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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech,” the man reported, using the king's oblique term of reference for David. “And he inquired of Yahweh for him, and gave him victuals, and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine.” (1 Sam. 22:10)12

  Doeg, of course, was embellishing the truth. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the priest of Nob “inquired of Yahweh”—a phrase that refers to the practice of using tools of divination to seek guidance from on high and suggests that Ahimelech had assisted David by appealing to God on his behalf.13 Perhaps Doeg was seeking to make Ahimelech appear as guilty as possible in order to distract Saul from the fact that Doeg had not disclosed a vital bit of intelligence sooner. If so, it worked. Saul was swept up in a new murderous frenzy, and he now turned his full attention to Ahimelech.

  A DAY OF SLAUGHTER

  King Saul summoned all of the priests of Yahweh who served in the sanctuary at Nob—Ahimelech and the rest of his family among them—to the royal court at Gibeah. Now it was their turn to endure the king's angry interrogation.

  “Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse?” Saul ranted, accusing Ahimelech of treason. “You gave him bread, and a sword, and inquired of God for him, that he should rise against me, to lie in wait.” (1 Sam. 22:13)14

  “Who among all thy servants is so trusted as David, who is the king's son-in-law and the commander of thy bodyguard and is honorable in thy house?” answered the priest, reasonably enough— after all, who would have turned away the king's son-in-law? And as for seeking a divine oracle on David's behalf, Ahimelech exclaimed: “Be it far from me! Let not the king impute anything unto his servant, nor to all the house of my father, for thy servant knoweth nothing of all this!” (1 Sam. 22:14–15)15

  Saul did not deign to argue with the accused priest. Rather, he simply pronounced Ahimelech guilty and sentenced him to death. “You will surely die, Ahimelech—you, and all of your father's house.” (1 Sam. 22:16)16

  Saul ordered the execution then and there: “Turn, and slay the priests of Yahweh!” he commanded the palace guard. Then, as if understanding that it would take more than an impulsive command to convince the soldiers to slay an ordained priest, Saul explained why the priests must die: “Because their hand also is with David, and because they knew that he fled, and did not disclose it to me.” (1 Sam. 22:17)17

  The soldiers, however, did not heed the king's bloody order. They stood in silence; their weapons remained at their sides. Saul, further maddened by their insolence and insubordination, looked in panic around the court. We can imagine he saw only blank faces, and his paranoia must have sharpened as he calculated that all of them—his courtiers, his palace guard, his own tribesmen— had sided with young David.

  And then his eye fell on the man who had been willing to inform on Ahimelech, a foreigner who would not be so fussy about spilling the blood of men who were consecrated to a lifetime of service to the God of Israel.

  “Turn thou,” Saul said to Doeg, “and strike down the priests!” (1 Sam. 22:18)18

  Unlike the men of Saul's own tribe, the Edomite did not hesitate to carry out the king's order—the informer-turned-executioner fell upon the priests and “slew on that day fourscore and five persons that did wear a linen ephod.”19 But the carnage did not end there: Saul ordered his death squad to descend on Nob itself. “And he smote Nob, the city of the priests, with the edge of the sword, both men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen and asses and sheep.” (1 Sam. 22:19)20

  Men in power have always resorted to terror and even mass murder to discourage a local populace from sheltering an enemy and to make an example of those who are suspected of doing so. Nob is only the first in a list that includes Lidice, the Czech town that Nazi Germany eradicated as a punishment for harboring partisans in World War II; Deir Yassin, the Arab village that was terrorized by the Irgun and the Stern Gang in the War of Independence that brought the modern state of Israel into existence; and My Lai, the Vietnamese village where civilians were slaughtered out of fear and hatred of the Vietcong. Saul may have been mad, but the message that he sent to the rest of Israel by ordering the murder of the men, women, and children of Nob was cool and calculated: anyone who trafficked with David, however innocently, was at risk of death.

