“And David reigned over all Israel,” the biblical author sums up, “and David executed justice and righteousness unto all his people.” (2 Sam. 8:15)
Still, there is a strange but significant imbalance in the biblical account of David's successes at statecraft and empire building. David is praised for his administration of “justice and righteousness,” but we are never shown or told exactly what he did to earn such praise. Similarly, the military and diplomatic achievements of David's early reign are hastily summarized in a few sketchy passages of the Book of Samuel. Far more attention is paid to what happens around the royal banquet table and behind the closed doors of the royal bedchamber.
Indeed, only a few of David's exploits are reported at all, and these brief reports are entirely consistent with the proud and ruthless warrior whom we already know David to be. After defeating the Moabites in battle, for example, David lined up the survivors in three groups, and he ordered the men in each line to lie on the ground, “two lines to put to death, and one full line to keep alive.” (2 Sam. 8:2) When David defeated the massed chariotry and cavalry of an obscure kingdom called Zobah, “a thousand and seven hundred horsemen,” he made sure that he would not face them in battle again by ordering all of the chariot horses to be hamstrung. (2 Sam. 8:4) When he withdrew from the land of Edom, he left behind a series of garrisons, “and all the Edomites became servants to David.” (2 Sam. 8:14) On the banks of the distant Euphrates, David erected a monument of stone bearing his name to mark the farthest reach of his empire. (2 Sam. 8:3, 13) (AB)
Still, the Bible makes no real distinction between the private affairs of King David and the public policy of the kingdom of Israel. Both aspects of the life story of David are so intertwined that they are not meant to be teased apart, and—as far as the more pious sources are concerned—both are meant to reflect the workings of God's will in the world of mortal men and women. All of these factors come into play in the curious tale of how King David suddenly resolved to do something to honor the memory of Saul and Jonathan. One day, abruptly and rather perversely, David was struck with the notion of canvassing Israel in an effort to find a man in whose veins ran the blood of King Saul.
“Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul,” asked David, “that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake?” (2 Sam. 9:1)
BLOOD GUILT
Saul was long dead. So were Jonathan and two of his brothers, all of whom had died in battle with the Philistines, and Ishbaal, the puppet-king who had been assassinated by his own officers. And, according to a grotesque incident that is revealed only much later in the biblical text, seven other sons and grandsons of Saul had been sacrificed by order of King David.2 So David would find it difficult to search out yet another son of Saul, and his interest in doing so must have seemed odd and ominous to the courtiers who knew well the fate that had befallen the house of Saul.
Indeed, the fate of Saul's children at the hands of David is one of the strangest episodes in all of the Hebrew Bible. At some unspecified point during David's reign, the Book of Samuel reports, the land of Israel suffered a famine that lasted for three years, and David sought a divine oracle to explain why.
“Blood guilt rests on Saul and his family,” God revealed, “because he put the Gibeonites to death.” (2 Sam. 21:2) (NEB)
The Gibeonites had lived in an enclave in the tribal homeland of Benjamin under the protection of the Israelites ever since the original conquest of Canaan by Joshua. (Josh. 9:19–21, 27) Saul's supposed crime against the Gibeonites is never actually described, but David now wanted to atone on behalf of Saul—“the man who massacred us,” as the Gibeonites described him, “and tried to exterminate us.” (2 Sam. 21:5) (New JPS) David offered to bestow upon the Gibeonites a bounty of silver and gold, but they wanted only blood-vengeance.
“Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us,” the Gibeonites demanded, “and we will hang them up unto Yahweh.” (2 Sam. 21:4–6)
“I will deliver them,” David replied. (2 Sam. 21:4–6)3
David turned over two of Saul's sons and five of his grandsons to the Gibeonites, who promptly put them to death in a public execution. Exactly how the seven descendants of Saul died is not clear—the original Hebrew text has been interpreted to suggest that the men were “flung down” from a mountain (NEB), or “impaled” (New JPS), or “dismembered” (NJB), and the Anchor Bible boldly reports that they were “crucified”—which, if accurate, is the only reference to crucifixion in the Hebrew Bible.4 Significantly, however, the Bible does specify that the men were killed “at the time of the barley harvest,” which suggests a ceremony of human sacrifice rather than a judicial execution. (2 Sam. 21: 9)
What is actually going on here, some scholars speculate, is the offering of royal blood to propitiate an angry god who has punished the people of Israel with famine, a ritual of human sacrifice that may have been borrowed from the practices of the pagan Canaanites and one that plainly violates the official theology of the Bible. Even if David cannot be fairly characterized as a participant in human sacrifice, the very notion that he surrendered the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites for “hanging” is shocking enough. After all, each one of the victims was the son or grandson of King Saul and, therefore, a potential rival for the throne of Israel. The whole incident is so unsettling that some scholars suspect that the passage was censored out of the sacred texts of ancient Israel and restored later by one of the compilers and redactors who were the final editors of the Bible, which may explain why the passage pops up so late in the Book of Samuel.
Only one male descendant of Saul now survived, or so the Bible says, and he was an unfortunate cripple named Mephibosheth,5 son of Jonathan and grandson of Saul. The boy had been only five years old when his father and grandfather died in battle, and his nurse had taken him into hiding, apparently fearful that Saul's enemies were seeking to slaughter everyone in the line of succession. Indeed, she may have worried that David himself represented the greatest threat to the child's life. “And it came to pass,” the Bible reports, “as she made haste to flee, that he fell, and became lame.” (2 Sam. 4:4) Now, as David canvassed his kingdom for any surviving member of the house of Saul, it was the crippled Mephibosheth who was found.
A DEAD DOG
Mephibosheth was fetched back to Jerusalem and ushered into David's throne room, where he promptly fell on his face in abject terror. David, as we have seen, had been careful to distance himself from the battlefield deaths of Saul and Jonathan and the assassination of Ishbaal. Even when seven prospective claimants to the crown of Saul were put out of contention in a single mass execution, David preserved a kind of plausible deniability—the Gibeonites, not David, spilled their blood. But surely poor Mephibosheth, the last known survivor of the house of Saul, must have ached with anxiety when David summoned him out of hiding.
“Fear not,” said David to the crippled man who now groveled in front of him, “for I will surely show you kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore to you all the land of Saul, and you shall eat bread at my table.” (2 Sam. 9:7)
Mephibosheth, however, continued to cower.
“What is thy servant,” said Mephibosheth to the king, “that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?” (2 Sam. 9:8)
But David did exactly as he promised. The lands and houses that had once belonged to King Saul were put under the custody of an old retainer named Ziba, who was charged with the duty of managing the estate for King Saul's grandson. “But Mephibosheth dwelled in Jerusalem,” the Bible carefully notes, “for he did continually eat at the king's table.” (2 Sam. 9:13) The biblical author would have us believe that David was acting out of love for Jonathan; after all, Jonathan had extracted a solemn promise from David to care for his survivors. “I know that as long as I live you will show me faithful friendship,” Jonathan had said, “and if I should die, you will continue loyal to my family for ever.”
But surely the irony was not lost on the original readers of the
Bible: Mephibosheth is one of “the lame and the blind” who “are hated of David's soul.” (2 Sam. 4:8) Yet now David insisted that the lame grandson of King Saul “shall eat at my table as one of the king's sons.” (2 Sam. 9:11) Perhaps David was concerned only with public relations. “Did David hope by this theatrical act of kindness to a descendant of Saul,” wonders Robert H. Pfeiffer, “to offset the silent indignation of the Israelites after the slaughter of Saul's sons?”6
Even so, we know enough about David by now to imagine a more calculated reason for keeping Mephibosheth within his intimate family circle. As a man well acquainted with conspiracy, both as a practitioner and as a target, King David wanted the last survivor of the house of Saul where he could keep a watchful eye on him.
