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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  On the first day of the festival, King Saul said nothing about David's empty place at the table, thinking that David must have absented himself because of a ritual impurity and that he would show up when he was fit to do so.22 On the second day, however, Saul asked Jonathan why David had missed two days of feasting at the king's table. When Jonathan recited the agreed-upon alibi, his father erupted into anger.

  “You son of perverse rebellion!” Saul railed at Jonathan, enraged that his son was making excuses for David and concluding that Jonathan had sided with his rival for the throne. “Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and the shame of your mother?” (1 Sam. 20:30)23

  At this moment, the enraged Saul seems less like a paranoid— or a man possessed by an “evil spirit from God”—than a watchful, calculating, and intuitive ruler. After all, Saul was correct in asserting that Jonathan, like Michal, had allied himself with David. And Saul voiced the plausible anxiety that had turned him against David in the first place: David sought the crown that Saul now wore, the crown that Jonathan would wear one day unless David took it away from him. And, as if Saul could not say the name aloud, he referred to David only by his Hebrew patronymic, “son of Jesse.”

  “I see how it will be!” railed the king. “As long as Jesse's son remains alive on earth, neither you nor your crown will be safe. Send at once and fetch him unto me—he deserves to die!” (1 Sam. 20:31)24

  “Deserves to die! Why?” protested Jonathan. “What has he done?” (1 Sam. 20:32) (NEB)

  Jonathan's defiant words stung Saul, who now realized that his son was an active coconspirator of the man he feared and hated most of all. And so Saul reenacted his earlier encounters with David, seizing his spear and menacing his own son, as the rest of the courtiers watched in silent horror.

  Jonathan rose from the table, more in anger at the public humiliation he had endured than in fear of death, and stalked out of the banquet chamber. So indignant was the crown prince, the Bible pauses to note, that he ate nothing on the second day of banqueting, “for he was grieved for David, and because his father had put him to shame.” (1 Sam. 20:34) The next morning, Jonathan slipped out of the palace and headed for the distant hilltop where David was hiding.

  An elaborate plan had been devised by the two men during their earlier rendezvous, and Jonathan carried it out with almost ludicrous precision. He brought along a young servant and pretended to be out for a morning of archery practice in the countryside, shooting arrows into an empty field and then sending the lad to fetch them back. David, hiding behind a hillock within earshot of the rendezvous point, was supposed to listen for Jonathan's instructions to his servant. If Jonathan called out that the arrows had fallen short of where the lad stood, it would signify that Saul had calmed down and David might safely return to court; if, however, Jonathan told the boy that the arrows had fallen beyond where he stood, it would mean that Saul was still enraged and David must run for his life. As for the lad himself, he was apparently expected to stand in the middle of the target range and take his chances on Jonathan's prowess with bow and arrow!

  “Look, the arrows are beyond you,” Jonathan called to the servant, making sure to shout loudly enough for David to hear— the words signaled David that Saul was still aggrieved. Then Jonathan again addressed his servant, but these words, too, can be understood as an urgent message to David: “Hurry! No time to lose! Make haste!” (1 Sam. 20:38) (NEB)

  Jonathan handed his bow and quiver to the lad and sent him back to town, thus raising a nagging question as to whether the whole unlikely charade was necessary. Then David, alerted to the fact that Saul was still seeking his life, emerged from his hiding place.

  As soon as the lad was gone, David rose from behind the mound, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed humbly three times. Then they kissed one another, and wept with one another, until David's grief was even greater than Jonathan's.

  When the two men stepped back from their lingering embrace, Jonathan spoke one last time.

  “Go in peace,” Jonathan said to David at their moment of parting. “We have pledged each other in the name of Yahweh, who is witness forever between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed, forever.” (1 Sam. 20:41)25

  Then the two men rose and departed. Jonathan headed back to the city and David turned toward the wilderness. Neither one knew with certainty whether they would ever embrace each other again.

  Chapter Five

  DESPERADO

  We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendant that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

  —T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM

  David is now a fugitive on the run. He has lost everything—his lofty rank in the king's army, his seat at the king's table, and the bed that he once shared with the king's daughter. Homeless and despairing, he lacks every resource that he would need to escape the king who is determined to kill him—food, money, weapons, comrades. But he possesses an indomitable will to survive—and willpower, it turns out, will be enough.

  UNCOMMON BREAD AND A GIANT'S SWORD

  After David parted from Jonathan, he made his way to the town of Nob,1 one of the many places in ancient Israel where one might find a shrine for the worship of Yahweh. He rousted the local priest, a man named Ahimelech, who trembled with fear at the sight of David, a man of high station who now resembled one of the vagrants, so wretched and yet so threatening in their desperate poverty, who could be seen along the byways of ancient Israel.

  “Why art thou alone,” the priest asked in a quavering voice, “and no man with thee?” (1 Sam. 21:2)

  David, for the first but not the last time in the Bible, does something that he apparently found quite easy and convenient.

  He lied.

