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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “And David said: ‘The first man to kill a Jebusite shall become chief and captain,’ ” goes the account of the Chronicler. “And Joab went up first, and so he was given the command.” (1 Chron. 11:6)11

  Chronicles is a much later—and much fussier—source than the Book of Samuel, and that's why scholars are tempted to regard the older work as the more authentic one, especially when the two are at odds. The Chronicler's tale, for example, suggests that Joab first achieved his high rank in David's army by his feat of arms in the conquest of Jerusalem. The Court Historian, by contrast, assigns Joab a prominent role throughout the civil war that brought David to the throne. Both sources, however, agree that Joab was a crucial figure in David's life; indeed, Joab is “second only to David and Absalom in frequency of reference,” as Bible scholar Joel Rosenberg points out, and he will come to play a fateful if ultimately tragic role in preserving David's monarchy.12 In fact, some scholars suspect that the greater role allowed to Joab by the Chronicler is evidence that David's rough-and-ready henchman may have been an even more prominent figure in ancient Israel than the Court Historian was willing to admit.

  “Joab is a sympathetic figure,” explains Rosenberg, “decisive when the king is vacillating, loyal to David throughout his reign and the interregnum, active where the king is sedentary, performing the work that the king finds odious, deferring to the king where credit is to be claimed for victories, and, in general, devoted to the civil peace, or at least, like any good Machiavellian courtier, devoted to the economy of violence.”13

  For the moment, David still regarded the conquest of Jerusalem as a personal triumph, and rightfully so. According to the Court Historian, David devised the strategy for penetrating the defenses, and he led his own men in the successful assault. Significantly, he neither asked for nor required any assistance from the tribal militia that had served King Saul—David conquered Jerusalem with only the picked men of his own army.

  “The capture of Jerusalem was entirely a private affair of David's,” observes Gerhard von Rad,14 and Frank Moore Cross, another luminary in biblical scholarship, points out that Jerusalem is depicted as “the personal possession of the king by right of conquest, providing the king with an independent power base over which he exercised absolute sway.”15 Accordingly, David promptly named the city he had conquered—or, at least, the citadel at the center of Jerusalem—after himself.

  “And David dwelt in the stronghold,” the Bible reports, “and called it the City of David.” (2 Sam. 5:9)

  Here we can discern two different explanations for the same event: the Court Historian credits the flesh-and-blood David with the victory over the Jebusites, but more pious biblical sources insist that the credit belongs to God alone. Shrugging off David's military genius and the sheer guts of the men who served him, one of the later biblical authors puts a theological spin on the Court Historian's battle report—the conquest of Jerusalem ought to be seen as the fulfillment of the promise that God had made to David so many years before.

  “David kept growing stronger, for Yahweh, the God of Armies, was with him,” goes one characteristic passage that has been written into the Court Historian's account. “Thus David knew that Yahweh had established him as king over Israel and had exalted his kingship for the sake of his people Israel.” (2 Sam. 5:10, 12)16

  The same tension between history and theology, of course, can be detected throughout the biblical life story of David. Some Bible readers, like some of the biblical sources, will entertain the idea that David succeeded on the strength of his own brilliant but thoroughly mortal gifts and powers. Others see David's successes as the working out of God's will in history. Not a few Bible readers and Bible scholars are able to hold both thoughts in their minds at once—David was both gifted and God-inspired, and that is why he survived and prevailed against every enemy and every defeat that stood between him and the glorious kingship described in the Bible.

  In either case, David was now ready to take on the momentous task of nation building, which both God and David saw as his destiny and which Bible historians praise as his greatest accomplishment. The obstacles that he faced were daunting: the twelve tribes of Israel were not yet a unified people, and David would have to overcome their tendency toward blood feuds and civil war. Indeed, the Israelites were not far removed from their origins as pastoral nomads, and they lacked the resources of the powerful monarchies and empires that surrounded them on all sides—a powerful king with a cabinet of ministers and counselors, an efficient bureaucracy, a professional army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry, and the other elements of what we would today call infrastructure.

