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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “Speak with David secretly,” Saul ordered one of his courtiers, “and say: ‘Behold, the king hath delight in thee, and all his servants love thee—now, therefore, be the king's son-in-law.’ ” (1 Sam. 18:22)

  David was not fooled by the king's latest words of flattery and entreaty, and he turned aside the marriage proposal with yet another declaration of his own unworthiness. “Does it seem to you a trifling thing to offer oneself as a son-in-law to the king?” he demurred to the king's emissary. “Well, as for me, I am poor and humble.” (1 Sam. 18:24) (AB)

  When David's refusal was reported back to Saul, the king took the plea of poverty to mean that David was unable to come up with a suitable “bride-price” (mohar), the dowry-in-reverse that a suitor was expected to pay his future father-in-law in ancient Israel. So Saul extricated David from his predicament by proposing a bride-price that required only courage in battle, which David possessed in plenty, and not a hoard of gold.

  “The king desires no bride-price,” Saul's emissary now told David, “but a hundred foreskins of the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 18:25)2

  If David took up the grotesque challenge, or so Saul calculated, he would certainly die by the sword of some Philistine soldier who refused to be separated from his foreskin. What else, after all, would better motivate a man in battle than the integrity of his own genitalia! But, yet again, Saul badly underestimated the willful young David, who may have declined to marry Merab but suddenly burned with desire for her younger sister.

  The Bible does not explain his sudden change of heart, but David now relished the idea of sitting at Saul's table as the son-in-law of the king. Indeed, some scholars suspect that marriage to the daughter of the reigning king had always been David's first objective in his long, patient, ruthless plan to put himself on the throne of Israel.3 So despite his earlier protestations of humility and poverty, David sallied forth in search of foreskins as a bride-price for Michal. Ever the overachiever, David returned with two hundred severed Philistine foreskins, twice as many as Saul had demanded.4

  Saul, foiled again, was forced to welcome the man he detested to the point of madness into the most intimate circles of his family and his court: “And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.” (1 Sam. 18:27) But Saul had not yet resigned himself to his fate, and his efforts to do away with David only grew more frantic. If the Philistines would not do the job for him, vowed mad King Saul, he would find a way to do it himself even if it meant defying the will of God.

  “And Saul saw and knew that the Lord was with David, and Michal loved him,” the Bible sums up. “And Saul was yet more afraid of David, and Saul was David's constant enemy.” (1 Sam. 18:28–29)

  A GAME OF CHESS

  Saul could do nothing right, and David could do nothing wrong, for the simple reason that God willed it to be so—it was only a matter of time before his divine plan to unseat Saul and replace him with David was revealed, and David was elevated to his rightful place on the throne of Israel. Such is the subtext of the Bible as it has come down to us, a set of texts that were repeatedly “corrected” by successive generations of editors and redactors to put a theological seal of approval on King David and the dynasty that continued to reign in Jerusalem for five centuries.

  But the pious account of David's rise to power, as we have already seen, may be read as an overlay applied to the older texts, a theologically correct effort by some later biblical source to rewrite history by attributing every act of human will to the hand of an unseen and unheard God. The core of the biblical text is much grittier, much bloodier, and much more suspenseful, as if the author was never quite sure of how it would all turn out. At the heart of the biblical life story of David are two men—each ambitious, willful, and ruthless—contending with each other for a crown. An open-eyed reading of the Bible permits us to conclude that David prevailed over Saul because of his superior skills in war and politics, not because God willed it so.

  Saul's next move against David, for example, was a blunder. The hapless king confided to Jonathan that he intended to kill David at the first opportunity. Saul even spoke openly of his murderous intent within the royal household, which included both Jonathan and Michal, David's wife. Saul ought to have known that his plan would be communicated to David, and so it was that Jonathan, who “delighted much in David,” sought David out, urged him to remain out of sight, and warned him: “Saul my father seeks to slay you.” (1 Sam. 19: 1–2) In the meantime, while David absented himself from the court, Jonathan sought to change Saul's mind.