  “I am under orders from the king,” David told the priest. “I was to let no one know about the mission on which he sent me or what these orders were.” (1 Sam. 21:3)

  David spoke with perfect self-assurance and more than a bit of blarney as he improvised a cover story. “When I took leave of my men, I told them to meet me in such and such a place,” he explained to the priest, and then he abruptly demanded: “Now, what have you got? Let me have five loaves, or as many as you can find.” (1 Sam. 21:3–4) (NEB)

  Was David now reduced to begging a country priest for a handout? Or was he extorting provisions for himself—and perhaps a few cohorts who were traveling with him—with an oblique threat of violence?

  “There is no common bread under my hand, but there is holy bread,” Ahimelech allowed, “if only the young men have kept themselves from women.” (1 Sam. 21:5)

  The holy bread—or “shewbread,” as it is known in the antique English of the King James Version—consisted of twelve specially prepared loaves made with pure wheat flour and sprinkled with frankincense. On the Sabbath, the fresh-baked loaves of holy bread were put on display in two neat rows on a table in the sanctuary as a symbolic offering to God. The old loaves that had been removed from the sanctuary could be eaten—but only by consecrated priests, according to the strict rules of the Book of Leviticus. (Lev. 24:5–9)

  The priest of Nob was not brave enough to reject David's demand for the holy bread straightforwardly on the grounds that he was not a consecrated priest. Instead, he made only a feeble attempt to refuse him by invoking an entirely different rule from the Book of Deuteronomy, one that applied to the ancient military practice of maintaining ritual purity before battle. (Deut. 23:9–11) David and his men, the priest was asserting, could not partake of the holy bread if they had been rendered unclean by sexual contact with women.

  “Of a truth, women have been kept from us these three days,” David declared. Then he continued to improvise in an effort to get his hands on the holy bread: “The young men's bodies have remained holy, and how much more will they be holy today.” (1 Sam. 21:6)2

 
; Thus appeased—or perhaps intimidated—the priest of Nob agreed to bend the rules by handing over the supply of holy bread.3 But David was not yet satisfied.

  “Have you a spear or a sword here at hand?” he demanded. “I have no weapon with me because the king's business was so urgent.” (1 Sam. 21:9)4

  Remarkably, the priest now disclosed that a rare and cherished weapon was stored in the shrine of Yahweh. “The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom thou slew in the vale of Elah,” Ahimelech told David. “Behold, it is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod.” (1 Sam. 21:10)

  EXCALIBUR

  Here again is a tantalizing glimpse behind the curtain of theological correctness draped over the Bible by its later editors and redactors.

  The “ephod” to which the priest of Nob so casually referred was some kind of ritual object on display in the shrine of Yahweh, an object large enough to conceal the gigantic sword of Goliath. Elsewhere in the Bible, the same term, “ephod,” is used to identify a priestly garment, perhaps a brief linen tunic or even a loincloth. Here, however, and in a few other passages of the Bible (e.g., Judg. 8:27), the term may refer to a graven image of Yahweh, fashioned of gold, or perhaps the bejeweled case in which it was stored. Ironically, the deity who so detested idolatry may have been the object of idol-worship at some point in the early history of ancient Israel.5

  The presence of Goliath's sword in the shrine of Yahweh is curious for another reason, too. When last noted in the biblical narrative, the sword had been stashed in David's tent. (1 Sam. 17:24) Now, by remarkable coincidence—or was it the hand of God?—David happened upon the sword that he had taken from Goliath at the fateful battle that had set him on the path toward power.

  “If thou wilt take that sword, take it,” the priest said, “for there is no other weapon here.” (1 Sam. 21:10)6

  “There is no sword like it,” David said, knowing better than anyone else how the weapon had been bloodied in battle. “Give it to me.” (1 Sam. 21:10)

  Thus armed with an Excalibur of his own, and provisioned with holy bread, David left the priest of Nob in peace. An agent of King Saul, a man named Doeg from the neighboring land of Edom, had observed David's encounter with the priest (1 Sam. 21:7), but Doeg did nothing to stop him. So David slipped back into the wilderness and continued to elude the men whom Saul sent in search of him. Still, he found himself harried out of Israel—or, rather, the fraction of Israel over which Saul actually enjoyed sovereignty. Much of the country was under occupation by the Philistines, and it is a measure of David's pragmatism that he now headed toward Gath, the hometown of Goliath and one of the five cities of ancient Israel that were under the occupation and rule of the Philistines.

  If the king of Israel sought to kill him, David would not hesitate to place himself under the protection and at the service of Israel's old and bitter enemy.

  “AM I SHORT OF MADMEN?”

