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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Nor did the affair escape the attention of Yahweh. The all-seeing and all-knowing God of Israel is notably absent from the biblical life story of David, especially in these tales of love and war, but now God is shown to bestir himself and make it known that “the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” (2 Sam. 11:27) Significantly, God did not speak directly to David as he had spoken to Moses. He expressed his displeasure through one of those cranky old men whom we know as the prophets. And, as David was about to discover, a God-inspired prophet in ancient Israel felt perfectly free to scold a king.

  “THOU ART THE MAN”

  King David, long accustomed to the company of brutal men and beguiling women, some of them highborn and some of them only habiru, but all of them worldly-wise, suddenly found himself confronted by Nathan, a man of God who presented himself at court with a message from Yahweh. The king granted Nathan an audience and listened in silence as the old man insisted on telling him a tale.

  “Pass judgment on this case for me,” Nathan began. “There were two men in a certain city, one rich and one poor.” (2 Sam. 12:1) (AB)

  The rich man was blessed with abundant herds and flocks, Nathan said, but the poor man had nothing at all except a single little lamb that he cherished as if it were human. “It grew up together with him, and with his children,” Nathan continued, “and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.” (2 Sam. 12:3)

  One day, a traveler appeared in town and asked the rich man for provisions. Of course, the rich man would not have missed a kid or a lamb from his own herds and flocks, but instead he seized the poor man's single lamb to satisfy the stranger's appetite. The rich man slaughtered the lamb, dressed it, and turned the butchered meat over to the traveler to be eaten.

  David, depicted here in a rare moment of naïveté, was apparently under the impression that Nathan had reported a real case and was asking him to judge the rich man for his crime.

  “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die,” an outraged David declared, “and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and he had no pity.” (2 Sam. 12:6)

  To which Nathan promptly replied: “Thou art the man!” (2 Sam. 12:7)

  Now the prophet allowed the king to understand that the tale of the poor man's lamb was a parable rather than an actual case. The rich man was meant to represent David, whose harem was filled with willing women, and the poor man represented Uriah, who could comfort himself with but a single wife. And David listened in abject silence to the scolding that Nathan now delivered.

  “I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul, and I gave thee thy master's daughter, and I made his wives lie down in thine embrace,” railed the prophet, mouthing words that he attributed to God.* “I gave thee the daughters of Israel and Judah, and if that were too little, I would give thee that many again. Why then hast thou despised the word of the Lord, to do that which is evil in my sight?' ” (2 Sam. 12:7–9)11

  Lest David mistake his meaning, Nathan spoke aloud what God already knew about David's secret crime. “Uriah the Hittite thou has smitten with the sword, and his wife thou hast taken to be thy wife,” said Nathan. “Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from thy house.” (2 Sam. 12:9–10)

  God's disappointment with the failings of humankind is perhaps the single most persistent theme of the Bible. The same punishing despair is found in the story of the Flood, where God resolves to exterminate the whole of his human creation save Noah and his family; and in the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God destroys five cities filled with evildoers for the want of ten righteous men; and in the saga of the Exodus, where he threatens to slaughter the Chosen People and start all over again with Moses. Now, however, God reassured David that he would not suffer the ultimate penalty for his sins. “Thou shalt not die,” Nathan told David, thus reminding him of God's special favor toward his anointed king (2 Sam. 12:13).

  Still, God singled out David for a strikingly intimate affliction, a kind of rough justice in which the punishment was made to fit the crime.

  Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives within the sight of this sun.

  (2 Sam. 12:11)

  The curse begins in the hazy language of metaphor but ends with an explicit threat: David will be forced to watch another man engage in sexual intercourse with his wives, and not only David but the whole of his kingdom will witness their sexual violation and his public humiliation. “For thou didst it secretly,” Nathan warned, again mouthing the words of God, “but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.” (2 Sam. 12:11) As we shall come to see, God meant everything he said in the most literal sense.

  Finally, God announced his intention to deliver a coup de grâce for the crime of David and Bathsheba—a death sentence, not on the star-crossed lovers, but rather on the wholly innocent victim of their fornication.

  “The child that is born unto thee,” warned Nathan, “shall surely die.” (2 Sam. 12:14)

  THE THIRD MAN

  The encounter between David and Nathan reveals something unique about the theology and politics of ancient Israel. David may have been the single most powerful man in ancient Israel—God's anointed king of Judah and all Israel, a man with the power of life and death over his subjects—but David still felt obliged to heed the words of the prophet who scolded him for his most intimate sins. A king might order the mass murder of priests, as Saul did when he exterminated the priests of Nob, but a prophet was sacrosanct. Here is something wholly new in human politics, something wholly different from what came before or after in the long history of kingship.

  Kings and priests, of course, have always contested with each other for both moral and political authority—the murder of Thomas à Becket on the order of King Henry II in the cathedral at Canterbury is an old and memorable example, and the dethronement of the Shah of Iran in a theocratic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini is a more recent one. But kings and priests alike recognized a third force in the politics of ancient Israel—the God-inspired men and women that the Bible knows as prophets (neviim). Just as Saul deferred to Samuel, and David deferred to Nathan, the kings of Judah and Israel always found themselves confronted and condemned by fearless truth-tellers who cared not at all for the trappings of royal authority, or, for that matter, the equally ornate trappings of the priesthood that presided over the Temple.

