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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “What troubles you?” David asked Bathsheba, the woman for whom he had once been willing to commit murder. (1 Kings 1:16)

  “My lord, you swore to me, by the Lord your God, that my son Solomon should succeed you as king, and that he should sit on your throne,” Bathsheba declared. “And now, behold, Adonijah reigns as king, and you, my lord the king, know it not.” (1 Kings 1:17–18)4

  Bathsheba's words—bold, assured, and guileful—must have struck David's ears like a scolding. Before this moment, we have heard only one sentence from the lips of Bathsheba, an utterance that changed David's life and the history of Israel forever: “I'm pregnant.” But now, more than twenty years later, Bathsheba showed herself to be one of those articulate and compelling women—like the old woman of Tekoa and the wise woman of Abel—who are able to capture the hearts and minds of powerful men with nothing but their own commanding words. She proceeded to press her case, telling David about the lavish feast to which Adonijah had invited all of the king's sons except Solomon and describing in detail how Adonijah had put on a spectacular display of ritual sacrifice, offering up oxen, buffalo, and sheep in abundance. And she named names, listing each of the courtiers who were siding with Adonijah.

  “And now, my lord the king, all Israel is looking to you to announce who is to succeed you on the throne,” Bathsheba said. “Otherwise, when you sleep with your forefathers, my son Solomon and I shall be treated as criminals.” (1 Kings 1:20–21)5

  Nathan, who had slipped into the king's bedchamber during Bathsheba's address, confirmed that everything Bathsheba had told him was true and then added a few incriminating details of his own. The sons of King David—all of them except Solomon— were feasting even now with Adonijah, and so were Joab, the commander of the king's army, and even Abiathar, the high priest. All of them ate and drank with Adonijah, boldly toasting him as if he already wore David's crown: “Long live king Adonijah!” (1 Kings 1:25)

  At length, the king bestirred himself and called upon Bathsheba to draw closer to his bed. The old woman whom David had loved so long ago had now succeeded where Abishag's youthful charms had failed—the king was hot with anger, and he gave Bathsheba the promise that she sought.

  “As the Lord lives, who has delivered me from all my troubles,” croaked the old king, “I swore by Yahweh, the God of Israel, that Solomon your son should succeed me, and that he should sit on my throne, and so will I do this day.” (1 Kings 1:29–30)6

  Bathsheba bowed again, her face to the floor, and offered one last poignant wish: “Let my lord king David live forever.” (1 Kings 1:31) Her words were nothing more than a prayer, and David knew that some prayers went unanswered.

  “LONG LIVE KING SOLOMON!”

  Just as he had promised Bathsheba, David promptly set in motion the plan that would make Solomon the next king of Israel. First he summoned Benaiah and ordered him to assemble the elite corps of foreign mercenaries, the Cherethites and the Pelethites. The soldiers were to convey Solomon to the sacred spring of Gihon—and lest anyone fail to understand whom David had chosen as his successor, Solomon was to ride the king's own mule all the way to Gihon and back. (1 Kings 1:34)7

  “Then he shall come and sit upon my throne,” declared David, “for he shall be king in my stead, and I have appointed him to be prince over Israel and over Judah.” (1 Kings 1:35)

  To which Benaiah, guarantor of Solomon's physical security, answered: “Amen.” (1 Kings 1:36)

  Solomon's anointment was vastly grander than his father's. David, of course, had been a shepherd boy when he was called from the fields and secretly anointed by Samuel with only his father and brothers as witnesses. Solomon, by contrast, was attended by an honor guard of soldiers, he was anointed with holy oil from the tent-shrine of Yahweh by both the prophet Nathan and the high priest Zadok, and he was surrounded by a vast crowd that had followed him to the sacred spring of Gihon and broke into wild celebration at the sight of the oil glistening in his hair.

  And they blew the ram's horn, and all the people said: “Long live king Solomon!” And all the people came up after him, and the people piped with pipes, and rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth rent with the sound of them.

