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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “And David danced before Yahweh with all his might,” the biblical author writes. “So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of Yahweh with shouting and with the sound of the horn.” (2 Sam. 6:14–15)30

  At last the solemn procession reached the walls of Jerusalem, passed through the open gate, and came to a halt inside the fortified citadel known as the City of David. Here David presided over yet another public spectacle that resonated with sacred meaning and political showmanship.

  First David pitched a tent and placed the Ark inside—a gesture that invoked the most cherished traditions of the Israelites, a nation whose sacred writings celebrate their origins as of tent-dwelling nomads and depict a tent as God's preferred meeting place with his greatest prophet. Then David once again arrogated to himself the role of high priest, sacrificing “burnt-offerings” and “peace-offerings” to Yahweh and pronouncing a blessing over the people of Israel in the name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the fierce and punishing aspect of God. Finally David did what kings have always done to ingratiate themselves with their subjects: he hosted a public feast, handing out to each man and each woman “a loaf of bread, a cake made in a pan, and a raisin cake.” Only then, after a day of both bread and spectacle, did the people of Israel disperse, “every one to his house.” (2 Sam. 6:18–19)31

  On the day when Saul had been acclaimed as the first king of Israel, the crowd had included a sprinkling of doubters and dissenters. “How shall this man save us?” they muttered at the sight of him. (1 Sam. 10:27) Today, by contrast, the masses were smitten by the handsome young king, or so the Bible suggests. Indeed, we may imagine how the men and women of Israel chattered excitedly among themselves as they wandered back to their homes, munching on raisin cakes and buzzing about the eye-grabbing dance that David had performed. If such was the word on the streets of Jerusalem, then King David's audacious gesture had been wholly successful.

  THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

  One woman had watched the whole remarkable spectacle with special care, but only at a distance from the crowds. From a high window in the royal palace, Michal—the daughter of King Saul and the first wife of King David—looked down into the street just as David and the Ark passed. But unlike the rest of the crowd, she was neither pleased nor impressed by what she saw.

  “Michal looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before Yahweh,” the Bible pauses to note, “and she despised him in her heart.” (2 Sam. 6:16)

  What so distressed the queen of Israel was the fact that the king had danced with such abandon that his brief linen garment repeatedly flew up and exposed his genitals to the crowd. By the time David showed up back at the palace, her anger had reached the flash point. So David, flush with excitement at the adoration of the crowds, found himself greeted not as an exalted king but as a husband in deep trouble with his wife.

  “Didn't the king of Israel do himself honor today,” complained Michal as soon as David appeared at the palace, “exposing himself today in the sight of his subjects' slave-girls like some dancer!” (2 Sam. 6:20)32

  David's high spirits evaporated in the heat of her harsh words, and he lashed out with equal rancor. “In Yahweh's presence I am a dancer!” he retorted. “Blessed be Yahweh, who chose me instead of your father and all his family, and appointed me ruler over Yahweh's people Israel.” (2 Sam. 6:21)33

  Thus did David pointedly remind Michal that he was king and her late father was not; if she still lived in a royal palace, it was because of him alone. What's more, if she felt humiliated by his promiscuity—if she was jealous of the powerful sexual allure that he worked on the other women of Israel—David vowed to punish her with more of the same.

  “I will dance before Yahweh and dishonor myself even more,” he taunted, “but among the slave-girls that you speak of I will be honored.” (2 Sam. 6:21–22)34

  The scene fairly sizzles with sexual tension and echoes with the bitter emotions of an estranged husband and wife. The Bible, as we have already seen, suggests that Michal had been forcibly separated from her second husband, Paltiel, and sent back to King David against her will. Now the Bible goes on to imply that David and Michal had already stopped sleeping with each other and never did so again: “And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.” (2 Sam. 6:23)

  Like much else in the life of David, the estrangement of David and Michal can be viewed from the perspectives of theology, politics, and intimate human relations. The pious reading of the text holds that God punished Michal for her insolence toward the anointed king with the curse of childlessness, the worst fate that can befall a woman in the biblical hierarchy of values. A more worldly reading suggests that David simply shunned Michal from that day forward, contenting himself with the sexual favors of his many other wives and concubines and thus denying Michal a child. But from either perspective, Michal's childlessness changed the politics of succession in ancient Israel. King David sired many sons, and, as we shall see, they fought bitterly with each other for the throne. Since Michal, daughter of King Saul, did not produce a son, none of the potential successors could claim to bear the blood of two kings, Saul and David. The house of Saul reached a dead end in the marriage of David and Michal.

  Above all, the fact that a moment of theological grandeur— the bringing of the Ark to Jerusalem—is linked so intimately to a moment of marital squalor reveals something telling about the Bible and, especially, the biblical life story of David. As we have seen, David is first and always a human being rather than a plaster saint, and the biblical author who knows and loves David best is the one who is fascinated by the dirty little secrets of the king of Israel.