  But it is exactly here and now that David reveals his stature as a leader, a mover and shaker, the maker of a nation and an empire. Significantly, he is shown to embellish his new capital in a manner befitting a great and glorious king. Under the Jebusites, Jerusalem centered around a hilltop citadel, but David pushed to the outer limits of the site: “And he built the city from around the Millo to the surrounding wall.” (1 Chron. 11:8) (AB)17 David received emissaries from the king of neighboring Tyre, Hiram, who sent him a supply of the rare and prized lumber from those famous cedars of Lebanon and a contingent of carpenters and masons whose skill and sophistication was unmatched in tribal Israel.18

  Once construction of the palace was under way, David began filling the royal harem with fresh young women and the royal nursery with more children. Perhaps to ingratiate himself with the Jebusites over whom he now ruled—Jerusalem was, after all, a conquered and occupied city—David “took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem,” and his new wives turned out to be blessedly fertile: “And there were yet sons and daughters born to David,” eleven of whom are named at this point in the Bible. (2 Sam. 5:13)19

  David was now firmly seated on the throne of Israel, and he was approaching those sublime heights of power and glory toward which he had long struggled. “And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, for his kingdom was exalted exceedingly, for His people Israel's sake,” the Chronicler exults. “And the fame of David went out into all lands, and the Lord brought the fear of him upon all nations.” (1 Chron. 14:17)

  One nation, however, did not yet fear David—the Philistines. And, ironically, it was David's former ally who would put him to the first and crucial test of his kingship.

  MAN OF WAR

  None of the grand exploits attributed to David escaped the attention of the Philistines, or so the Bible suggests. As long as David was merely king of Judah, the Philistines might have regarded him as a vassal and even an ally—after all, he had served them faithfully as a soldier of fortune! But whoever wore the crown of a united Israel would surely be regarded as an enemy of Philistia, and so it was that the Philistines declared war on King David. The army that marched on Jerusalem to dethrone King David was the very same army in which he had once sought to serve in the campaign against King Saul. But now it was David, not Saul, whose kingship was at risk.

  The Philistines sent a task force to search out David and his men—but David, too, had his sources of intelligence. When he learned that a Philistine army was on the move, he went to ground in what the Bible calls “the stronghold,” presumably the City of David in Jerusalem but possibly his old stronghold at Adullam. Soon the enemy appeared in the lowlands of Rephaim, which lay on the approaches to Jerusalem and positioned the Philistines to split the northern and southern regions of David's united monarchy. Thus the old guerrilla fighter was faced with the same tactical decision that figured so crucially in his war with Saul—should he stay in his stronghold and and hope to survive a siege, or should he sally forth and fight?

  “Shall I go up against the Philistines?” he inquired of God, presumably resorting to the casting of lots. God answered: “Go up!” (2 Sam. 5:18–19) (AB)

  David and his men engaged the Philistines and succeeded in driving them off. Indeed, the Philistines fled in such haste that they left behind their own array of idols
, which David and his men seized as spoils of war. The taking of an enemy's ritual paraphernalia was a common practice in ancient warfare—it was thought to humiliate the defeated enemy and celebrate the superior power of the god or gods of the victor. In fact, the Philistines had once taken the Ark of the Covenant, if only briefly, in an earlier battle with the Israelites. (1 Sam. 4:1–11) Lest we suspect that David and his men actually used the abandoned idols, the fussy author of Chronicles (but not the author of Samuel) insists that “David gave instructions and they burned [them] with fire.” (1 Chron. 14:12) (AB)

  The first skirmish with the Philistines, as it turned out, was only a tactical victory. The Philistines regrouped and appeared again at the approaches to Jerusalem, and David resorted again to the tools of divination to seek instruction from God. Now, however, Yahweh is shown to give rather more elaborate advice than could plausibly have been extracted with a series of yes-or-no questions. God, displaying the tactical insights of a Napoléon or a von Clausewitz, now ruled out a second frontal assault on the Philistine lines. “Circle around them,” God said, ordering David to execute a flanking maneuver and carry out an assault on the undefended rear of the enemy. To express the tactical advantages of the maneuver, the biblical text slips into a kind of martial rhapsody.

