “Put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and asses.” (1 Sam. 15:2) (NEB)

  Saul raised a new army—the Bible reports that the army of six hundred now swelled to some two hundred thousand men—and marched against the Amalekites. He dutifully and mercilessly put to the sword all but one of the Amalekites. But he was not dutiful or merciless enough to please the cranky and demanding Yahweh, and God's patience finally ran out.

  First Saul allowed the Kenites, a tribe of nomadic coppersmiths who lived in the same precinct, to flee into the wilderness before the killing of the Amalekites began in earnest. Moses had married a Kenite woman and fathered his two sons with her, and now Saul recalled that the Kenites had “showed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt.” (1 Sam. 15:6)25 Next Saul spared the life of the king of the Amalekites, apparently recognizing a kindred spirit in a fellow monarch. Finally he set aside “the best of the flock and the herd—the fat ones and the young ones—and every good thing” as a prize of war for himself and his victorious army. (1 Sam. 15:9) (AB)

  God was enraged by Saul's refusal to obey his plain order to kill every living thing among the Amalekites—men, women, and children, and their cattle, too. “I repent of having made Saul king,” God confided to his prophet, “because he has turned his back on me and has not obeyed my commands.” (1 Sam. 15:10–11) (NEB)

  Samuel trekked out to find Saul and deliver the news of God's displeasure. As it happened, the unsuspecting king had just finished building a monument to himself and offering some of the booty he had seized from the Amalekites as a sacrifice to Yahweh. Foolish and vain, Saul had apparently talked himself into believing that he had been compliant enough to keep Yahweh's favor.

  “May you be blessed by Yahweh!” Saul hailed the prophet. “I have carried out Yahweh's command.” (1 Sam. 15:13) (AB)

  “What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears? Why do I hear the lowing of cattle?” demanded a sarcastic Samuel, pointedly reminding Saul that he was supposed to have slain the very cattle that now idled in the pens where they were being kept for the pleasure of the king and his men. “The Lord sent you with strict instructions to destroy that wicked nation, the Amalekites; you were to fight against them until you had wiped them out. Why then did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord?” (1 Sam. 15:18–19) (NEB)

  “I have sinned,” cried Saul. “Please, forgive my offense and come back with me, and I will bow low to the Lord.”

  “I will not go back with you,” said Samuel, “for you have rejected the Lord's command, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel.” (1 Sam. 15:24–29)26

  Abruptly turning his back on Saul, the old man started to stride away. Abject and desperate, Saul seized the old man's robe and struggled to hold him back. But Samuel's garment tore away in the king's hand.

  Here, we may imagine, the two men stood in tense silence for one long moment, each one contemplating the torn strip of cloth that Saul now held in his hand.

  “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from your hand today,” said the prophet to the king, “and will give it to another, a better man than you.” (1 Sam. 15:28) (NEB)

  THE LONG, UNHAPPY REIGN OF KING SAUL

  The received text of the Book of Samuel is so confused and distorted at certain crucial points that we cannot say exactly how long Saul sat on the throne of ancient Israel. “Saul was a year old when he began to reign, and he reigned two years over Israel,” reads the Masoretic Text (1 Sam. 13:1), but some versions of the Septuagint* replace these nonsensical assertions with the report that Saul was thirty years old when he was crowned and that he reigned for twenty-two years.27 Other versions of the Bible simply censor out the questionable numbers and leave blanks in the text: “Saul was … years old when he began to reign,” goes the same passage in the New Jerusalem Bible, and “he reigned over Israel for … years.”28 At best, the reign of Saul is “a guess,” according to Bible historian John Bright, who goes on to assert that Saul remained on the throne for at least a decade.29

  What is perfectly clear from the biblical account, however, is that God did nothing to hasten Saul's exit from the stage of history. Long after God admitted his mistake in anointing Saul and vowed to remove him from the throne, Saul continued to reign as king of Israel, wage war against the Philistines, and keep his rivals for kingship, real or imagined, at bay. Some scholars read the biblical text to suggest that Saul, who is depicted by the royal chroniclers of the Davidic kings as a bungler and a madman, may actually have been far more beloved by the people of Israel than his successor.30

  The open-eyed Bible reader may wonder out loud why God waited so long to execute his harsh judgment on Saul, and why he allowed the hated Philistines to do his work for him. If Saul had forfeited God's favor early in his reign, why was he allowed to remain on the throne for so long?

  The pious explanation for the delay in dethroning Saul and the way it was finally carried out can be summed up in the simple affirmation of William Cowper: “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”31 That rationale explains why, for example, the Bible honors the Persian emperor Cyrus II, who conquered Babylon and thus put an end to the exile of the Jewish people, with the exalted title of messiah: if it took a pagan monarch from far-off Persia to restore the Jews to their homeland, the prophet Isaiah concluded, he must have acted with the blessing of the God of Israel. (Isa. 45:1) And by the same reasoning, God must have charged the Philistines with the task of putting an end to the life and reign of Saul, at least according to the implicit theological assumptions of the Book of Samuel.