  (1 Kings 1:39–40)

  David's last promise to Bathsheba had been fulfilled, and the only surviving child of their passionate but illicit love affair was now king of Israel.

  THE HORNS OF THE ALTAR

  At the very moment of Solomon's anointment, as the Bible reveals, Adonijah and his own band of intimates—Joab and Abiathar and all the sons of David except Solomon—were celebrating what turned out to be Adonijah's premature claim on the kingship. Their revelries were disturbed by the distant shriek of the shofar, the sound of drums and horns, the swelling roar of a crowd. “What is all this uproar in the city?” asked Joab, whose instinct and experience must have prompted him to wonder whether some fresh rebellion had broken out in Jerusalem. “What has happened?” (1 Kings 1:41) (NEB)

  Jonathan, son of the high priest Abiathar, approached the house of Adonijah. He was flushed and out of breath.

  “Come in,” Adonijah said hopefully. “You are an honorable man and bring good tidings.” (1 Kings 1:42)8

  “Alas, our lord King David has made Solomon king!” Jonathan cried. He proceeded to describe all the particulars, including the soldiers who guarded Solomon, the priest and the prophet who anointed him with holy oil, and the frenzy of celebration that Solomon's anointment had inspired. And then he reported that David himself had confirmed Solomon as his chosen successor: “ ‘Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who has set a successor on my throne this day,’ ” Jonathan reported, quoting the words of David, “ ‘while I am still alive to see it.’ ” (1 Kings 1:48)9

  “The city is in an uproar,” concluded Jonathan, abject and miserable. “That was the noise that you heard.” (1 Kings 1:45)10

  Then, as each man at Adonijah's table realized that he had staked his fortune on the wrong son of David, all of them began to scatter in panic. Soon Adonijah found himself abandoned, and panic seized him, too. He hastened to the altar of Yahweh, a squat column of stone with a hornlike protuberance on each corner, and he “caught hold on the horns of the altar,” thus invoking an ancient tradition by which a man could claim the protection of Yahweh against his pursuers. (1 Kings 1:50)

  “Behold, Adonijah fears king Solomon,” it was reported to Solomon, “for he has laid hold on the horns of the altar, saying: ‘Let king Solomon swear to me first of all that he will not slay his servant with the sword.’ ” (1 Kings 1:51)

  Here was the very first test of Solomon's kingship. His father, as we have seen, was quick to forgive those who challenged his authority—but Solomon was equally quick to threaten his brother with death.

  “If he shall show himself a worthy man, there shall not a hair of him fall to the earth,” said Solomon of Adonijah, “but if wickedness be found in him, he shall die.” (1 Kings 1:52)

  When Adonijah heard of Solomon's words, he released his grip on the horned altar, made his way to the palace, and prostrated himself before his brother in abject surrender. Solomon was satisfied, at least for the moment, and he spared his brother's life. “Go to thy house,” Solomon ordered Adonijah. But Solomon vowed to keep a closer watch on Adonijah than David had kept on Absalom, and he would not be so lenient if Adonijah betrayed any sign that he still coveted the throne. (1 Kings 1:53)

  THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF DAVID

  Now that his successor was safely seated on the throne, David fell into his last decline. The old king lived on even as the new king reigned, but not for much longer. “Now the days of David drew nigh that he should die,” the Bible reports, “and he charged Solomon his son, saying: ‘I go the way of all the earth.’ ” (1 Kings 2:2)

  David now delivered a deathbed speech to Solomon. We might imagine that David, old and frail, struggled to utter his last words. But, unlike the valedictory speech that is reported in the closing pages of the Book of Samuel—“No
w these are the last words of David” (2 Sam. 21:1)—his final instructions to Solomon as reported in the Book of Kings were blunt and bloody.