  “Then, when you hear the sound of the wind in the asherahs,” God tells David, referring to the upright poles by which the goddess Asherah was venerated, “look sharp, for Yahweh will have marched out ahead of you to attack the Philistine camp!” (2 Sam. 5:23–24)20

  Here we find the kind of metaphorical flourish that is so often used by the biblical authors to depict a physical manifestation of the ineffable God of Israel—Yahweh will manifest himself as a kind of storm god, and the sound of the wind is the evidence of God's physical presence. The very fact that God is shown to express himself in ornate prose rather than the yes-or-no answers of divination suggests that the passage is of late authorship. But the kernel of military intelligence that can be found within the husk of theology makes it clear that David's generalship was the decisive factor in defeating the Philistines once and for all.

  “David did as the Lord had commanded him, and he smote the Philistines from Gibeon to Gezer.” (2 Sam. 5:25)21

  Gibeon, of course, was the place that figured so prominently in the civil war that followed the death of Saul. It was here that twelve men of Ishbaal's army and twelve men of David's army managed to kill each other off in a single round of ritual combat. Gezer was a frontier town on the border between Israel and Philistia, and so the biblical author is suggesting that David finally succeeded in driving the Philistines out of the heartland of Israel and confining them to a narrow coastal strip along the Mediterranean. The expulsion of the Philistines from Gibeon was a notable achievement because it was in the nearby town of Kiriath-jearim22 that the most sacred ritual object in all of Israel was located—the gilded wooden chest known in the Bible as the Ark of the Covenant.

  GOLDEN TUMORS AND GOLDEN MICE

  The Ark was a tactile symbol of both history and theology in ancient Israel. According to the Bible, the Ark was fabricated by a master carpenter named Bezaleel during the forty years of wandering in the Sinai. Moses himself provided the specifications—“two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it,” all of it fashioned out of acacia-wood, covered with pure gold, and fitted with rings and staves that allowed the Ark to be carried by the Israelites wherever they went. (Exod. 25:1 ff.) Within the Ark were stored the two stone tablets on which Moses was believed to have inscribed the sacred law of Yahweh on Mount Sinai. (Deut. 10:1) Atop the Ark were two gold-wrought figures of cherubim—fierce sphinxlike beasts rather than the fat angels of contemporary Christmas cards—and God himself was imagined to have ridden on their outstretched wings as he led the Israelites through the wilderness: “Yahweh Seated-upon-the-Cherubim” is one of the many names of the God of Israel. (2 Sam. 6:2) (AB) Indeed, the Ark was carried into battle by the Israelites precisely because it was imagined to be the throne and footstool of Yahweh Sabaoth, that is, Yahweh in his fearsome role as the God of Armies.23

  How the Ark first came to the town of Kiriath-jearim is the point of an especially bizarre tale preserved in the Book of Samuel. Twenty years earlier, when David was still a lad tending his father's sheep in Bethlehem, the Philistines had succeeded in capturing the Ark in battle, but later they insisted on restoring it to the defeated Israelites when they found themselves afflicted with an infestation of mice and a plague of tumors.24 To make amends to Yahweh over the hijacking of the Ark, and to persuade him to lift the plague, the Philistines struck on the idea of fashioning five mice and five tumors out of pure gold; they loaded the Ark and the golden offerings on a cart drawn by milk cows and sent the driverless cart in the direction of the Israelite border, where it finally came to halt in a village called Beth-shemesh.

  The surprised locals, busy at work on the wheat harvest, greeted the Ark with an impromptu round of burnt-offerings, but their exultation did not last long. When a few of the curious reapers dared to peak inside the Ark, God promptly struck them dead, and, lest anyone miss the point, he smote fifty thousand others, too. So the people of Beth-shemesh hastened the Ark on its way—“Who is able to stand before Yahweh, this holy God? And to whom shall it go up from us?”—and it finally came to rest in the private house of the local priest in Kiriath-jearim, where the Ark remained for the next twenty years. (1 Sam. 6:20–7:2)

  So long as the district around Kiriath-jearim remained under occupation by the Philistines, the Ark was inaccessible to the people of Israel. Now David had evicted the Philistines, but he was not content to leave such a rare and precious relic in a backwater town. Indeed, some scholars suggest that David was a conqueror rather than a liberator of Kiriath-jearim, and he seized the Ark as a spoil of war!25 In any event, David resolved to bring the Ark from its humble setting in Kiriath-jearim to Jerusalem, where it would symbolize the centrality of the City of David in the newly reunited kingdom of Israel.