  Quite a different explanation suggests itself to those who approach the Bible as a work of history and biography. The passages in which God is shown to withdraw his blessing from Saul can be understood as an effort to put a retroactive theological spin on the recorded facts of history. If the Court Historian and other early sources were simply telling the truth
as they knew it, they apparently felt compelled to report Saul's successes as well as his failures. They confirmed that Saul, not David, was the first king of Israel, that Saul won the first victories against the enemies of Israel, and that his reign was a long if unhappy one.

  Above all, it is possible to read the oldest portion of their writings as an account from which God is mostly and notably absent. At the heart of the Book of Samuel is a tense and suspenseful account of the struggle for power between Saul and the man who would succeed him on the throne. Each one is depicted as ambitious, ruthless, and willful, and each one resorts to politics, intrigue, and violence to determine who will wear the crown. Only in retrospect does the Bible assert that God took sides in the contest between Saul and his successor.

  THE EXECUTIONER

  As if to signal the bloody fate that awaited Saul, the Bible provides us with a strange and unsettling coda to Samuel's grim prophecy that his kingship would pass to a better man than he. Samuel, we are told, resolved to carry out the bloodthirsty order that Yahweh had given and Saul had refused to obey.

  “Bring ye to me Agag the king of the Amalekites,” ordered the old prophet, and the defeated king was dragged before him in chains.

  “Surely,” observed the condemned man, “the bitterness of death is at hand.”

  “As thy sword hath made women childless,” replied Samuel, reminding the Amalekite king of the Israelite blood that had already been spilled, “so shall thy mother be childless among women.”

  And then Samuel—seer, holy man, and prophet of Yahweh— roused himself to do what the warrior-king Saul had failed to do. Seizing a weapon in his own two hands, Samuel hacked the king of the Amalekites into pieces. (1 Sam. 15:32–33)

  Now Samuel and Saul went their separate ways, the prophet to the shrine of Yahweh at Ramah, the king to the fortified household at Gibeah that served as the family home and the royal palace.

  “And Samuel never beheld Saul again to the day of his death.” (1 Sam. 15:35)32

  Before Samuel passed away, however, God called upon him to anoint one more man as king of Israel. According to the deeply mystical vision of the prophetic source, the question of kingship in ancient Israel was already decided, and the divine plan that began when God planted the seed of Samuel in the womb of a grieving woman was about to be fulfilled.

  * The twice-told tale of Saul's coronation may be an example of what scholars call a “doublet,” that is, parallel accounts of the same incident by different biblical sources in slightly different versions. Doublets are regarded as key evidence of the multiple authorship of the Bible.

  * The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was undertaken as early as the third century B.C.E. and is the version of the Hebrew Bible used in Christian tradition.

  Chapter Three

  “HE IS THE ONE”

  Now so soon as David appeared at his father's summons—a lad of ruddy colour, with piercing eyes and in other ways handsome—Samuel said softly to himself: “This is he whom it has pleased God to make king.”

  —JOSEPHUS, JEWISH ANTIQUITIES

  Samuel was old and weary and ready to die, but he was called by God for one more effort at kingmaking. As the holy man sat alone in Ramah, fretting over the fate of King Saul, God roused him with a sharp rebuke.

  “How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from being king over Israel?” complained God. “Fill your horn with oil, and go! I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem, for I have chosen myself a king among his sons.”

  “How can I go?” protested a timid Samuel, mindful that Saul might have fallen out of favor with Yahweh but was still king of Israel. “If Saul hears it, he will kill me!” (1 Sam. 16:1–2)1

  God apparently regarded Samuel's fear of Saul as well founded, and he went to the trouble of cooking up a cover story. “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord,’ ” God instructed Samuel. “Then call Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will tell you what you shall do. You will anoint the one I point out to you.” (1 Sam. 16:2–3)2

  So Samuel, ever obedient to God, trudged out to Bethlehem with a heifer in tow. When he was hailed by the apprehensive city elders—“Is your visit peaceful, O seer?” they asked in quailing voices—the old prophet stuck to the cover story: “It is to sacrifice to Yahweh I have come.” Then Samuel issued a special invitation to the man called Jesse, and pointedly insisted that Jesse bring his sons along, too. (1 Sam. 16:4) (AB)

  Jesse showed up in the company of seven strapping sons. So striking was Eliab, the eldest, so tall and handsome, that Samuel promptly concluded he must be the one whom Yahweh had chosen to be king. But God set him straight. “Do not look upon his appearance or his stature—I have rejected him!” he whispered to Samuel. “For it is not as a man sees that God sees: a man looks into the face, but God looks into the heart.” (1 Sam. 16:7) (AB)

  Then Jesse paraded the rest of his sons in front of the old prophet, but God rejected each one in turn.