  One priest managed to escape the mass murder. His name was Abiathar, and he was one of Ahimelech's sons. Significantly, Abiathar managed to carry off an ephod—not a priestly garment but a tool of divination. The Bible does not disclose how he eluded the sword on that day of slaughter, but we know where he sought refuge from Saul: “Abiathar escaped, and fled after David, and Abiathar told David that Saul had slain the priests of Yahweh.” (1 Sam. 22:21)

  David listened to Abiathar's report of the massacre and recalled his visit to the shrine at Nob. “I knew on that day, when Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul,” David said, blaming himself for bringing down Saul's wrath on the innocent men, women, and children of the town. “I have brought about the death of all the persons of your father's house.” (1 Sam. 22:22)

  David, as we shall come to see, was capable of even greater acts of violence. Yet he was also susceptible to self-reproach and compassion. Indeed, a constant state of tension between ruthlessness and sentimentality was basic to his character. Now he was moved to the expression of concern, so eloquent and so heartfelt, that seemed to be his first impulse at moments of loss or danger.

  “Abide thou with me, fear not,” said David to Abiathar, offering the fugitive priest a place in his guerrilla army, “for he that seeketh my life seeketh thy life; for with me thou shalt be in safeguard.” (1 Sam. 22:23)

  A GREAT SLAUGHTER

  David's little army of outcasts and malcontents increased as new men sought out his latest encampment and put themselves under his command, but the head count never exceeded six hundred. To sustain themselves in the wilderness, David and his men raided farms and towns and carried off food and wine and livestock, extorted protection money from the wealthier landowners, and now and then earned a few shekels as mercenaries for the Philistines. As it turned out, David was skilled in the brutal craft of banditry. On one occasion, David led his men on a raid at a place called Keilah, a fortified town northwest of Hebron and south of Adullam. Significantly, Keilah was located within the boundaries of Judah, and thus its townspeople were fellow members of the tribe of Judah. The Philistines were reported to be terrorizing the local populace and stealing the wheat harvest right off the threshing-floors. David's men feared attacking a place deep inside the territory dominated by the Philistines, but he assured them that God had ordered the mission—and besides, the prospect of plunder made the effort worth the risk. So the Philistines were put to “a great slaughter,” and David and his men “brought away their cattle,” a crucial prize of war for an army that had to feed itself on what it was able to steal or extort from the populace. (1 Sam 23:2, 3, 5)

  One of the biblical sources, seeking to put a favorable spin on the facts, insists that the raid on Keilah was an action against the Philistines rather than the townspeople—“Thus David liberated the inhabitants of Keilah” (1 Sam. 23:5) (AB)21—but the unmistakable subtext points to something less praiseworthy. If David regarded himself as the liberator of the people of Keilah, they felt no gratitude. Indeed, a close reading of the biblical passage reveals that men and women throughout the land of Israel—and even his fellow tribesmen in the land of Judah—regarded David with suspicion and sometimes even hatred.

  David soon learned that Saul hoped to capture him by putting Keilah under siege. “God has delivered him into my hands,” Saul exulted. “For he has walked into a trap by entering a walled town with gates and bars.” (1 Sam. 23:7) (NEB) When told that Saul and his army were approaching, David resorted to the use of an ephod as a tool of divination, anxiously seeking an oracle from God.

  “Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into his hand?” David asked.

  “They will deliver thee up,” the ephod confirm
ed. (1 Sam. 23:12–13)22

  Thus warned of the treachery of the townspeople he had just “liberated”—and perhaps reminded by the guerrilla-prophet Gad that a walled town can be a deadly place—David and his men “arose and departed” from Keilah and slipped into the wilderness.

  “And David abode in the wilderness and remained in the hill-country,” the Bible reports. “And Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into Saul's hand.” (1 Sam. 23:14)23

  SHAKEDOWN ARTIST

  From a new encampment in the Judean wilderness, within striking distance of the village of Carmel, David sent ten young men to the estate of a rich Calebite named Nabal.24 “The man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep, and a thousand goats,” the Bible notes, and David sized him up as a likely benefactor. The modern term for what David had in mind is “shakedown.”

