And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armor, and sent into the land of the Philistines round about, to carry the tidings unto the house of their idols, and to the people.
(1 Sam. 31:9)
Just as Saul had feared, he was disgraced in death even as he had been tormented in life: the royal armor that he had worn in his final battle was displayed in a temple of Ashtaroth, one of the pagan goddesses of the ancient Near East, and his headless body was nailed to the town wall at a place called Beth-shan,33 where it might remind the Philistines of their triumph and the Israelites of their defeat.
THE CROWN OF THE SLAIN KING
On the third day after David's return to Ziklag from his skirmish with the Amalekite raiding party, a stranger appeared at his camp. His clothes were ripped, dirt was sprinkled in his hair—both traditional signs of a man in mourning—and when he was ushered into the presence of David, the man fell to the ground and prostrated himself in submission.
“From where do you come?” David asked.
“Out of the camp of Israel, I have escaped,” the man explained.
“How went the matter?” David asked, eager to know how Saul and his army had fared against the Philistines. “I pray thee, tell me.”
“The people are fled from the battle, and many of the people are fallen and dead,” answered the stranger. “Saul and Jonathan, his son, are dead, too.” (2 Sam. 1:3–5)
Here at last was the moment that David had been awaiting ever since Samuel had anointed him as Saul's successor to the throne of Israel. Since then, David had managed to survive the mad king's effort to murder him, first when he was still at court, then during his fugitive years in the wilderness, and finally as a mercenary in service to the Philistines. All the while, we may imagine, he must have wondered whether the holy oil that Samuel had poured over his head so many years before had been a blessing or a curse.
But David dared not rejoice at the word of Saul's death, and he continued his interrogation. The stranger was courageous (or foolish) enough to identify himself as an Amalekite—surely he risked sudden death by doing so!—and then he proceeded to tell a remarkable tale about the last moments of Saul's life, a much different version from the one just provided by the biblical author.
The man had happened upon Saul on the slope of Mount Gilboa in the heat of the battle. Though mortally wounded, the king still leaned on his sword as the chariotry and cavalry of the Philistines pressed down upon him. And then Saul cried out to him. “Stand beside me, and slay me,” begged the king, “for the throes of death have seized me, but there is still life in me yet.” The stranger complied, putting Saul to the sword as an act of simple mercy.
“I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm,” the stranger disclosed to David, “and I have brought them unto my lord.” (2 Sam. 1:9–10)34
The notion that the crown of Israel was put into David's hand by an Amalekite who confessed to slaying King Saul must have shocked and perhaps even outraged the original readers of the Bible. Yet the Bible, which gives two versions of the battlefield death of Saul, offers no other explanation for how the symbols of kingship once worn by Saul came into David's possession. So we are left to wonder which version of Saul's death is true—did Saul fall on his sword or was he put out of his misery by a passing Amalekite?—and what role, if any, David played in this mysterious episode.
Of course, the inconsistent accounts of Saul's death could be yet another pair of doublets, each originating with a different source and both used by a biblical editor who did not bother to harmonize them. Another explanation is that the Amalekite was simply telling a lie—perhaps he had plundered the king's dead body and then made up a tale to tell David in the belief that he would reward the man who had finished off his rival and brought him the royal insignia. If so, the Amalekite badly misjudged David.
“How is it that you were not afraid to put forth your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?” David asked in pious rage. “Go,” he told one of his own men, “and fall on him.” (2 Sam. 1:14–15) Then, as David witnessed the hasty execution of the last man to see King Saul alive, he uttered a cold benediction.
“Your blood be upon your own head,” he said, “for your own mouth has testified against you.” (2 Sam. 1:16)
A less wholesome meaning can be detected in the same text, a crack in the wall of apologetics that has been thrown up around the figure of David by the biblical sources. The Court Historian, presumably an insider at the court of the Davidic kings and perhaps even an eyewitness to some of the events he describes, made every effort to show David as wholly pure of motive. Never does David openly covet the crown or actively conspire against Saul. Not once but twice, David declines to slay him when he has the chance to do so. Again and again, David declares his love and loyalty to the rightful king of Israel. Yet the biblical author feels obliged to address the awkward question of how the royal crown and bracelet ended up in David's hands so soon after Saul's death.
Surely the original readers of the Bible—no less than the modern reader who is inclined to see conspirators under every bed—must have wondered whether David played a more active and more sinister role in these curious events. Did the king of Gath, for example, carry the crown back to David with the intent of putting his trusted vassal on the throne of Israel as an ally and even a quisling? Or is it possible that David went to war with the Philistines after all and plundered the dead body of Saul with his own hands? The Amalekite's story, conveniently enough, acquits David of any such treachery and was meant to put an end to such scandalous speculation.