  According to one of the most bizarre tales in all of the Bible, “the sons of God”—or, more literally, “the sons of the gods” (b'nai Elohim)7—descended from heaven soon after the creation of the world and bedded the women who struck their fancy, thus siring a race of giants known as the Nephilim. (Gen. 6:2–4) Their descendants still lived in the land of Canaan when, countless centuries later, Moses sent spies ahead of the conquering army of Israel. “All the people that we saw in it are men of great stature,” went the “evil report” of the defeatists, “and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” (Num. 13:32, 33) When the Israelites fought their way into Canaan under the generalship of Joshua, all but a few of these giants were exterminated. “Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain,” goes a brief report in the Book of Joshua, naming three of the five cities of Israel that were still dominated by the Philistines even after the conquest of Canaan. (Josh. 11:22)

  David's link to Gath began when he defeated Goliath, whom the Bible depicts as not just a man of impressive stature but the distant offspring of the sexual union between gods and mortals.8 Now David presented himself to the Philistine overlord who ruled Gath, a king named Achish, and pleaded for refuge against Saul. But David discovered that, even among the Philistines, he was regarded as a dangerous young man.

  “Is not this David the king of the land?” the wary counselors of Achish warned their king, claiming for David a crown that was not yet his own and urging Achish, like Saul, to see David as a threat to his throne. “Did they not sing to one another of him in dances,” they continued, stoking the king's fears, “saying: ‘Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands?’ ” (1 Sam. 21:12)

  The peril in these whispered words was not lost on David, who “laid up these words in his heart and was sore afraid of Achish the King of Gath.” (1 Sam. 21:19) And so David, always daring and quick-witted but never more so than when in danger, contrived to put the Philistines at ease.

  And he changed his demeanor before them, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard.

  (1 Sam. 21:13)

  So David feigned lunacy to save his own life. Here is a moment that strikes Bible scholars as something new and remarkable— where else in the writings of the ancient world do we find a sacred history in which a God-chosen king turns himself into a drooling and gibbering idiot? Indeed, the scene depicts David as not merely undignified but cowardly. Yet David's ploy works and the king of Gath is utterly fooled.

  “The man is mad!” complained Achish. “Am I short of madmen that you bring this one to plague me?” (1 Sam. 21:16) (NEB)

  So David was escorted out of the court to the king's dismissive cry—“Must I have this fellow in my house?”—and hustled out of Gath. (1 Sam. 21:16) (NEB) David was still on the run, but now he did not seek refuge amid the familiar comforts of a royal court. Rather, he sought refuge in a cave, more like a runaway slave than a man who would be king.9

  DESPERADOES

  Word of David's desperate predicament—and the whereabouts of the cave in which he had barricaded himself—reached his tribal homeland, the land of Judah. Not only his brothers and the rest of his family but hundreds of men from the tribe of Judah sought out David's stronghold among the hills near Adullam.10 But David quickly saw that if he was no longer alone, he was also no longer in the company of kings.

  And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.

  (1 Sam. 22:2)

  “Flotsam, ruffians, and desperadoes” is how John Bright describes the men who rallied to David, and “bandit chief” is the title he bestows upon David himself. Indeed, the blunt text of the Book of Samuel provokes the suspicion that the real David may have been someone far less exalted than the man we find in the pages of Chronicles or the Psalms.11 About the best case that can be made for David during his fugitive years is that he was a soldier of fortune who relied on guerrilla tactics to survive and prevail against the reigning king of Israel.

  TRIBES

  One member of David's outlaw band was a man who is identified in the Bible as a prophet but seems to have been a master of guerrilla warfare. Like Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, the prophet Gad understood that even the strongest urban fortress is always at risk of being surrounded and cut off by a superior force, and thus a guerrilla army is always safest when it is on the move through the countryside.

  “Abide thee not in the stronghold—depart and get thee into the land of Judah,” Gad counseled. (1 Sam. 22:5)

  David followed Gad's advice, moving himself and his band of partisans into the traditional homeland of the tribe of Judah, where he hoped to find support among his own people. Saul may have been elected to reign as the first king of the tribal confederation called Israel, but the Bible suggests that the loyalties to family, clan, and tribe were far older and far stronger than any sense of citi
zenship in the newfangled monarchy.

  Saul himself played on the old tribal loyalties in his pursuit of David. As he presided over a council of war at his stronghold in Gibeah—sitting, spear in hand, under a tamarisk tree—Saul sought to convince his counselors and captains, all of them Benjaminites, that David, a man from the tribe of Judah, was their enemy, too. Surely, Saul suggested, David would favor Judah over Benjamin if he succeeded in defeating Saul and seizing the kingship.

  “Hear now, ye Benjaminites, will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards?” Saul demanded, still unable to speak David's name aloud and using only his patronymic. “Will he make you all captains?” (1 Sam. 22:7)

  Even now, when he so desperately needed his clansmen's solidarity, Saul could not control his raging paranoia. Somewhere out there, at this very moment, David lay in wait for him—or so the king complained—but Saul would be forced to face him alone. “All of you have conspired against me,” Saul railed. “There was none that disclosed it to me when my son made a league with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you that is sorry for me, or disclosed to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me.” (1 Sam. 22:8)

  Only one man spoke up—Doeg the Edomite, the man who had spotted David in conversation with the priest Ahimelech in the shrine of Yahweh at Nob. Perhaps glancing at the spear in Saul's hand, he sought to prove his loyalty to the king.