Indeed, the appearance of the psalm at this point in David's life story can be taken to exemplify how the biblical authors and editors went about creating the Bible out of the raw materials available to them. “It was a common literary practice in ancient Israel to place a long poem or ‘song’ (shirah) at or near the end of a narrative book,” explains Robert Alter, who diplomatically concedes that David's authorship of the text “cannot be categorically dismissed” but deems it “unlikely.”8 And the late biblical editors were apparently undeterred by the fact that David's theological assumptions and rhetorical style, both so restrained and so spare in earlier passages, now seemed suddenly bloated, overdecorated, and out of character.
The real motive of the biblical author who composed the psalm—and the editor who added it to the sacred texts that ultimately became the Bible—is betrayed in the next passage of Samuel. Suddenly, the Bible harkens all the way back to the “theological highlight” of Samuel, the passage in which God is shown to make an eternal and unconditional promise of kingship to the house of David.9 “Now these are the last words of David,” insists the biblical author by way of introduction to one final burst of biblical poetry, even though David is still very much alive and his life story is not yet fully told. (2 Sam. 23:1)
For is not my house established with God?
For an everlasting covenant He hath made with me,
Ordered in all things, and sure;
For all my salvation, and all my desire,
Will he not make it to grow?
(2 Sam. 23:5)
David may be yet alive, but the mortal David is already being eclipsed by the transcendental David, the shimmering theological icon who will loom so large in the messianic yearnings of both Judaism and Christianity. As far as the late biblical author is concerned, David is as good as dead already, and only the symbolic David really matters. But as we shall see, the Bible is not quite ready to bury the flesh-and-blood David.
ANGELS AND DEVILS
One final act of kingship was reserved for the aging King David: the taking of a census to determine the population of Israel. A census may seem like an unremarkable function of government to the modern reader, but the ancient Israelites regarded the notion as something monstrous, if only because a head count would assist the king in imposing the hated burdens of conscription and taxation on the populace. What's more, David's simple idea of census taking becomes the occasion for a theological flight of fancy unlike anything that has come before in the biblical life story of David. Indeed, the biblical author was so put off by the census that he characterized it as a divine punishment for the sins of the Israelites.
“And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying: ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’ ” (2 Sam. 24:1)
So diabolical was the notion of a royal census that the author of the Book of Chronicles, whose work was intended to be a corrective to the Book of Samuel, insisted that the Devil made David do it: “And Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel.” (1 Chron. 21:1) Even Joab, who was always quick to support the power and prerogatives of the king, is shown to challenge David when it came to taking a census: “Why does my lord delight in this thing?” (2 Sam. 24:3) But the king insisted, and it fell to Joab, his captains, and the soldiers under their command to actually count heads under threat of arms. For the record, the Bible puts the population of Judah during the reign of King David at five hundred thousand men of fighting age with another eight hundred thousand men in the rest of Israel. (2 Sam. 24:9)10
Even though David was acting on divine authority, the king was guilt-stricken when the census was complete: “I have sinned greatly in what I have done.” (2 Sam. 24:10) And God, perversely enough, agreed. So the prophet Gad showed up to report that God intended to punish Israel with one of three afflictions: seven years of famine, three days of pestilence, or three months during which David would “flee before thy foes while they pursue thee.” (2 Sam. 24:13) Aghast at all three options, David refused to choose, although he asked Gad to let God know that he preferred not to “fall into the hand of man.” (2 Sam. 24:14)
“So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel,” the Bible reports, “and there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men.” (2 Sam. 24:15) As the plague approached Jerusalem, God relented. “It is enough,” he told the angel of death. “Now stay thy hand.” (2 Sam. 24:16)
But the angel of death now showed itself to David as a ghostly specter hovering above the threshing-floor of a Jebusite named Araunah, and David was moved to beg God for mercy.
“Lo, I have sinned, but these sheep, what have they done?” David prayed, referring to the people of Israel. “Let thy hand, I pray thee, be against me, and against my father's house.” (2 Sam. 24:17)
The sudden and spooky appearance of angels and devils is something wholly new in the experience of King David. Indeed, the very strangeness of the scene prompts some Bible scholars to look for hidden and forbidden meanings in the text. Perhaps the threshing-floor was a sacred site of the Jebusites, and the angel of death sent by the God of Israel was made to stand in for a non-Israelite plague god who was worshipped there.11 But the Israelites, too, regarded threshing-floors as places of special sanctity, and the God of Israel had been known to manifest in such places.12 Thus the angel at the threshing-floor can be seen as yet another fingerprint of a biblical source with a theological agenda—the angel's sudden appearance was a message from God, according to the prophet Gad, who explained to David that Yahweh wanted him to “rear an altar unto the Lord in the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” (2 Sam. 24:18)
When Araunah learned of the king's plan, he insisted on providing David with all of the necessaries for a ritual sacrifice: “Behold the oxen for the burnt-offering, and the threshing-instruments and the furniture of the oxen for the wood.” (2 Sam. 24:22) David was apparently untroubled by the fact that a threshing-floor belonging to a Jebusite might have been used as the site of idol-worship and other pagan rituals. After all, he was accustomed to handling the teraphim and other idols, and some of his best friends were Gittites and Philistines, Pelethites and Cherethites, all of them idol-worshippers. But David insisted on paying for what Araunah had offered as gift.