“As for Saul's regalia, the present narrative shows that David came by it innocently and by an agent acting on his own initiative,” explains Bible scholar P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. “So there is no genuine reason, we are to believe, to suspect David of any wrongdoing in the matter of Saul's death.”35
If we seek an answer to the question that asks itself—Cui bono? Who benefits?—the response is plain enough: David is the one whose path to the throne was cleared of a crucial obstacle by Saul's death. And, as we shall see, the death of Saul is only the first occasion on which David distances himself from a political murder that works to his advantage. But the Bible does not preserve any evidence of David's culpability, whether because no such evidence ever existed or because it has been concealed from us.
Indeed, David betrayed no pleasure or relief at the news of Saul's death. Rather, the man who had begged the Philistines for the opportunity to go into battle against Saul and the army of Israel now rent his garments in a public display of grief, and his men followed his example. “And they wailed and wept and fasted until evening,” the Bible reports, “for Saul, and for Jonathan, his son, and for the house of Israel, because they were fallen by the sword.” (2 Sam. 1:12) The face that David showed to the men around him, the face he showed to the people of both Judah and Israel, was one of unrelieved grief and despair.
“Thy beauty, O Israel, upon thy high places is slain!” David began to rhapsodize. “How the mighty are fallen!” (2 Sam. 1:19)
“PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN”
The death of Saul and Jonathan moved David to eloquence, and here we find the first appearance of verses by “the sweet singer of Israel,” as David is later called in the Bible. (2 Sam. 23:1)
Saul and Jonathan, the lovely and the pleasant,
In their lives, even in their death, they were not divided.
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions.
(2 Sam. 1:23)
The biblical author seeks to authenticate David's famous words of praise for Saul and Jonathan by claiming to rely on a long-lost source that is supposedly even more ancient than the Bible itself. “Behold,” the Bible says of David's eulogy, “it is written in the Book of Jashar.” (2 Sam. 1:18) The undeniable grace and power of the elegy inspired the pious tradition that David was the author of the Psalter in its entirety. “As Moses gave five books of laws to Israel,�
� goes a midrash in the Talmud, “so David gave five Books of Psalms.”36 Although modern scholarship allows only that a few psalms in the Book of Psalms may date back to “the Davidic period,”37 the elegy for Saul and Jonathan inspires considerably more enthusiasm.
“His authorship is unquestionable,” writes Robert H. Pfeiffer. “The deep pervading emotion shows that it was composed immediately after the battle of Gilboa, under the first shocking impression of the calamity.”38
Even if the eulogy can be attributed to David, the fact remains that the pretty sentiments found here are not much more truthful than the platitudes that are uttered over graves nowadays. Saul and Jonathan were bitterly divided over David: Jonathan loved him, Saul hated him, and Saul even tried to murder his own son and successor because he felt betrayed by Jonathan's love for David. But now David was ready to rewrite their history—and his own—in the words that he uttered so memorably: “In their lives, even in their death, they were not divided.”
Still, a certain sly irony can be detected in the eulogy. Perhaps mindful of the raw envy that burned in Saul when he heard the women of Israel declare their preference for David in song and dance—“Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands”—David now admonished the women of Israel to honor Saul in death even if they preferred David in life.
Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
Who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights,
Who put ornaments of gold upon your apparel.
(2 Sam. 1:24)
Even now, the words and phrases that fall from David's lips betray an appeal to the senses and an appreciation for the “delights” of dressing and undressing. David had experienced such pleasures at the hands of both Saul and Jonathan, each of whom stripped off his own apparel and armament and dressed David in them. And now, in one of the most provocative moments in the Bible, David openly declared the passion that he felt toward Jonathan.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan.
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me,
Wonderful was thy love to me,
Passing the love of women.
(2 Sam. 1:26)
To pious Bible readers of many centuries, these words have reflected the wholesome affection of a man toward his friend and comrade in arms. For others, however, the same words raise a tantalizing question.
WAS DAVID GAY?
Much effort has been expended in explaining away David's declaration of love for Jonathan, a declaration that suggests an undeniable homoerotic subtext. Commentators in all three Bible-based religions insist that what passed between David and Jonathan was something pure and pious. “The classic description of genuine unselfish love,” is how Rabbi Israel H. Weisfeld puts it,39 and Robert H. Pfeiffer vouches for David's machismo by pointing out that his grief over Jonathan is “intense and sincere, but nonetheless virile.”40
More recent scholarship proposes a political motive for the vows of love exchanged by these two men. The Hebrew word for love (aheb) may refer to “genuine affection between human beings, husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend,” concedes Bible scholar J. A. Thompson, but the same word is used with “political overtones” in the Bible and in various ancient texts from elsewhere in the Near East. “In this context, the verb love expresses more than natural affection,” Thompson argues. “It denotes rather the kind of attachment people had to a king who could fight their battles for them.”41
So perhaps we are meant to see only a political alliance, and not a pledge of love, when Jonathan declares his “love” for David. After all, Jonathan offered to renounce his claim to the throne and to support David's bid for kingship only if David promised to protect him and his family when Saul was dead or gone. “I know that as long as I live you will show me faithful friendship, as the Lord requires,” Jonathan bargained with David, “and if I should die, you will continue loyal to my family forever.” (1 Sam. 20:14)42
But the passion in David's elegy cannot be overlooked, and the plainspoken references to love between men cannot so readily be explained away. “Male homosexuality was rampant in Biblical times,” insists anthropologist Raphael Patai. “The love story between Jonathan, the son of King Saul, and David, the beautiful hero, must have been duplicated many times in royal courts in all parts of the Middle East in all periods.”43 That's why, for example, we find intimacies between men in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the creation myth of ancient Sumeria, and that's why some open-minded commentators are willing to entertain the notion that the Israelites were not shocked to hear of one man's love for another man.