  “Sir, do not wrong your servant David, because he has not wronged you,” urged Jonathan. “His conduct toward you has been beyond reproach. Did he not take his life in his hands when he killed the Philistine, and the Lord won a great victory for Israel? You saw it, you shared in the rejoicing. Why should you commit a sin of innocent blood by putting David to death without cause?” (1 Sam. 19:4–5)5

  Jonathan's open praise of David seemed to succeed in softening Saul's anger, if only momentarily, perhaps because of Jonathan's earnest and eloquent words, or because his own mood had lurched once again from murderous rage to impulsive affection, or because he had decided to feign a change of heart.

  “As the Lord lives,” King Saul vowed, “he shall not be put to death.” (1 Sam. 19:6)

  So Jonathan conducted David back to the court of Saul. David took up residence with his new wife and resumed his duties as an officer in the king's army. Once again he marched off to war, and once again he marched back in victory over the Philistines. “He slew them with a great slaughter,” the Bible reports, “and they fled before him.” (1 Sam. 19:8) But David's victories in battle only stoked King Saul's mad rage.

  “TOMORROW YOU WILL BE A DEAD MAN”

  Now Saul's mood swings were more frequent and more violent, and the Bible describes yet another ugly incident in the palace. As David strummed the lyre, “an evil spirit from the Lord” came upon Saul and the king tried to pin David to the wall with his spear. (1 Sam. 19:9) David fled to his own house and locked himself inside with Michal. Saul dispatched a few of his soldiers to David's house with instructions to wait out the night and strike him down as soon as he emerged in the morning.

  Michal, like her brother Jonathan, loved David despite their father's hatred for him—and it was she who contrived to thwart the king's latest attempt to murder him. She spotted the royal hit men who were waiting in ambush, and she alerted her husband. “If you save not your life tonight,” she warned him, “tomorrow you will be a dead man.” (1 Sam. 19:11)6

  Then she put an artful but effective plan into action. Opening a window on an upper floor of the house, she lowered David down to the ground and watched as he slipped away into the darkness. Then, taking one of the household gods that the biblical author calls teraphim,7 she placed the figurine in David's bed, arranged a tangle of goat's hair at its head, and covered it with a blanket. To anyone who spied into the darkened room, she calculated, it would look as if David were asleep. Then she sent word to the guards waiting outside that David was ill and bedridden.

  The ploy was sufficient to fool the king's men, and they reported to Saul that his son-in-law was confined to a sickbed. Now Saul, his mind sharpened to a cutting edge by sheer paranoia, saw his opportunity. “Bring him to me, bed and all,” ordered Saul, “so that I may slay him myself.” (1 Sam. 19:15)8

  So the soldiers returned to David's house, forced their way into his bedroom, and discovered the ruse. But it was too late— David was long gone and beyond easy capture. Only Michal remained to face her father's rage when she presented herself at the palace.

  “Why have you played a trick on me,” demanded Saul, “and let my enemy get safe away?”

  Michal's cool reply betrayed a truly impressive measure of chutzpah. “He said to me,” she lied, “ ‘Help me to escape, or I will kill you.’ ” (1 Sam. 19:17) (NEB)9

  CRAZY QUILT

  The episode of Michal's deception and David's getaway is salted with allusions to other
passages in the Bible, some subtle and some pointed, all of which demonstrate how the crazy quilt of biblical text is stitched together. As bits and pieces of what we now call the Bible were compiled and collated, revised and redacted, and sometimes even censored by generation after generation of authors and editors, people and events were combined and conflated. The same story was sometimes told two or three times, each in a slightly different version; words, phrases, and whole passages were sometimes cut out, put aside, and restored in a different place. As a result, here and there in the biblical text we are able to glimpse a landscape that is profoundly at odds with the official theology of the Bible.

