Chapter Fourteen
AN ANGEL AT THE
THRESHING-FLOOR
… angels in the architecture …
—PAUL SIMON, “YOU CAN CALL ME AL”
The sight of King David at the gate of his capital-in-exile reassured the loyalists who had rallied to his banner in the war against Absalom. The land of Israel, however, was still in crisis. Now that Absalom was dead, and while David still lingered in his distant stronghold, no king reigned in Jerusalem. And the Israelites, leaderless and fearful, reverted to their old tribal feuds and rivalries.
“And all the people were at strife throughout all the tribes of Israel,” the Bible notes. “The entire army was complaining to all the staff-bearers of Israel: ‘So now why have we no plans for bringing the king back?’ ” (2 Sam. 19:10–11, 12)1
The old king, it seems, was sulking. David had not forgotten that Absalom's rebellion had begun in Hebron—the capital of the tribal homeland of Judah and the place where David himself was first crowned a king—and he resented the disloyalty of his own tribe in rallying to Absalom's kingship. Indeed, he marked the fact that the other tribes of Israel had clamored for his return to Jerusalem but his own tribe of Judah remained insultingly silent.
“Ye are my brethren, ye are my bone and my flesh,” went his petulant message to the elders of Judah. “Why are ye the last to bring the king back to his house?” Standing on protocol, David refused to return to Jerusalem until he was accorded the proper expression of remorse and respect from his own tribe. At last the elders of Judah sent the message that David had demanded—“Re-turn thou, and all thy servants” (2 Sam. 19:15)—and the people of Judah thronged to the banks of the Jordan River “to meet the king, to bring the king over the Jordan.” (2 Sam. 19:15, 16)
The king's homecoming to the City of David is described in the Book of Samuel in a phantasmagorical scene, and the matter-of-fact quality of the earlier narrative is replaced by a blend of symbolism and surrealism. The other biblical sources, so plainly fascinated with the hard facts of military history or the intimate scenes of a family in crisis, are joined here by an author who is caught up in a kind of fever dream. Now and then, the flesh-and-blood David seems to disappear in a swirling mist of myth and memory.
The scene opens on the banks of the Jordan River. A ferryboat “passed to and fro to bring over the king's household.” Suddenly, the humbled enemies of King David—all the men who had cursed him to his face or plotted behind his back—began to appear, one by one.
First came Shimei, who had once condemned David as a “bloodstained fiend of hell.” Now he fell to the ground before the restored king, buried his face in the earth, and begged for his life.
Next came Ziba, the servant whom David had assigned to care for Mephibosheth, Saul's only surviving son. In his haste to abase himself before the returning king, Ziba did not wait until David had stepped out of the boat but instead waded into the swirling waters of the Jordan to greet him.
Finally, Mephibosheth, the last potential claimant to the throne once occupied by King Saul, appeared at the riverside. And just as David had once tried to convince the king of Gath of his harmlessness by feigning madness, Mephibosheth shambled up to David like a homeless lunatic. “He had neither dressed his feet, nor trimmed his beard, nor washed his clothes,” the Bible reports, “from the day the king departed until the day he came home in peace.” (2 Sam. 19:25)
The sight of these old enemies offended Abishai, Joab's brother, who believed that their betrayals merited nothing less than the ultimate punishment. “Shall not Shimei be put to death for this,” asked Abishai, “because he cursed the Lord's anointed?” (2 Sam. 19:22)
But David only shushed Abishai. “What have I to do with you, ye sons of Zeruiah?” he asked yet again. The king was in an expansive mood, and he impulsively declared a general amnesty: “Why should any man be put to death this day in Israel? I know now that I am king of Israel.” (2 Sam. 19:23) (NEB)
“My lord the king is as an angel of God,” said Mephibosheth, whose mind was not so disordered that he could not engage in a bit of ornate flattery for the man who had just spared his life. (2 Sam. 19:28)
David's largesse symbolizes the urgent interest of the biblical sources in the healing of old wounds. The house of David must be put back in order, and a nation in disarray must be united again. Blood-vengeance and tribal feuds must end, and the self-perpetuating cycle of insult and injury must be broken once and for all. And so David, mild and forgiving, is made to serve as a symbol of theological law and order—God's anointed was back where he belonged, and the time had come for healing rather than vengeance.