  David carefully instructed his men on what to say to Nabal: David and his army had come across the rich man's flocks and herds in the wilderness, but they had taken none of his livestock and they had done no harm to the shepherds who tended them. The biblical text is heavy with the unspoken threat of violence— after all, why send ten men to deliver the message, and why deliver such a message at all? And, lest Nabal miss the point, David directed the young men to ask the rich man to show his gratitude for what David did not do to his sheep and his shepherds. (1 Sam. 25:2–8)

  “All hail! and peace be both unto thee, and peace be to thy house, and peace be unto all that thou hast,” one of the young men addressed Nabal in ornately respectful words, perhaps resting his hand ever so casually on the hilt of his sword. “For we come on a good day—give, I pray thee, whatsoever cometh to thy hand, unto thy servants, and to thy son David.” (1 Sam. 25:8–9)

  One phrase that fell from the lips of the young men—“For we come on a good day”—may have been a reference to the sheep-shearing festival then in progress on Nabal's estate, but the words might be taken as an unspoken threat: “You should see us on a bad day.” Yet Nabal, whose name means “foolish” or “churlish,” rejected their demand with bold but foolhardy contempt.25

  “Who is David?” Nabal replied dismissively. “In these days, every slave who breaks away from his master sets himself up as a chief! Shall I then take my bread, and my wine, and the meat I provided for my shearers and give it to men who come from I know not where?” (1 Sam. 25:10–11)26

  When these defiant words were reported back to David, he issued an order to his army—“Let every man strap on his sword!”— and four hundred of them set off in the direction of Nabal's estate. As they approached their target, David complained out loud about Nabal's appalling ingratitude and scolded himself for failing to take the flocks and herds when he first had the chance.

  “He has repaid me evil for good,” muttered David, as if to convince himself he was justified in carrying out the rough justice that he intended to visit on Nabal and his household.

  The Bible depicts David as a man acting out of righteous necessity. God had anointed him to be king but had done nothing at all to put a crown on his head. Instead, David had been forced into flight by King Saul, and he was responsible for the sustenance of his men and their camp followers, including women and children. Nabal was a rich man with far more than he needed, and they were desperate fugitives who survived on what they were able to scare up.

  At this moment, David appears as a kind of Robin Hood, or a Che Guevara. If the churlish Nabal will not give him what he needs to feed his people, David reasons, then he has no choice but to take it by force of arms. And it is a measure of David's charisma that the Bible reader is invited to see him as a heroic figure even when he is acting brutally and criminally. Even on a purely theological plane, David is depicted as a wholly sympathetic figure— after all, he did not ask to be anointed as the future king of Israel, and now he has been left to his own devices. To the biblical author who stamped a divine seal of approval on the life story of David, the ends always justify the means: “And David had great success in all his ways, and the Lord was with him.” (1 Sam. 18:14)

  Still, the bloodcurdling threat that fell from David's lips seems more appropriate to a bandit or terrorist than a man on a mission from God.

  “God do the same thing to me and more,” vowed David as he and his army approached the estate of Nabal, “if I leave alive until morning a single one who pisses against the wall!” (1 Sam. 25:22)27

  HAREM

  At least one person in the household was quick to grasp the point of the impending visit by David and his men—Nabal's wife, Abigail, a woman “of good understanding, and of a beautiful form.” Without telling Nabal, she ordered a gift-offering to be prepared for the approaching raiders: “two hundred loaves, and two skins of wine, and five sheep, slaughtered and dressed, and five measures of parched corn, and a hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs,” all of it to be loaded on asses and sent ahead as if to encourage David and his men to just take the stuff and go away. (1 Sam. 25:18)28

  Perhaps to mitigate the horror of the threatened atrocity, one of Nabal's shepherds is made to deliver an address justifying David's demands. “David and his men were very good to us, and we were not hurt, neither did we miss anything, when we were in the open country,” the shepherd told his mistress, “they were as good as a wall around us, night and day, while we were minding the flocks.” The real evildoer was Nabal, who “flew upon” David's men when they attempted to “salute our master” and solicit some humble gift in return for their protection. If David now approached the estate with evil intentions toward Nabal and his household, the fault lay with Nabal. (1 Sam. 25:14–17)29