  Michal's ruse faintly echoes an incident in the Book of Genesis—and both episodes reveal something shocking about the casual use of idols by the ancient Israelites. According to the tale in Genesis, the patriarch Jacob fled from his father-in-law, Laban, in the company of the two daughters whom he had taken as his wives, Leah and Rachel. Laban's daughters carried off their father's teraphim, and Rachel contrived to hide the stolen idols from her pursuing father by secreting them in the cushions of a camel saddle that had been carried inside their tent for safekeeping, seating herself on the saddle, and then telling her father that she could not rise from her seat because she was menstruating. (Gen. 31:34–35)10

  Both of these stories feature a household idol that is used by a daughter to deceive her father, although the teraph that Michal used to simulate a sleeping David was apparently a mask or a statue of life-size proportions rather than a statuette. What is especially shocking and revealing about the episode is the fact that, as late as the lifetime of David in the early tenth century B.C.E., the Israelites were still keeping and using idols despite the oft-stated loathing of Yahweh for polytheism and paganism.

  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is the first of the Ten Commandments, and the second commandment is even more specific: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, [and] thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.” (Exod. 20:3–5) God threatens plague and famine and exile as punishment of the Israelites for the sin of idolatry, and he decrees a holy war to expunge idol-worship by the non-Israelites who claimed the Promised Land as their homeland.

  Ye shall surely destroy all the places, wherein the nations that ye are to dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountain, and upon the hills, and under every leafy tree. And ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces in their pillars, and burn their Asherim11 with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods; and ye shall destroy their name out of that place.

  (Deut. 12:2–3)

  Yet the Book of Samuel preserves a casual reference to the presence of graven images in the home of an Israelite couple— and no ordinary couple at that! Somehow, the biblical author who tells the tale of how Michal aided and abetted David in his flight from King Saul found nothing worthy of comment in the fact that the household of the king's daughter was supplied with teraphim or that Michal was perfectly comfortable in using them to trick her father and conceal her husband's escape. Thus, a stray line of biblical text confirms that “God's anointed” was at liberty to indulge in religious practices that are explicitly condemned in later passages of the Bible.

  Some of the priests and scribes who were the custodians of Holy Writ in ancient Israel were scandalized by such details, and they censored the older texts—the Book of Chronicles, for example, is a cleaned-up version of David's life story in which the incident of the teraphim, along with much else, is simply left out. For that reason, if Samuel had been lost or suppressed and only Chronicles had survived, we would know nothing of David's sins and scandals, including his casual attitude toward idolatry. But the Book of Samuel was apparently regarded as so ancient and so authentic that, here and elsewhere in the life story of David, the final editors of the Bible felt obliged to preserve the text in its entirety.

  DERVISHES

  “Now David fled, and escaped,” the Bible continues, “and came to Samuel.” (1 Sam. 19:18)

  The reunion of David and Samuel, the man who had secretly anointed him as the future king of Israel, is the occasion for yet another surprise—the scene is a kind of theological burlesque, a healthy reminder that the Bible sometimes takes itself less seriously than we take it.

  The old prophet listened with concern to David's account of “all that Saul had done to him,” and the two of them fled together from Ramah to a hiding place among the shepherds who pitched their tents on the outskirts of the town.12 But some nameless informer betrayed them to King Saul, who promptly dispatched his soldiers to find and arrest David. Upon their arrival at the hiding place, however, the king's men came upon Samuel and a band of his fellow seers, all of them in a trance-state of spiritual ecstasy and all them uttering words of prophecy. The sight of so many holy men in the grip of mystical frenzy turned out to be infectious. “The spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied.” (1 Sam. 19: 20)

  Word reached Saul that his death squad had been lifted into a state of ecstasy, which rendered them useless as killers. So Saul sent a second band of assassins, and they, too, fell into impotent gibbering. Then Saul sent yet another squad of killers, and they succumbed to the same sorry fate. The exasperated king resolved to do the job himself.

  Saul set out in search of David, first in the city of Ramah where Samuel lived, then on a windswept height overlooking Ramah, and finally among the tents on the outskirts of Ramah where David and Samuel were hiding. There King Saul found the man he sought to kill—and there, too, Saul fell under the same spell that had turned each of his soldiers into a whirling dervish.