THE INVENTION OF BIBLICAL ISRAEL
An intriguing glimpse into David's inner circle is offered in a few spare lines of the Bible that describe the men who served in his royal cabinet. On these brief and oblique observations by the biblical author, modern Bible scholarship has come up with a description of how David worked a revolution in ancient Israel. With the assistance of these confidants and commanders and henchmen, David reinvented the army, government, and religion of ancient Israel, dragging the people out of their primitive tribal existence and showing them how a modern cosmopolitan state of the tenth century B.C.E. ought to function.
The Bible reports, for example, that Joab was placed in charge of the army of Israel, presumably the tribal musters that rallied to the king in times of war. But, significantly, David did not rely only on the tribal militia to protect his life and his throne—a man named Benaiah commanded the corps of foreign mercenaries who served as David's praetorian guard. (2 Sam. 8:18) And David's standing army included a few especially distinguished warriors who pledged their loyalty to him—these were the “mighty men,” as the King James Version renders the Hebrew term gibborim, who served in elite units designated as “the Three” and “the Thirty.” (2 Sam. 23:8, 13 ff.)
King David was attended by both a chronicler (literally, a “remembrancer”) and a scribe, both of whom may have prepared and preserved the very annals on which significant portions of the biblical account are based. (2 Sam. 8:16–17) According to later notices in the Book of Samuel, the cabinet included a privy counselor known formally as “the Friend of David” (2 Sam. 15:37) (AB), and a man who served as overseer of the corvée, a program of labor conscription that supplied the king with the manpower to build his palaces and fortifications. (2 Sam. 20:24) Two men shared the office of high priest in King David's court—Abiathar, the lone survivor of King Saul's slaughter of the priests at Nob, and the mysterious Zadok, a man of dubious origins who may not have been an Israelite at all.
The cabinet of King David was something entirely new in the history of ancient Israel. For that reason, David can be seen as a reformer and a modernizer, the man who invented biblical Israel by turning twelve nomadic tribes into a single nation with all the appurtenances that could be found in the imperial courts of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, some scholars argue that David aped the rituals and institutions of the pagan peoples and nations that surrounded the land of Israel. Just as the developing nations of the twentieth century sought armament and constitutions and popular culture from the West, Israel in the tenth century B.C.E. may have found a role model in the superpowers of its day.
THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW
The so-called Jebusite hypothesis, for example, holds that David borrowed freely from the Jebusite and Canaanite rituals of court and temple. “The main source of this borrowing,” writes Bible scholar R. E. Clements, “would seem to have been Jerusalem, where David took over the tradition and authority of the Jebusite kingdom.”7
The solemn processional by which David brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem—and even the marital spat that it prompted—are seen by some as evidence that the faith of ancient Israel was deeply suffused with pagan borrowings. When a nearly naked David dances in “the grip of cultic ecstasy,” the biblical author may be echoing an ancient Canaanite text that describes the sacred marriage of El, the supreme god in the Canaanite pantheon, and his consort, Asherah. The raisin cake that David distributed to the crowds was the symbol of the cult of Baal, yet another Canaanite deity. The slave-girls who were said to “honor” David with sexual favors may have been temple prostitutes of the kind described in another pagan text from an important Canaanite archaeological site at Ras Shamra.8
Even the scene in which Michal watches David's antics has been likened to an ancient Near Eastern motif known as the Woman at the Window—an image of Astarte or some other goddess of love and fertility in the guise of a harlot showing herself at an open window. Similar images carved into Phoenician ivories have been recovered from archaeological sites in northern Israel, where they were apparently used as pagan icons. When David returns to the palace at the climax of the public ritual, ready to “bless” his house, as the Bible put it, perhaps we are meant to see a symbolic reenactment of the sacred act of intercourse between El and Asherah. Significantly, Michal's punishment for spurning David is lifelong childlessness.