“I will verily buy it at a price,” declared David, “neither will I offer burnt-offerings unto the Lord my God which cost me nothing.” (2 Sam. 24:24)
The two men settled on fifty shekels of silver as a fair price for the purchase of the threshing-floor and the cattle, too, and David proceeded to build an altar and offer up the cattle to Yahweh.
“So the Lord was entreated for the land, and the plague was stayed from Israel.” (2 Sam. 24:25)
THE TEMPLE THAT DAVID DID NOT BUILD
So reads the very last line of the Book of Samuel. The formal biography of David continues briefly and then concludes in the opening passages of the Book of Kings, where the old king is shown to choose his successor among the willful sons who seek the throne. But the strange encounter between David and the angel of death at the threshing-floor will turn out to play a fundamental role in the history and destiny of the house of David and the people of ancient Israel.
Solomon will prevail among the sons of David, of course, and it is Solomon who will build the temple that the God of Israel requires of his Chosen People. Ultimately, the Bible fixes on the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem as the single most crucial feature in both the credo and the practice of religion in ancient Israel. The distant descendants of the desert nomads who followed a tent-shrine through the wilderness will be confined to worshipping Yahweh at a single magnificent temple.
But a crucial and potentially embarrassing question remains unanswered. If God desired and required a temple in Jerusalem, why didn't God's anointed build it? Perhaps the flesh-and-blood David did not build a temple because he was faithful to the oldest traditions of his people, which required only a tent-shrine, or perhaps because, as the Bible explain
s, God did not want a “man of blood” to build his sacred temple. In either case, the biblical author now seeks to link David to the temple that Solomon will go on to build, and the linkage begins with the appearance of the angel at the threshing-floor of Araunah.
The link between David and the Temple is only suggested in the Book of Samuel, but it is spoken out loud in the Book of Chronicles, where the tale of the threshing-floor is retold with a few significant variations. The Jebusite who owned the sacred site is called Ornan rather than Araunah in Chronicles, and the price paid by David is given as six hundred shekels of gold rather than fifty shekels of silver. But the most significant contrast between the two versions of the tale is the purpose for which David acquired the threshing-floor in the first place. According to the Book of Samuel, the threshing-floor was the site of a crude altar of sacrifice to Yahweh, but the Book of Chronicles makes it clear that the Temple will rise on the same site during the reign of David's son and successor, King Solomon.
“This is the house of the Lord God,” David is made to declare in the Book of Chronicles, “and this is the altar of burnt-offering for Israel.” (1 Chron. 22:1)
So eager was David, according to the Chronicler, that he began to assemble a corps of masons and a supply of gold and silver, cedar and stone, iron and brass, all of it to be used for “the house that is to be builded for the Lord,” a structure that “must be exceeding magnificent, of fame and glory throughout all countries.” (1 Chron. 22:5) But one critical detail remains the same in both Samuel and Chronicles: David is not permitted to actually build the temple. Rather the task falls to his son, and the Chronicler allows David himself to explain why.
“My son, as for me, it was in my heart to build a house unto the name of the Lord my God,” David tells Solomon in the Book of Chronicles. “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)
The Chronicler insists that Solomon, “a man of rest,” rather than David, “a man of blood,” was chosen by God to build the Temple at Jerusalem. Even so, another sharp point of irony remains hidden in the biblical text. Solomon, as we shall now see, was no less of an intriguer than his father, no less ruthless in his lust for power, no less willing to shed the blood of even his closest kin. David's final legacy to his son—and his specific deathbed instructions—will leave the throne of Israel awash in blood.
Chapter Fifteen
HEAT
Abishag my angel has risen from her chair and approaches without noise, wearing only a vivid scarf. Her eyes are as dark as the tents of Kedar. I want my God back; and they send me a girl.
—KING DAVID IN GOD KNOWS, BY JOSEPH HELLER
At the age of seventy, the king of Israel, once so fresh and full of promise, once so strong and virile, lay alone in the bed that had accommodated so many warm bodies. The courtiers who hovered around the royal bedchamber in the palace at Jerusalem fretted over his flagging spirits and failing health.
Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he could get no heat.