  “And he stripped off his clothes,” the Bible reports, “and he prophesied before Samuel, and lay down naked all that day and all that night.” (1 Sam. 19:24)13

  The biblical author is openly derisive of Saul at this moment, picturing the warrior-king as a pathetic figure, writhing on the ground and speaking in tongues, wholly enraptured by the “spirit of God” and thus rendered utterly harmless. Even as we laugh at Saul, however, we are reminded that God's ulterior motive is being served—God is shown to use the gift of prophecy as an affliction rather than a blessing, a device to torment Saul and spare David. “That is why men say,” the Bible notes dryly, and perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, “ ‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ ” (1 Sam. 19: 24)14

  “THERE IS BUT A STEP BETWEEN ME AND DEATH”

  Still, God plays only an incidental role in the story of David's survival. More often, David relies on his own skills or the favors extended to him by the men and women who are so smitten by him. After Michal arranged his escape from the king's men, for example, David sought out her brother Jonathan and recruited him for service as a spy in the court of King Saul—but not before venting his anger and resentment toward Saul.

  “What have I done?” David demanded of Jonathan when they met secretly in the countryside. “What is my sin before your father that he seeks my life?” (1 Sam. 20:1)15

  David may have been protesting a bit too much. After all, he had already been told by Samuel that he was designated to replace Saul as king of Israel, and he appears to have harbored his own driving ambition for the throne. But he had not yet gone into open insurrection against the king, and so he was still able to protest his innocence with credible fervor.

  Jonathan's response, too, was either insincere or ignorant. Contrary to everything reported in the Bible so far, Jonathan denied that his father wanted to kill David.

  “Behold, my father does nothing either great or small but that he discloses it to me,” Jonathan reassured David. “Why should my father hide this thing from me? It is not so!” (1 Sam. 20:2)16

  “Your father knows well that I have found favor in your eyes, and he has said to himself: ‘Let not Jonathan know this,’ ” David replied. “But truly as the Lord lives, and as your soul lives, there is but a step between me and death.” (1 Sam. 20:3)17<
br />
  These ominous words silenced Jonathan's defense of his father, and now Jonathan spoke solicitously to his beloved friend. “What does your soul desire?” he asked tenderly, “that I should do it for you?” (1 Sam. 20:4)

  David knew exactly what he wanted of Jonathan, and he proposed an elaborate intelligence-gathering mission back at the court. The next day was the feast of the new moon,18 when David would be expected to join Saul at the king's table for a festival that would be celebrated with three days of feasting. Jonathan was to observe Saul's reaction to the absence of his son-in-law; if Saul happened to miss him, Jonathan would explain that David had asked permission to return to his hometown of Bethlehem to participate in a ritual of sacrifice with his own clan. Then Jonathan was to report the king's response to David.

  “If he says: ‘Well and good,’ then I will have peace,” David explained to Jonathan, “but if he flies into a rage, you will know that he is set on doing me wrong.” (1 Sam. 20:7)19

  Then David, as if fearful of an act of treachery and betrayal by Jonathan, reminded his old friend of the solemn pact of love and loyalty that they had already sealed between them. “Keep faith with me!” he demanded. “Kill me yourself if I am guilty. Why let me fall in your father's hands?” (1 Sam. 20:8)20

  “God forbid!” Jonathan cried, and the two young men solemnly renewed their bond of love. “Jonathan pledged himself afresh to David because of his love for him,” the Bible relates, “for he loved him as himself.” (1 Sam. 20:9) (NEB)

  So David slipped away and sought refuge in the wilderness, and Jonathan returned to his father's house to take his place at the feast. Saul himself sat in his customary place against the wall—a telling detail that suggests the king's hypervigilance. Next to him sat Abner, Saul's favorite general, and Jonathan was seated on the opposite side of the table.21 David's place, of course, was empty.