“Homosexuality was both dignified and manly—in fact, often associated with heroes—in the cultures that surrounded Israel,” argues Bible critic Tom Horner. “And how could Israel not have been influenced by these cultures? How could it have adopted an entirely different sexual ethic, living as close as it did to foreign influences?”44
Of course, the essential message of the Bible is that God's Chosen People were supposed to be different from the rest of humankind—a “holy nation,” as God puts it. (Exodus 19:6) The sexual practices of the non-Israelites among whom they lived are routinely condemned as an “abomination.” But we have already seen that the Israelites, like everyone else in the world, were never quite capable of living up to God's lofty expectations. The best evidence was their stubborn demand for a king of their own, which may have disgusted God and his prophet, Samuel, but proved that the Israelites aspired to be just like everyone else, only more so, in the words of an old Jewish joke. Perhaps, then, the Bible preserves the evidence of a sexual dalliance between two men that would not have shocked anyone in the classical world.
“There can be little doubt,” Horner concludes, “except on the part of those who absolutely refuse to believe it, that there existed a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan. They were simply well-rounded men who acted fully within the standards of a society that had been dominated for two hundred years by an Aegean culture—a culture that accepted homosexuality.”45
Once our eyes are opened, homoerotic moments and meanings can be detected throughout the life story of David. When Saul complains about Jonathan's relationship with David, the cause for Saul's complaint gets a political spin in most translations. “I know that you side with the son of Jesse,” Saul rails at Jonathan, “to your shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness!” (1 Sam. 20:30) (New JPS) But some scholars detect “a slight textual corruption” in the original Hebrew text that distorts the meaning of Saul's words. Rather than scolding Jonathan for siding with David in a political dispute, Saul may have been expressing his shock and horror at Jonathan for sleeping with David. For that reason, some suggest that the ancient Greek versions of the Bible preserve a more accurate reading of Saul's words: “For, do I not know that you are an intimate companion to the son of Jesse?” is how some scholars would render the same text.46
The same sexual tension has been detected by artists and writers over the centuries. André Gide was tempted to see in King Saul himself a “possessive desire for the beautiful young shepherd who joins his court,” and to explain Saul's efforts to slay David not as a matter of madness or politics but rather as “an attempt either to repress his homosexual longing by killing its inspiration or to revenge himself on a beloved who spurns him.”47 Even Goliath is depicted as hopelessly smitten with young David in a poem by Richard Howard, “The Giant on Giant Killing”: “My eyes … fell upon David like a sword.”48
The subtitle of Howard's poem is “Homage to the Bronze David of Donatello (1430),” and it reminds us that David inspired contradictory emotions in the artists and poets of the Renaissance. To Peter Martyr, David and Jonathan offered an example of chaste male friendship that he considered superior to the pairings in the pagan myths of Greece and Rome, perhaps because he did not believe them capable of expressing physical love for each other. To Abraham Cowley, their friendship on earth was exalted into something mystical. “The reward of their perfect lov
e for each other,” Bible scholar Ted-Larry Pebworth explains, “is the eternal contemplation of God in the person of primal, absolute love.”49 But for artists such as Donatello and Michelangelo, who are said to have recruited their own young lovers as models for statues of David, the handsome warrior was the object of intense sexual yearning. And the same yearning can be teased out of the biblical text that inspired them—David was clearly a man given to carnal pleasure, and nothing in the Bible rules out the possibility that he took his pleasure with both men and women.
LONG LIVE THE KING!
The most telling detail in the biblical account of David's eulogy for Saul is what happened after the elegy was spoken and David turned his thoughts to matters of pure politics. The death of Saul and the defeat of the Israelites created a vacuum of power in ancient Israel and an opportunity for David to fill it. By surviving Saul's efforts to kill him, David had triumphed over the king, and now he was ready to claim the throne as yet another spoil of war. So David considered whether now was the right time to sever his allegiance to the Philistines, return to his tribal homeland in Judah, and put himself in play for the kingship. The biblical author works out these calculations in the metaphor of an oracle, thus putting the divine imprimatur on matters of realpolitik, but David is clearly thinking like a politician now.
“Shall I go up into any of the cities of Judah?” David inquires of Yahweh, presumably by consulting the “sacred divination box” or one of its many equivalents.
“Go up,” God responds.
“Whither shall I go up?”
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 14