  “Yahweh has not chosen any of them,” said Samuel in consternation. Then he addressed a question to Jesse: “Are these all of your children?”

  “There is still the youngest,” allowed Jesse. “He is tending the flock.”

  “Send and fetch him,” ordered Samuel.

  The last and youngest son, of course, was David.

  “Arise!” said God to Samuel when David arrived. “Anoint him, for he is the one!” (1 Sam. 16:10–12)3

  Then, as David's father and seven older brothers watched in amazement, the old prophet raised his horn and poured the holy oil over the young man's head.

  Thus did the God of Israel correct his mistake in the choice of a king. To emphasize that divine charisma had been withdrawn from Saul and bestowed upon David, one of the biblical sources insisted that “the spirit of Yahweh came mightily upon David from that day forward” and, at precisely the same moment, “the spirit of Yahweh departed from Saul.” (1 Sam. 16:1–14)4 Here is yet another fingerprint of the biblical author who embraced the prophetic tradition and piously attributed each event in the history of ancient Israel to God's will.

  Still, if the theological overlay is lifted off, the older and grittier passages of the Bible make it clear that divine will alone was not sufficient to remove Saul from the throne of Israel and install David in his place. David may suddenly have been filled with “the spirit of Yahweh,” but his worldly qualities—his will to power, his guile and cunning, his military genius and his utter ruthlessness in bringing it to bear on his enemies—will turn out to be crucial to his ultimate success against Saul. In a real sense, David was the creator of his own kingship.

  THE FAIRY-TALE PRINCE

  David's coming has been subtly anticipated from the opening passages of the Bible, when God is shown to promise Abraham that the land of Israel will one day reach imperial dimensions, an expansion that will be achieved only under David's rule: “From the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” As we have seen, the Book of Genesis is salted with stories that anticipate the more squalid incidents of his reign—incest and seduction, rape and rebellion. But only now, as he steps forward to be anointed by Samuel, is David named and depicted in the biblical text.

  Our first glimpse of David is meant to convince us that he was an even finer specimen than Saul, not only a charismatic figure who inspired love and loyalty but also “a comely person,” a man of compelling physical beauty: “Ruddy and attractive, handsome to the eye and of good appearance.” (1 Sam. 16:12, 18) (AB) David, in other words, is presented as the archetypal fairy-tale prince, and that is exactly how we are encouraged to see him in these opening passages of his life story.

  The Bible may pause to praise his “good appearance,” but we are never actually told what David looked like. The Hebrew word conventionally rendered as “ruddy” suggests to some translators that David was a redhead,5 and the Hebrew phrase translated as “handsome to the eye” is understood by others to mean both that David
was pleasing to behold and that David himself had beautiful eyes.6

  The passages that describe David's physical appearance represent yet another strand of biblical authorship in the tapestry that makes up his life story. As a rule, the Bible is candid about the physical flaws of even the most exalted men and women in the sacred history of Israel—the matriarch Leah, for example, suffered from poor eyesight, and Moses was a stutterer—but now and then a biblical figure suddenly looms larger than life. Bible critic Robert Alter characterizes the more fanciful episodes in the Bible as “folkloric embellishments,”7 and the life story of David is richly decorated with heroic exploits and romantic encounters that owe more to folklore and fairy tale than to history or theology.

  For example, Samuel's search for the new king suggests the story of Cinderella and the glass slipper. Even the number of sons that Samuel ruled out before finally reaching David seems slightly fanciful: seven is a richly symbolic number throughout the Bible, and seven sons is a common motif in folk traditions.8 And the sense that we are being told a tall tale is heightened by the contradictions that can be teased out of the biblical text; the Book of Samuel, for example, describes David as the youngest of eight sons of Jesse (1 Sam. 16:10–11, 17:12), but Chronicles refers to him as the seventh son. (1 Chron. 2:13–15) Clearly the various biblical authors did not know or could not agree on something so basic as how many brothers David had, and they supplied their own resonant numbers.

  The fact that David is both the youngest and the worthiest of the sons of Jesse, by the way, is another example of an ironic subtext that runs throughout the Hebrew Bible. The principle of primogeniture, by which the firstborn or eldest son is supposed to succeed to his father's title and property, began in distant antiquity, and the Bible formally embraces the superior rights of the eldest son in the elaborate rules of law that are embodied in the biblical text. Yet the Bible can be understood as a saga about the surprising success of younger sons: Isaac prevails over his older half brother, Ishmael; Jacob over his earlier-born twin, Esau; Joseph over all of his older brothers. Each of these stories may have been intended to prepare the Bible reader for the successes of David. When we finally encounter him, we are not at all surprised that the last-born David beats out his six or seven older brothers for the blessing of God.