  “He is such a good-for-nothing,” the shepherd complained, “that it is no good talking to him.” (1 Sam. 25:17) (NEB)

  Abigail's curiosity about David seems to have outweighed any fear she may have felt, and so she mounted an ass and rode out to greet him with the bounty she had prepared. Surely she already knew of his considerable reputation as a war hero and high-ranking officer in the king's army—ruddy, handsome, and fit— who had turned to banditry. There is something of Lady Chatterley in Abigail, who finds a dashing young outlaw more intriguing than her rich but stingy and ill-tempered husband. The fact that one of her servants felt free to refer to her husband as a “good-for-nothing” suggests that Nabal was held in contempt by everyone in his household. So the Bible allows us to understand that Abigail was already inclined to blame her husband and side with the outlaw.

  At first sight of David, she hastened toward him, alighted from her ass, and bowed her forehead to the ground in greeting.

  “Let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak in thine ears,” pleaded Abigail in phrases that are both formal and yet flirtatious, “and hear thou the words of thy handmaid.” (1 Sam. 25:24)

  Abigail unburdened herself to David, calling her husband a “base fellow” and blaming him for insulting David. “Nabal is his name, and churlishness is with him,” Abigail said. She was careful to let David know that she had not received the ten young men he had sent to their estate, as if to suggest that she would have shown generosity from the first.

  “And now this present which thy servant hath brought unto my lord,” she said, referring to the bounty she had prepared, “let it be given unto the young men that follow my lord.” (1 Sam. 25:27)

  Abigail now delivers a sermon that was surely scripted by one of the more pious biblical sources and inserted into the text to prefigure David's rise to kingship and, at the same time, to soften some of his rough edges. If only David would refrain from the slaughter he intended to carry out—“withhold thee from blood-guiltiness,” as Abigail put it—and if, instead, he used his sword in “the battles of the Lord,” he would be rewarded with “a sure house” and he would be raised to be “prince over Israel.” The soul of David would be “bound in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God,” she predicted, and “the souls of thine enemies shall he sling out, as from the hollow of a sling”—a flattering allusion to the
humble weapon that David had used to defeat Goliath. (1 Sam. 25:25–31)

  “And when Yahweh shall have dealt well with my lord,” concluded Abigail, calling his attention back to her, “then remember thy handmaid.” (1 Sam. 25:31)30

  The florid language of Abigail's address to David cannot quite conceal the romantic and even erotic undercurrents of their encounter—and it seems that David was smitten, too.

  “Blessed be Yahweh, God of Israel, who sent you to meet me this day,” he replied, still speaking in the coarse tongue of a bandit rather than the exalted phrases of a psalmist. “If you had not come so quickly to meet me, not a single one of Nabal's household who pisses against a wall would have been left alive by morning.”

  David, handsome and dashing, was surely accustomed to the yearnful attention of flirtatious women, and he knew how to flirt back in a manly way. And he must have understood that some women would be aroused rather than put off by his swagger and his crude language. Abigail was one such woman.

  “A blessing on your good sense,” said David to Abigail, “a blessing on you because you have saved me today from the guilt of bloodshed.” (1 Sam. 25: 32–35)31

  David accepted Abigail's gift of food and wine, and then, signaling his men to turn back in the direction of his camp, he saluted her. “Go up in peace to thy house,” he said. “I have harkened to thy voice, and I have accepted thy person.” (1 Sam. 25:32–35)

  That night, as David and his men feasted on Abigail's bounty somewhere in the wilderness, a celebration “like the feast of a king” was held in the grand house of Nabal. Abigail had not yet told Nabal of her encounter with David—so bold and so thrilling—and her husband must have congratulated himself on his own courage in turning away David's men: “Nabal's heart was very merry within him, for he was very drunken.” (1 Sam. 25:36) But she burned to reveal to her foolish husband how close he had come to death, and how it was only her charm and savvy that had spared him from David's sword. And surely Abigail wanted her churlish husband to understand how little she thought of him, and how much she thought of David. So she waited until Nabal had slept off the effects of a night of feasting and drinking.