WIDOWS WITH THEIR HUSBAND ALIVE
David soon discovered, however, that the wounds of war were too deep to be healed with a few gracious words. Indeed, the strife in David's life was always double-edged, cutting into the flesh of his loved ones and the flesh of the body politic at the same time. And now David was forcefully reminded of the stain on his honor and the breach of royal protocol that had taken place while he was absent. When he returned to his palace he came upon the ten concubines whom he had left behind when he fled from Jerusalem, the women whom Absalom had taken to the rooftop for an orgy “in the sight of all Israel.”
Absalom, as we have seen, committed a double sin when he engaged in a public orgy with the women of his father's harem— he violated the taboo against incest, and he committed an act of treason. The women were now fleshly symbols of the failed rebellion of a usurping son, and whether we look at them from the perspective of biblical theology or royal politics or Freudian psychology, they were untouchable. For David—and for the biblical author, too—it was simply unthinkable for the rightful king to take his pleasure with these twice-tainted women, and so now he simply shunned them.
The king's very first decree upon resuming the throne in Jerusalem was to shut the women away where he would never lay eye or hand upon them again. David “provided them with sustenance,” the Bible notes, “but went not in unto them.” (2 Sam. 20:3) He tended to be generous toward his enemies at the moment of triumph, but even the biblical author seems to concede the sting of injustice in the fate of these ten women: “So they were shut up unto the day of their death in widowhood, with their husband alive.” (2 Sam. 20:3)
“EVERY MAN TO HIS TENT, O ISRAEL!”
The estrangement of the king from his concubines was repeated on a larger scale across the land of Israel, and the old rivalries between Judah and the other tribes of the Israelite confederation still sputtered. David himself was the flash point.
“Why have our brethren, the men of Judah, stolen thee away?” complained the Israelites, who resented the fact that David had been first welcomed back from exile by his fellow Judahites.
“Because the king is near of kin to us,” retorted the men of Judah, asserting a claim on David by reason of his roots in Judah.
The bickering exploded into a new civil war when a man named Sheba, a rabble-rouser from the tribe of Benjamin, rallied the Israelites to make war on Judah. Unlike Absalom, who challenged David for the kingship of all Israel, Sheba was a secessionist who sought to break up the delicate tribal coalition over which David reigned. (2 Sam. 19:42–43)
“We have no portion in David,” cried Sheba to the rebel army he had raised. “Every man to his tent, O Israel!”(2 Sam. 19:42)
To punish Sheba and crush the uprising, David issued a new call to arms. But instead of relying on his own trusted generals, Joab and Abishai, David summoned a man called Amasa to lead the army into battle. The choice was surprising and rather perverse—Amasa had served as the commander of Absalom's army in the abortive campaign to dethrone David. Amasa had been pardoned for his act of treason during the general amnesty that followed the victory over Absalom, and now David entrusted him with the crucial task of raising an army in Judah and going in pursuit of Sheba. David specified that the tribal muster should be complete within three days so that the rebel army could be tracked down and destroyed
before securing a stronghold in one of the fortified cities of Israel.
Amasa, however, quickly forfeited the confidence of King David when three days passed and he still tarried somewhere in Judah. With Amasa nowhere to be found, David turned to his kinfolk and comrades in arms, Joab and Abishai. And rather than order a tribal muster from Judah, David put them in command of the foreign mercenaries who served as his bodyguard, the Cherethites and the Pelethites. Then the hastily assembled task force moved out in search of Sheba and his rebel army.
BLOOD ON THE HIGHWAY
On the way to search out and destroy Sheba, Joab came upon the missing Amasa and his men. Unlike the king, who had been willing to entrust an army to Amasa, Joab saw him only as a renegade and a traitor. The two men had commanded opposing armies during the rebellion of Absalom, and it must have galled Joab twice over to see him pardoned and then named as a general of David's army. Now Joab resolved to satisfy his old grudge.