  A HOUSE OF CEDAR

  “The Lord had given him rest from all his enemies,” goes a brief notice in the Bible, and David's thoughts turned from matters of war and politics to the matter of God. So begins a curious passage in the Bible—“the theological highlight” of the Book of Samuel35 according to one scholar, or “monkish drivel”36 according to another, but one that casts a shadow over the rest of the Bible and the whole of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

  The scene opens in the royal palace that King Hiram of Tyre built for David in Jerusalem. To counsel him on his duties to Yahweh, David has summoned not a priest but a prophet named Nathan, a uniquely commanding figure in the life of David whom we meet here for the first time. The troubled king muses out loud to the prophet about the ironic fact that David himself, a mere mortal, enjoys the comforts of a palace while the Ark of the Covenant, the throne and footstool of the King of the Universe, is sheltered only in a rude tent. (2 Sam. 7:1)

  “See now that I dwell in a house of cedar,” said the king, “but the ark of God dwells within curtains.” (2 Sam. 7:2)

  That very night Nathan was granted a vision in which Yahweh explained it all.

  First Yahweh reaffirmed the fundamental credo of the Israelites, a people that began as a tribe of shepherds and goatherds and always cherished the nomadic ideal of wandering and tent-dwelling.

  “Shalt thou build me a house for me to dwell in?” said God in Nathan's vision. “For I have not dwelt in a house since the day that I brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but I have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle. In all the places wherein I have walked among all the children of Israel, spoke I a word with any of the tribes of Israel, saying: ‘Why have ye not built me a house of cedar?’ ” (2 Sam. 7:5–6)

  After instructing Nathan to reassure David that he need not feel guilty about his royal digs, God next told Nathan to remind David of the special favor that he enjoyed.

  I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, that thou should be prince over my people, over Israel. And I have been with thee whithersoever thou didst go, and have cut off all thine enemies from before thee; and I will make thee a great name, like unto the name of the great ones that are in the earth.

  (2 Sam. 7:8–9)

  Next God promised that David, unlike the judges and king
s who had ruled over Israel before him, would be the founder of a dynasty—a “house,” as the Bible puts it. The house of Moses ended with his death, and so did the house of Saul, but the house of David would produce generation after generation of kings.

  When thy days are fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, that shall proceed out of thy body, and I will establish his kingship.

  (2 Sam. 7:12)

  Finally God pronounced a blessing on the house of David that is unprecedented in all of the Bible, an unconditional promise of divine protection that no other mortal—not Adam, not Noah, not Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, not even Moses—was ever granted. Here is what Bible scholar Matitiahu Tsevat calls the “blank check of unlimited validity made out to the house of David.”37

  “He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever,” God said of David's successor to the throne of Israel without pausing to specify which of his many sons he had in mind. “I will be for him a father, and he shall be to me for a son; if he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men, but my mercy shall not depart from him.” (2 Sam. 7:13–14)

  God, in other words, might punish the kings who came after David for their wrongdoings, but he vowed that he would never abandon them as he had abandoned the house of Saul.

  THE BLESSING AND THE CURSE

  God's promise of eternal kingship to the house of David was something wholly new in the official theology of the Bible. God had entered into covenants with Noah and Abraham and Moses, but never before had he given such a sweeping promise of divine favor. Indeed, the deal that Moses is shown to broker between God and Israel was strictly an “if-then” proposition. “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse,” Moses announced to the Israelites in the name of Yahweh. “The blessing, if ye shall hearken unto the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day, and the curse, if ye shall not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord your God.” (Deut. 11:28) But God's vow to the house of David was perpetual and unconditional.

  And thy house and thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established forever.

  (2 Sam. 7:16)

  The biblical source that contributed Nathan's prophecy to the Book of Samuel is generally understood to be one of the priests who served the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem several centuries after David's reign. The royal theologian's motive was to put the divine seal of approval on the house of David, which continued to provide kings to rule over the southern kingdom of Judah for nearly five hundred years. So the prophecy of Nathan as we find it in Samuel can be understood as an artful work of propaganda that was composed and written into the Bible long after the supposed lifetime of King David.

  “Actual history is telescoped in 2 Samuel 7,” explains Frank Moore Cross. “While the promise was made to David, it is the house of David and the house of Yahweh that were bound together and promised eternity.”38

  Indeed, one sure sign that a later author or editor reworked the text of Samuel can be found in the distinctly schizoid quality of Nathan's prophecy. At one point, God is shown to reassure David that he does not want or need a “house of cedar” for the Ark of the Covenant, his throne and footstool on earth, because he prefers to dwell in a tent like the earliest ancestors of the Israelites. Then, abruptly, God changes his mind and demands a temple instead of a tent—but he specifies that David's son, rather than David, will provide one: “He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.”39

  The first idea expressed in the prophecy of Nathan—God prefers a tent to a temple—is based on the simple and unavoidable fact that David did not build a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, a fact that the biblical author felt obliged to explain in theological terms. So he insisted that David did not build a temple because God specifically told him not to do so. But, at the same time, the biblical author reaffirms an article of faith that dates back to the earliest history of the Israelites: Yahweh, the God of Israel, preferred a tent to a temple because, like his Chosen People, he was a restless wanderer, a nomad, a tent-dweller.