  “The flow of charismatic energy in Israel,” as Bible scholar William F. Albright puts it, was channeled through the prophets rather than kings or generals or priests. “From David's time on, the prophetic mission was closely associated with moral and political reform as well as purely religious revival.” 12

  Moses was the first prophet, according to biblical tradition, and he set the example for all who came after him when he boldly confronted the mighty pharaoh of Egypt, condemning him for his evildoing and threatening him with divine punishment in the form of the Ten Plagues. Moses was privileged to speak with God “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend,” even “mouth to mouth.” (Exod. 33:11; Num. 12:8) When Moses died, Yahweh cut off any further direct conversation with mere mortals. Thereafter, as we have seen, kings and priests alike were allowed to consult God only by casting lots and asking for answers to yes-or-no questions. But the men and women whom God designated as his prophets would be granted the opportunity to hear the “dark speeches” of Yahweh and relay the message from on high to kings, priests, and commoners.

  Hear now my words: if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord do make myself known unto him in a vision, I do speak with him a dream.

  (Num. 12:6)

  The biblical prophets who found themselves filled with “the spirit of Yahweh” have been likened to the ecstatics and diviners of other times and places, not only the mystics and wonder-workers who were active in pagan cults thr
oughout the ancient world but also the Hasidim, dervishes, and Pentecostals of today. As with the shamans and seers of indigenous cultures who carry messages from the spirit world, no ordination was required to be a prophet—men and women received the word of God through the medium of “visions and oracles delivered in a state of trance.”13 “Ecstatic practices of an orgiastic type”—singing, dancing, speaking in tongues, perhaps even self-flagellation and self-mutilation—are some of the expressions “which, taken collectively, are called ‘prophesying,’ ” as P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., concludes.14

  But the prophet also served as a “sober mediator” between God and humankind.15 The Bible depicts the prophets as a moral counterweight to both royal and priestly authority in ancient Israel, and the prophetic books still represent the beating heart of its ethical teachings. Samuel, the first of the “classical” prophets, was literally called by God as a young child—called by name and called by night—to the task of making and breaking both kings and high priests. His abiding faith in God and his fierce commitment to social justice can be traced to Isaiah and the other prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, the unbroken thread runs all the way down to John the Baptist, and, arguably, Jesus of Nazareth; all denounced kings and high priests in the name of God.

  “I SHALL GO TO HIM”

  Just as Nathan had prophesied, the nameless child of David and Bathsheba fell desperately ill: “And the Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife bore unto David.” Still, it is a measure of David's character—both his audacity and his sheer willpower—that he refused to accept the decree and sought to bend God's will to his own. “David besought God for the child,” as the Bible puts it, keeping a prayer vigil night and day, fasting, and sleeping on bare earth in a display of remorse and repentance. (2 Sam. 12:15, 16)

  The illness of David's newborn son was not merely a family matter—after all, a king who grieved so deeply was incapable of attending to affairs of state—and so the elders rallied to King David, urged him to eat, tried to raise him up from the ground and restore him to the throne. But David refused all of their entreaties, and he continued to afflict himself day after day as the child grew weaker. When the child's short life came to an end on the seventh day of his illness, the servants of the royal household feared that news of the death would break David's spirit once and for all.

  “While the boy was alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us,” they fretted among themselves. “How can we now tell him that the boy is dead? He may do something desperate.” (2 Sam. 12:18) (NEB)

  But as it turned out, David spared his courtiers the unpleasant task of breaking the news. When he saw them whispering in the corridor, the king was quick to grasp the reason for their concern.

  “Is the boy dead?” he asked.

  “He is dead,” the courtiers replied.

  Abruptly David rose from the ground, washed himself, and dressed in fresh clothes. Then he anointed himself, walked to the tent-shrine of Yahweh, prostrated himself, and prayed one more time.16 The words that he uttered to Yahweh are not recorded, but the biblical author tells us that David promptly asked for food and then sat down to his first meal in seven days.

  “What is this?” his servants dared to ask. “While the child was alive, you fasted and wept and kept a vigil for him, but now that the child is dead, you rise up and eat.”

  “While the boy was yet alive I fasted and wept, for I said: Who knows whether Yahweh will not be gracious to me, and the child may live?” answered David in matter-of-fact words that seem at odds with his earlier antics. “But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?” (2 Sam. 12:21–23)17

  Then David spoke words of such world-weariness and resignation, such fatalism and even cynicism, that they seem eerily modern. Unlike his famous tribute to the slain Saul and Jonathan, the elegy for his own son was short and blunt, if no less eloquent or poignant.