Indeed, some scholars see Michal as the pious believer in the God of Israel and David as an overenthusiastic innovator who borrowed a bit too heavily from pagan rites and rituals. When the Bible reports Michal's disgust at the dance that David performed, we may be witnessing not a wife's response to her husband's “sexual impropriety” but the shock and horror of a true believer at the “cultic innovation” that her husband was bringing to the strict Yahwism that was the faith of ancient Israel. “The linen ephod, the ecstatic dancing, and the apparent ritual nakedness of the king are motifs of ancient Near East mythology and priestly liturgies,” one scholar observes. “David's role … bespeaks changes in Israel—a return, perhaps, to the sense of king and temple that prevailed in the heyday of pagan culture in the land.”9
THE FRIEND OF DAVID
Just as David seems to have mimicked the pagan practices of the Canaanites, he appears to have modeled his cabinet after the court of Egypt or the “Egyptianized” monarchies of Canaan and Phoenicia. A “rational and bureaucratic mode of statecraft,” proposes Joel Rosenberg, “is David's specific innovation.”10
Thus the duties of the man described in the Bible as a “remembrancer” may have been comparable to those of his Egyptian counterpart—“a master of ceremonies and foreign minister”—and the scribe may have been comparable to “the personal secretary of the pharaoh and his chef de bureau.”11 The “Friend of David” may have been a kind of privy counselor and marriage broker patterned after an Egyptian courtier with the formal title of “the Friend of the King,”12 and David's corvée resembles the program of forced labor by which the pharaohs built their mighty temples and pyramids. Even the soldiers known as the Thirty may hark back to the “royal cortege” of thirty men who served in the court of Ramses II of Egypt three hundred years before the supposed lifetime of David.13
David, who had sown the seeds of more than one tribal blood feud during his years as a bandit and a mercenary, learned a practical lesson from the pagan kings whom he had served. Thus, he chose to surround himself with a personal bodyguard that consisted entirely of foreigners14—the “Cherethites” and “Pelethites” whose duty was to protect David from his own people are understood to have been “Sea Peoples” who, like the Philistines, came to the land of Israel from Crete or elsewhere in the Aegean. Some scholars propose that the Pelethites were, in fact, Philistines, and the Bible itself confirms that David's foreign mercenaries included a contingent of Gittites, that is, men from the Philistine city-state of Gath, the hometown of Goliath. (2 Sam. 15:18)
Even something so fundamental to the biblical history of ancient Israel as the “twelve tribes” may have been an innovation of King David. A fundamental assumption of the biblical authors is that the twelve tribes originated with the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob, but the “twelveness” of the tribes is not always in evidence in the Bible—a close reading
reveals that the total number of tribes ranges from ten to thirteen.15 So the conventional wisdom of biblical scholarship—and the Bible itself—holds that David's single greatest achievement of statecraft was to forge the clans and tribes known loosely as “Israelites,” including his own tribe of Judah, into a single nation called “Israel” and to place the nation under the governance of a king, an army, and a royal bureaucracy.
“Israel was no longer a tribal confederacy led by a charismatic nagid who had been acclaimed king, but a complex empire organized under the crown,” explains John Bright. “While David's court was no picture of sybaritic luxury, it was hardly the rustic thing that Saul's had been.”16 Indeed, David proved himself to be a daring and energetic leader who constructed “a fully imperial conception of kingship,” and did so “out of whole cloth.”17
WHEN KINGS GO FORTH
Here then is King David as the biblical authors wished to remember him—and, more important, as they wished us to remember him. He reigned over not only a kingdom but an empire. He commanded the conscripted labor of his own people to build roads and cisterns, fortresses and palaces, and he accepted tribute from conquered kings and peoples throughout the ancient world. He was cherished by his loyal subjects for the “justice and righteousness” that he dispensed, and he was feared by his defeated enemies for the ruthless and powerful army that served him. He was attended by a royal court that resembled and perhaps even rivaled that of the pharaoh of Egypt, and his harem teemed with wives and concubines and children. Above all, according to the Bible, he enjoyed not only the favor of God but the divine promise of eternal kingship for his sons and successors.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 19