  The idea of Yahweh as “a god of the way,” a wandering god who accompanies his people from place to place, is believed to express the original theology of the Israelites. God favored a tribe of pastoral nomads as his Chosen People, according to the sacred history recorded in the Bible, and he rode along with them atop a portable shrine, the Ark of the Covenant, that served as his throne and footstool. The same idea may be preserved in the Ten Commandments, where the Tenth Commandment—“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house”—may have started out as a rejection of all houses by a tent-dwelling people. (Exod. 20:14) “It is the brief expression of the ‘desert-ideal,’ the tenacious adherence to the forms of nomadic life that alone were considered worthy of men and pleasing to God,” writes Bible scholar Elias Auerbach, drawing an analogy between the original Israelites of distant antiquity and the Bedouin tribes of more recent times.40

  The second sentiment in Nathan's prophecy—God requires a temple, and David's son will build it—reflects the historical reality of ancient Israel as the later biblical authors knew it. Jerusalem was the site of the central sanctuary of ancient Israel, an opulent temple that was first built by David's son and successor and later rebuilt after its destruction by the Babylonians. According to the Book of Deuteronomy, God accepted worship and sacrifice only from a single central sanctuary—“the place which the Lord your God shall choose to cause His name to dwell there” (Deut. 12:11)—and that place was the Temple at Jerusalem.41 So the original version of Nathan's prophecy was “written over” to make it clear that God had wanted a temple all along.42

  Still, a hard knot of contradiction remains in the text—if God wanted a temple, then why did he tell David not to build one? No clear answer is given in the troubled and troubling text of the Book of Samuel, but the author of the Book of Chronicles came up with one of his own. According to the Chronicler, David knew that it would be necessary to build a “house of God” in Jerusalem, one that “must be exceeding magnificent, of fame and of glory throughout the world.” So he assembled a supply of building materials—stone, cedar, brass, iron—and a corps of foreign stonemasons to work the stone. But, as David would later reveal to Solomon, his son and successor, God had told David that he was unworthy to build the temple because his hands were so bloodstained.

  My son, as for me, it was in my heart to build a house unto the name of the Lord my God. But the word of the Lord came to me, saying: “Thou hast shed blood abundantly, and hast made great wars; thou shalt not build a house unto my name, because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in my sight.”

  (1 Chron. 22:7–8)

  No such explanation, however, appears in the prophecy of Nathan as reported in the Book of Samuel. At the end of the fateful encounter between the prophet and the king, David left his palatial house of cedar and entered the tent where Yahweh was understood to dwell, and he delivered a long and ornate prayer of thanksgiving.

  “Thou has promised a good thing unto thy servant,” said David. “Thou, O Lord God, hast spoken it, and through thy blessing let the house of thy servant be blessed forever.” Significantly, the word “forever” appears seven times in the seventh chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, where the eternal promise of kingship is woven deeply and vividly into the biblical tapestry.

  Then the king rose and returned to the palace in the City of David. But his sense of well-being would not last long. War and rebellion, conspiracy and deception, murder and mayhem, sexual adventure and sexual assault—all depicted with brutal candor by the biblical authors—would soon put his life and throne at risk even in the face of God's unconditional promise of divine favor. At the worst moments to come, David would surely wonder whether God could be trusted to keep his promise at all.

  Chapter Nine

  AT THE TIME WHEN KIN
GS

  GO FORTH TO BATTLE

  War is the trade of kings.

  —JOHN DRYDEN, KING ARTHUR

  David was now approaching the high-water mark of his kingship. Secure on the throne, safely established in his own fortress-city, and afire with a kind of pious bravado, David set out to accomplish what Saul had tried but failed to do. In a series of brutal military campaigns and elegant diplomatic initiatives, David pacified the traditional heartland of ancient Israel and expanded its borders, transforming the land and people of Israel from a ragged coalition of feuding tribes into an empire. Under King David, Eretz Yisrael reached from the “river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates,” just as God had once promised the patriarch Abraham so long ago. (Gen. 15:18)

  “And Yahweh gave victory to David,” the Bible devoutly (and repeatedly) notes, “wherever he went.” (2 Sam. 8:14)1

  First he “smote the Philistines and subdued them,” apparently driving the last of the Philistines out of central Israel and confining them, once and for all, to the coastal strip that constituted the land of Philistia. (2 Sam. 8:1) Then, leading his army across the Jordan River on Israel's eastern frontier, he campaigned as far afield as Damascus and the Euphrates River. As his army ranged through the ancient Near East, David subdued all of the traditional enemies who had long threatened the very existence of the land of Israel—the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, the Amalekites—and the smaller tribes and peoples submitted without a fight. After each victory, David left behind garrisons to occupy the defeated nation, and he carried tribute and plunder back to Jerusalem—“vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and vessels of brass.” (2 Sam. 8:10)