  David charged Solomon to be resolute and ruthless in claiming and keeping the crown of Israel. Just as Moses and God once charged Joshua, conqueror of Canaan, to “be strong and of good courage” (Deut. 31:23, Josh. 1:6), David urged Solomon: “Be thou strong, and show thyself a man.” (1 Kings 1:2)11

  Next, David gave orders for what would be his final act of revenge. Indeed, he gave Solomon a hit list—“a last will and testament worthy of a dying Mafia capo” is how Robert Alter describes David's final words to his son and successor,12 and indeed the scene was artfully copied by Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather.

  “You know how Joab treated me and what he did to two commanders-in-chief in Israel,” said David, referring to Joab's assassination of Abner, general of Saul's army, and Amasa, general of Absalom's army. “He killed them both, breaking the peace by bloody acts of war, and with that blood he stained the belt about my waist and the sandals on my feet.” (1 Kings 2:5) (NEB)

  David's sudden insistence on settling old scores is something new and shocking, if only because we are accustomed to seeing David carefully distance himself from acts of revenge and political violence. Throughout his reign, David refused to acknowledge responsibility for the deaths of his enemies even when he benefited from them, and he constantly tried to hold back his brutal henchmen, Joab and his brothers, from acting on their bloodthirsty impulses. Now and then, of course, he failed—Joab had killed David's beloved son, Absalom, in defiance of the king's specific order. At the very end of his life, David was ready to take his own vengeance on Joab—and yet, even now, his instructions to Solomon were oblique, more like a poem than a death sentence.

  “Do as your wisdom prompts you,” said David to Solomon, “and let not his gray hairs go down to the grave in peace.” (1 Kings 2:6) (NEB)13

  David urged Solomon to show “constant friendship” to a man from Gilead named Barzillai, one of the allies who rallied to David's cause during the war with Absalom. But he revealed that he was still nursing a grudge against old Shimei, the man who had once cursed him as a “bloodstained fiend of hell.” Twice before, David had spared Shimei from death at the hand of Abishai, first when Shimei dared to curse him and again when David issued a general amnesty after the defeat of Absalom. Now, however, David instructed Solomon to punish Shimei for the old insult, and he admitted that by doing so he was carefully sidestepping his own vow to God.

  “True, I swore by the Lord that I would not put him to death with the sword, but you do not need to let him go unpunished now,” reasoned the old king, sly and cagey to the end. “You are a wise man and will know how to deal with him—bring his gray hairs in blood to the grave.” (1 Kings 2:8–9)14

  Joab and Shimei, like David, were old men now. Their hair was gray, as David emphasized, and the old soldiers were surely toothless. But the very last thoughts that flashed through David's mind as he approached the day he had long anticipated—the day when he would go to join the dead baby whom he had refused to mourn—were thoughts of vengeance and bloodletting. To the very end, then, David was a “man of war” and a “man of blood.”

  SPIN DOCTOR

  Some late biblical editor, who probably came along a few hundred years after these lines were first written down, found himself appalled at the brutality, cynicism, ruthlessness, and sheer impiety of David's final charge to Solomon. So he decided to give the dying king a few theologically correct lines to speak, and he boldly wrote these new lines into the old text.

  Keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his ordinances, and his testimonies, according to that which is written in the law of Moses, that thou mayest prosper in all that thou doest.

  (1 Kings 2:3)

  The words attributed to David in this passage bear the fingerprints of a biblical source known as the Deuteronomistic Historian, a title used by scholars to identify a school of priestly authors and editors whose theology was first defined in the Book of Deuteronomy. According to Deuteronomy, the fate of ancient Israel was not predetermined by God; rather, the Israelites enjoyed the gift of free will, and their fate depended on how they used it. So the promise of God to the house of David came with a big “if”: “If thy children take heed to walk before me in truth with all their heart and with all their soul,” David is made to quote God in a way that echoes the familiar phrases of Deuteronomy, “there shall not fail thee, said He, a man on the throne of Israel.” (1 Kings 2:4)15

  The biblical spin doctor at work here chose to ignore the promise that God had once made to David through the prophet Nathan. “When thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee,” God had promised, “and I will establish the throne of his king forever.” (2 Sam. 7:12)16 The later biblical sources were not quite as confident and optimistic as the earlier ones, and they began to wonder out loud if the reign of the house of David was not conditioned on good behavior after all.