“Is it well with thee, my brother?” called Joab, apparently greeting him in friendship. (2 Sam. 20:9)
Then, curiously, “Joab took Amasa by the beard with his right to hand to kiss him”—and as he pulled Amasa into an embrace, Joab loosed his sword from its sheath.2 “Amasa took no heed to the sword that was in Joab's hand,” and he was neatly disemboweled, falling down dead and “wallowing in his blood in the midst of the highway.” (2 Sam. 20:9–10, 12)
Refusing to waste any time or tears on their old enemy, Joab and Abishai marched off in pursuit of Sheba while Amasa lay in a pool of his blood and bowels. The militiamen who had accompanied Amasa, however, were stunned by the sight of their slain commander.
“He that is for David,” cried one of Joab's lieutenants to Amasa's men, “let him follow Joab!” (2 Sam. 20:11)
But the men refused to move. So the resourceful young officer dragged Amasa's body into the adjacent field and covered it with a garment, thus hiding the ghastly corpse from the green recruits who found the sight of blood so unsettling. Only then did the reluctant men of the tribal muster begin to put one foot in front of the other and move off numbly after Joab.
Sheba was finally cornered at a place called Abel, where he sought refuge behind the high wall of the fortified city. Joab promptly besieged the town, and his men began to pile up a mound of earth to span the moat and reach to the top of the wall. As they prepared for a final assault, a woman's voice was heard from within.
“Come near that I may speak with thee!” she called to Joab, and he consented to palaver with her before ordering his men to destroy the city. (2 Sam. 20:16)
Like the woman of Tekoa once recruited by Joab to put Absalom's case to King David, her counterpart in Abel may have been an advocate selected by the townsfolk “by reason of her skills of speech and persuasion.” Armed only with the power of artful speech, the woman of Abel went to work on the old soldier.3
“We are peaceable and faithful,” declared the wise woman of Abel, as she is called in the Bible. “Seekest thou to destroy a city and a mother in Israel?”
“Sheba has lifted up his hand against the king,” Joab replied coolly. “Deliver him only, and I will depart from the city.”
“Behold,” the woman said, no less coolly, “his head shall be thrown to thee over the wall.”
The woman, “a mother in Israel,” returned to the townsfolk who cowered behind the wall and, “in her wisdom,” she told them exactly what they needed to do to save their lives. Moments later, the severed head of Sheba came hurtling high over the wall and landed in the camp of the besieging army. And Joab, having achieved what he came to do, sounded the ram's horn to signal a retreat, and headed back to Jerusalem to report his latest victory to the king. (2 Sam. 20:22)
THE SWEET SINGER OF ISRAEL
On the day of David's final victory—“the day that the Lord delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies,” as one biblical author puts it—the king sang a song of thanksgiving to the God of Israel, or so the Bible says. In the biblical account, he stops abruptly and delivers a long, ornate, deeply pious sermon in which he credits God for each one of his successes in life. Here, as elsewhere in Samuel, the work of the Court Historian has been overwritten by a biblical author whose interest in David is strictly theological.4
“The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,” begins the first of the many praise-songs and psalms traditionally credited to David. “My savior, thou savest me from violence.” (2 Sam. 22:3)
The song that has been written into the Book of Samuel at this point is repeated in a slightly different version as Psalm 18 in the Book of Psalms. “In both places it is attributed to David,” writes Bible scholar Mitchell Dahood, who goes on to argue that “there is no internal evidence militating against such an attribution.”5 Indeed, it is here that the Bible identifies David as “the sweet singer of Israel,” a gentle soul whom we first met during those golden days of his youth when he was able to soothe King Saul by plucking the strings of his lyre.