  “I shall go to him,” said David of the dead infant, “but he will not return to me.” (2 Sam. 11:23)

  David had sought mightily to persuade God to spare the innocent child through fasting and prayer, but when the child died in spite of his pious exertions, David could only shrug. Of course, a pious reading of the text suggests that David was at last deferring to the superior and mysterious power of God. But the same scene has been given a psychological and even an existential reading by some Bible commentators—David here reveals “a revolutionary new attitude in the psychic history of Israel,” argues J.P.E. Peder-sen,18 and he is shown to be a “fully responsible, fully free man,” according to Walter Brueggemann. David, in other words, is a worldly-wise man who refuses to blame God when his own prayers are unavailing.19 No matter how devout David is made to seem in the pages of the Bible, the man who shines through the biblical text is one who, like most modern readers of the Bible, lives wholly in the here and now and neither beseeches nor blames God for his lot in life.

  “BEHOLD, A SON SHALL BE BORN”

  Of Bathsheba's grief, the Bible has little or nothing to say. “David comforted Bathsheba,” the Bible observes, but he did not confine himself to whispering words of condolence. Rather, David “went in unto her, and lay with her,” according to the literal translation of the euphemistic biblical Hebrew in the King James Version, or “had intercourse with her,” according to the plain-spoken New English Bible. (2 Sam. 12:24) The fertile Bathsheba quickly conceived a second son, and the child was born healthy and strong.

  Curiously, the child is named twice. The prophet Nathan, acting on instructions from God, dubs him Jedidiah, “beloved of the Lord,” to signal his divine favor and his future greatness. But Bathsheba insisted on calling him Solomon, which is traditionally understood to derive from the Hebrew word for peace, shalom.20 “Behold, a son shall be born to thee,” God announces to David in the Book of Chronicles. “For his name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quietness unto Israel in his day.” Characteristically, the Chronicler makes no mention whatsoever of the doomed bastard who was born to David and Bathsheba, but he exults over Solomon. “He shall be to me for a son,” God is reported to say, “and I will be to him for a father.” (1 Chron. 22:9–10)

  Nothing else is said of Bathsheba until the very end of the biblical life story of David, when she will emerge from obscurity to play a decisive role in the choice of David's successor to the throne. Indeed, as we shall see, Bathsheba was a woman who refused to be ignored.

  “RAPED BY THE PEN”

  So troubled were the rabbis and sages by the story of David and Bathsheba that they concocted a whole array of improbable excuses and far-fetched exculpatory tales to soften the impact of the frank biblical report.

  Bathsheba was to blame for provoking David's lust, they asserted, “by taking off her dress where she knew he would see her.”21 Nor was David technically guilty of adultery when he succumbed to her seduction—Uriah, like other soldiers in biblical times, gave his wife a bill of divorcement before going off to fight so that she would be properly divorced if he went missing in combat, and so “Bathsheba was a regularly divorced woman.” What's more, Uriah was to blame for his own death, they insisted, because he refused “to take his ease in his own house, according to the king's bidding.” Above all, the whole nasty affair was God's doing in the first place: God decreed that David should summon Bathsheba to his bed before they were properly married so that he could later serve as a shining example of moral redemption.

  “Go to David,” God would thereafter say to sinners, “and learn how to repent.”22

  One rabbinical fairy tale told in the Talmud insists that Satan, rather than David or Bathsheba, was to blame for their adultery. Bathsheba took the precaution of bathing behind a wicker screen that blocked her from view, thus sparing David from temptation. But Satan, seeking to ruin them both, assumed the shape of a bird and alighted on the screen. David shot an arrow at the bird, just as Satan had intended, but the arrow missed the bird and knocked down the screen. Once Bathsheba's naked body and long hair wer
e revealed, “the sight of her aroused passion in the king,” a passion so powerful that he could not have been expected to resist it—and didn't. For failing to avoid Satan's trap, David spent twenty-two years as a penitent, eating his bread mixed with ashes and weeping for a full hour each day.23

  Yet, as earnest and imaginative as the Talmudic sages may have been, they tended to overlook one awkward but unavoidable fact: David himself and the other powerful men around him never seemed to court a woman or consult her about her wishes before “taking” her, as the Bible puts it. The Bible allows us to imagine that Bathsheba yearned for David with the same passion that he felt toward her, but the Bible never says she did. The plain text of the Bible—“And David sent messengers, and took her” (2 Sam. 11:4)—can be read to suggest that Bathsheba engaged in sexual intercourse with David under compulsion and perhaps even under the threat or use of physical force.

  “This is no love story,” argues J. Cheryl Exum. “The scene is the biblical equivalent of ‘wham bam, thank you, m'am’: he sent, he took, she came, he lay, she returned.”24

  Indeed, the most militant Bible critics resent the very intimacy of the scene that is presented in the Bible. “Raped by the pen” is how Exum describes Bathsheba at the hands of the biblical author. “By introducing Bathsheba to us through David's eyes, the narrator puts us in the position of voyeurs,” Exum argues. “Is not this gaze a violation, an invasion of her person as well as her privacy?” After carefully parsing out the biblical text, Exum draws a pointed comparison between the depiction of Bathsheba in the Bible and one of the obligatory images in modern erotica. “Art, film, and pornography provide constant reminders that men are aroused by watching a woman touch herself,” she concludes. “And if Bathsheba is purifying herself after her menstrual period, we can guess where she is touching.”25