  From somewhere far beneath the layers of theological spin, however, the thoroughly mortal voice of David can still be heard. He was not at all concerned about the pious conduct of his son or the goodwill of God. Rather, he uttered a few plainspoken words that summed up his own credo and his own theology: “Be strong and show yourself to be a man.” (1 Kings 2:2) (NEB)

  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

  At the moment of his birth, according to a tale preserved in the Midrash, David was destined to survive only three hours. “He would have died immediately,” imagines the rabbinical storyteller, “had not Adam made him a present of 70 years.”17 But the biblical authors did not engage in such theological speculation in reporting the death of David, perhaps because they were mindful that his real life story was poignant enough and impressive enough. Indeed, even though more biblical text is devoted to David than to any other figure in the Hebrew Bible, relatively few tales are told about him in the vast accumulation of legend and lore that we find in the Talmud and the Midrash. The flesh-and-blood David is rendered in the Bible with such brilliance that mere mythmaking seems hardly worth the effort.

  “I go the way of all the earth,” said David to Solomon, and his biblical death notice is equally lyrical but also equally direct: “And David slept with his fathers and was buried in the City of David.” (1 Kings 2:2, 10)

  Indeed, the very last words of the biblical life story of David read like an obituary.

  And the days that David reigned over Israel were forty years: seven years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned he in Jerusalem. And Solomon sat upon the throne of David his father; and his kingdom was firmly established.”

  (1 Kings 2:11–12)

  Thus passed the living figure of David from the world of ordinary men and women into the realm of history and memory, theological speculation and messianic yearning. He will continue to be celebrated and even exalted in the pages of the Bible, and he will be slowly and subtly transformed into something rich and strange. But at this moment, the flesh-and-blood David, both a “man of blood” and “a man after God's own heart,” slips into that good night toward which every human travels.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE QUALITY OF LIGHT

  AT TEL DAN

  And I will make an everlasting covenant with you, Even the sure mercies of David.

  —ISAIAH 55:3

  And as concerning that he raised him up from the dead, now no more to return to corruption, he said on this wise, I will give you the sure mercies of David.

  —ACTS 13:34

  Solomon mourned the passing of King David with a hit list in his hand. And, no less ambitious or ruthless than his dead father, Solomon set about carrying out David's final instructions with genuine enthusiasm. So it was that Solomon, whose name means “peaceful,” ascended the throne on a flood tide of blood.1

  Solomon's first victim, however, was one whose name did not appear on the
death list—his brother Adonijah, the man he had forgiven for trying to take the throne away from him. If we take the biblical author at his word, Adonijah refused to give up his royal ambitions, and he now approached Bathsheba with a strange and shocking request.

  THE CRIME OF STUPIDITY

  “Do you come peaceably?” Bathsheba asked Adonijah as he presented himself at her quarters in the royal palace.

  “Peaceably,” affirmed Adonijah, who promptly began to kvetch about his own sad fate to the woman least likely to sympathize with him. “You know that the kingdom was mine, and all Israel was looking to me to be king, but I was passed over and the throne has gone to my brother.” And then he added, piously but also a bit lamely: “It was his by the Lord's will.”

  Then Adonijah revealed the real purpose of his visit to Bathsheba.

  “And now I make one small request of you,” he said. “Do not refuse me.”

  “Say on,” said Bathsheba, perhaps fascinated by Adonijah's naïveté and eager to know how far the fool would go in his foolishness.

  “Speak to King Solomon—for he will not refuse you!—and ask that he give me Abishag the Shunamite in marriage.” (1 Kings 2:12–18)2