To be sure, at certain sublime moments in the Bible, David is depicted as a singer and a dancer, a poet and a musician. His famous elegy for Saul and Jonathan is what convinces Harold Bloom that a flesh-and-blood David may have been the author of the literary efforts that are attributed to him in pious tradition. “It is … possible that David indeed was a poet,” allows Bloom, “and that the lament for Jonathan and some of the Psalms began as his work.”6
And yet the words mouthed by David at this moment are profoundly at odds with the ironic and measured lyricism of his elegy to Jonathan—and, for that matter, with the man whom we have come to know so intimately. In fact, virtually nothing in David's song of thanksgiving rings quite true.
DELIGHT
God, for example, is almost always an aloof and indistinct figure in the biblical life story of David. Unlike Abraham, with whom God sat down for an impromptu meal of curds and chops, or Moses, with whom God chatted “face to face,” David is never granted a manifestation of Yahweh that he can perceive with his own eyes or ears. But the praise-song that David now sings depicts God as a deity who reveals himself in urgent, unmistakable, and highly theatrical ways, rather like the storm god whom we encounter in the Book of Exodus:
Smoke arose up in his nostrils,
And fire out of his mouth did devour,
Coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens also, and came down;
And thick darkness was under his feet.
(2 Sam. 22:9–10)
On the rare occasions when God does offer advice to David, he communicates through the oracles of the Urim and Thummim or, at best, in the dreams and visions of prophets like Samuel, Nathan, and Gad. Throughout the ordeal that the king had endured—the rape of Tamar, the assassination of Amnon, the rebellion of Absalom—David did not hear from God at all. But here we find a very different version of David's relationship with God.
“Yea, I called my God, and out of his temple he heard my voice,” David sings. “The Lord thundered from heaven, and the most high gave forth his voice.” (2 Sam. 22:7, 14)
Significantly, the theology of David's praise-song simply does not mesh with what we have already learned about his attitude toward the role of God in the lives of mortals. God might or might not favor him, David seemed to believe, and there was simply nothing David himself could do about it, one way or the other. When his prayers for the life of his bastard child went unanswered, David summed up his own theology with a fatalistic shrug. “I shall go to him,” David said of the dead infant, “but he will not return to me.” (2 Sam. 11:23)
The same fatalism can be seen at his moments of greatest physical and moral peril during the rebellion of Absalom. David declined to arm himself with the Ark of the Covenant, the throne and footstool of the God of Armies, and insisted on sending the relic back to Jerusalem. Indeed, he was never quite sure whose side God was on—perhaps, David allowed, Shimei's blood-shaking curse had been placed on him at the specific command of God himself! And so David never bothered t
o implore God to intervene in his desperate struggle with his own son; he relied on himself to preserve his life and his kingdom.
Now, however, David is shown to praise God for intervening on his behalf and to credit God for his every victory in battle against his enemies—a theme that will be repeated throughout the Book of Psalms.
He sent from on high, he took me,
He drew me out of many waters;
He delivered me from mine enemy most strong,
From them that hated me, for they were too mighty for me.
(2 Sam. 22:17–18)
Most striking of all is the off-putting note of pious self-praise that can be heard in David's first psalm. “He delivered me because he delighted in me,” David sings, referring to his special favor in the eyes of God. “The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness,” he continues, incredibly enough. “According to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.” (2 Sam. 22:20– 21) And he is made to claim a degree of moral rectitude that we already know to be wholly unmerited.
For I have kept the ways of the Lord,
And have not wickedly departed from my God.
For all his ordinances were before me;
And as for his statutes, I did not depart from them.
And I was single-hearted toward Him,
And I kept myself from mine iniquity.
(2 Sam. 22:22–24)
How can we reconcile the cloying piety of David's psalm of thanksgiving with the rough-and-ready quality of the life he actually lived? The simple answer, of course, is that David did not speak the words attributed to him here. Rather the psalm was fabricated by one of the later biblical sources and put into the mouth of David at a time when the man himself was long gone. In fact, a close study of the text convinces some Bible scholars that it was cobbled together out of two older poems. “Like the two spires of a cathedral,” writes Bible scholar Artur Weiser, “the two parts of the mighty hymn soar to heaven.”7
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 27