  The Ark may have been regarded as a relic of the greatest sanctity in ancient Israel, but David was determined to use it for political purposes. The presence of the Ark in Jerusalem would attract worshippers from all over the land of Israel; it would link his new-minted crown and his newfangled capital to the most ancient traditions of the twelve tribes; and it would demonstrate to any doubters or dissidents that King David, unlike Saul or any of his sons, was the master of his own fate and the fate of all Israel.

  THIRTY THOUSAND PICKED MEN

  David's army had numbered only six hundred during his years as a freebooter and an outlaw, but now the king of Israel summoned thirty thousand picked men from throughout the land of Israel to serve as a guard of honor in the solemn procession that would bring the Ark into Jerusalem.26 Ranks of musicians filled the air with “the sound of all kinds of cypress-wood instruments,” as the Bible describes the scene, “with lyres, harps, timbrels, sistrums, and cymbals.” (2 Sam. 6:5) (New JPS) The Ark was loaded on a cart fashioned out of virgin lumber and pulled by a brace of oxen, and two men—the sons of the priest in whose home the Ark had been sheltered—were detailed to walk alongside and guide the cart on the road to Jerusalem. David himself led the procession, leaping and dancing with ecstatic abandon.

  So holy was the Ark, however, that even the pious showmanship of David was not sufficient to soothe the God of Israel, or so the Bible allows us to understand. At one awful moment, as the cart passed a threshing-floor on the road to Jerusalem, the oxen stumbled and one of the attendants, a man named Uzzah, reached out to steady the Ark. His only motive was to make sure that the throne of invisible Yahweh did not tumble to the ground. But the mere touch of a mortal hand was apparently an offense to Yahweh, because “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error, and there he died for his error.” (2 Sam. 6:7)

  David, always so bluff and brave, so rough and ready, was badly rattled by the incident
at the threshing-floor. “David was afraid of Yahweh that day,” the Bible reports, and he wondered whether Uzzah's death meant that God was symbolically withdrawing his imprimatur on David's kingship by preventing the Ark from being installed in the City of David. “How can I let the Ark of Yahweh come to me?” fretted David. So he ordered a halt to the procession, dispersed the soldiers and the musicians, the singers and the dancers, and stashed the Ark in a house on the road to Jerusalem, the residence of a man called Obed-edom, where it remained for the next three months. (2 Sam. 6:9)27

  Only when David was assured that the auguries were good— “Yahweh has blessed Obed-edom's house and all that belongs to him because of the Ark of God”—did he try again to bring the Ark to the City of David. “I'll bring the blessing back to my own house!” he figured. (2 Sam. 6:12) (AB)28 But now he took even greater precautions to soothe the temper of the mercurial Yahweh and, not incidentally, to put on an even more spectacular display for the tens of thousands of Israelites who had gathered to see their king as he brought the holiest relic of Israel into the city he had named after himself. (2 Sam. 6:12)29

  The spectacle is eerie and even grotesque. Slowly and solemnly, the oxcart bearing the Ark began to roll in the direction of Jerusalem once again, guarded by soldiers, attended by singers and musicians, watched by thousands of awed onlookers who lined the road. Every six steps, the whole procession halted as David himself offered up an ox and a fatling sheep, an orgy of sacrifice that must have left the road to Jerusalem soaked in blood.

  To demonstrate his piety—and, we might imagine, to make sure that every eye was on him alone—David had shed all of his royal apparel and wore only the brief linen ephod that was the customary garb of a consecrated priest. Thus attired in nothing more than a loincloth, the handsome king capered and whirled like a dervish as the ram's horn shrieked, the cymbals clanged, the woodwinds droned, and the crowds reveled in a pious frenzy.