(1 Kings 1:1)
David is fully human again in the opening passages of the First Book of Kings, and heartbreakingly so. The biblical source who closed out the Book of Samuel with lofty theological musings and ornate psalm-singing may have lost interest in the flesh-and-blood David, but here we find an author, possibly the Court Historian, who felt obliged to describe how David's life really ended. In fact, the final scene in the life of David originally appeared in the Book of Samuel, scholars suspect, but some later biblical editor cut it out and pasted it in the Book of Kings, perhaps in an effort to emphasize the legitimacy of the king who followed him to the throne.1
The final moments of David's life are played out against a backdrop of unspoken memories. As a shepherd boy, David bested Goliath in single combat, according to the biblical life story, and he managed to dodge King Saul's well-thrown spear. He spent years as a fugitive, a bandit, and a mercenary, all without suffering an injury or a defeat. He survived Saul's maniacal efforts to track him down and kill him, and he ultimately prevailed over Saul and his sons in the struggle for the kingship of all Israel. He fought uncounted battles against the traditional enemies of Israel, and he reigned for forty years over a court and a country that pulsed with assassination and betrayal and conspiracy. No one—not political rivals, rebellious sons, or cuckolded husbands—had been able to touch David. And yet, precisely because he was a mortal man and nothing more, he was eventually overtaken and brought down by the quiet but relentless passing of the years.
To symbolize the ravages of age and time, the biblical author focuses on the very quality that had always animated the figure of David in the Bible—his love for women—and here David suffers the unkindest cut of all.
HEAT
One of the courtiers who had attended David for many years— one who remembered his old appetites and recalled the days when his harem was a lively place—suggested a way to cheer his king.
Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand before the king, and be a companion unto him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.
So a kind of Bible-era beauty contest was conducted throughout the land of Israel until a suitable woman was found—a “fair damsel” called Abishag, a woman from the town of Shunam in the hill-country outside Jerusalem. She was recruited for duty in the harem, conveyed to the palace, and prepared for her introduction to the king. Surely the sight of Abishag the Shunamite, the warm touch of her young flesh against the king's chest, would revive his flagging spirits.
But even as the alluring Abishag was ushered into David's bedchamber, the king continued to shiver helplessly beneath his bedclothes. Abishag, as it turned out, served as a nurse rather than a lover to the old man in her care: “She was a very beautiful girl, and she took care of the king and waited on him, but he had no intercourse with her.” (1 Kings 1:4) (NEB)
All that was left to David, as far as the Bible is concerned, was to select a successor from among his many ambitious and contentious sons, and then die.
DEATHBED POLITICS
David had buried many sons, Amnon and Absalom and the nameless first child of Bathsheba among them, but two of his remaining male offspring managed to put the royal succession into question and even crisis. Would the next king of Israel be Adonijah, David's eldest surviving son, or Solomon, the late-born son of David and Bathsheba?
These two contested with each other for the throne, and the wishes of the dying king would be crucial in determining which one of them would occupy it when their father died. The very idea of dynastic succession was something wholly new in ancient Israel, and no law or custom was available to resolve the conflicting claims of Adonijah and Solomon. Indeed, if a son of David succeeded him to the throne, it would be the first peaceful succession in the short history of the Israelite monarchy.
Adonijah, as the eldest son, seemed to take it for granted that he would inherit the crown one day. Like Absalom, the Bible reports, Adonijah was “a very handsome man.” (1 Kings 1:6) (NEB) Unlike Absalom, he had never offended David with his conduct— at least until now. For as David's health began to fail, Adonijah began to ape his deceased brother by acting like a king without wearing a crown. Everywhere he went in Jerusalem, Adonijah traveled with “chariots and horsemen, and fifty men to run before him” (1 Kings 1:5), and he presided over showy ritual sacrifices, slaughtering “sheep and oxen and fatlings” at a ceremony from which Solomon, his brother and rival, was pointedly excluded. (1 Kings 1:9)
As the old king rested in the royal bedchamber, Adonijah hurried through the corridors of the palace, lobbying the king's cabinet and lining up allies in what promised to be a battle for the throne. Joab, David's ever-ruthless but ever-faithful general, sided with Adonijah, and so did Abiathar, the high prie
st who had survived Saul's slaughter of the priests of Nob and remained loyal to David ever since.
Solomon was more subtle in his politicking but no less effective. Zadok, the other high priest, and Nathan, the prophet, and Benaiah, commander of the palace guard, assured him of their support in the contest for the crown. And Solomon claimed the loyalty of one person who counted for more than all the rest in terms of influence on King David—Solomon's mother, Bathsheba, the love of David's life.
“Have you not heard that Adonijah has become king, all unknown to our lord David?” Nathan said to Bathsheba. “Now, come, let me advise you what to do for your own safety and for the safety of your son, Solomon.” (1 Kings 1:11–12)2
Nathan urged Bathsheba to present herself to King David and remind him that he had once vowed to her that he would make Solomon his successor as king of Israel. Until now, the Bible has reported no such promise by David, and Bible scholar Robert Alter proposes the provocative idea that Nathan may simply have invented it. If so, Alter writes, the briefing of Bathsheba by Nathan may reflect his effort to enlist her assistance in “persuading the doddering David that he actually made this commitment.”3
The final encounter between David and Bathsheba is charged with both political and sexual tension, a fitting note on which to end the life story of David. As Bathsheba entered the royal bedchamber, she spotted the comely young Abishag in the midst of her ministrations, but the old queen betrayed no lack of confidence in her own influence over David. Bathsheba simply ignored Abishag as she presented herself to David, bowing to the ground before her old lover in an ostentatious display of royal protocol.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 28