“We have an ancient reference to King David,” assert Bible scholars David Noel Freedman and Jeffrey C. Geoghegan. “The Tel Dan inscription also underscores the general historicity of the Biblical narratives….”37
Not every Bible scholar is quite so convinced. Thomas L. Thompson, a revisionist who has challenged all the high hopes and conventional wisdom of “biblical archaeology,” declares himself unconvinced by the discoveries at Tel Dan. He complains of “problems” with “the reading of the text, its dating and interpretation.” His arguments, as always, are highly provocative. The dating of the stela is “optimistically early” and ought to be moved forward by a century or more. The missing words and letters make it impossible to prove that the stela makes a direct reference to King David. Indeed, he points out, the word that has been interpreted as “David” also appears on an important archaeological find from Jordan, the Mesha Stele of the ninth century B.C.E., where it is used as the divine title for an ancient god called Yahweh, who may or may not be the same deity who is identified as the God of Israel in the Bible. Although Thompson allows that David himself may or may not have been the founder of a “patronate”—a primitive tribal chieftainship— he insists that the Tel Dan stela “tells us nothing, as such, of a person David as the founder of that patronate in an earlier period.”38
But the consensus of modern Bible scholarship holds that the Tel Dan inscription is important new evidence of the historicity of King David and the exploits described in the Bible. Indeed, the fragments of polished basalt and the intriguing inscription on them have taken on an almost religious significance in our irreligious era. At a talk I gave about my previous book, Moses, A Life, I was approached by a woman who was agitated and distressed to hear me report that no extra-biblical evidence of any kind confirms the historical existence of Moses. But she told me that she was comforted by her own sure knowledge that the other hero of the Hebrew Bible had been a man of flesh and blood.
“At least we still have David,” she witnessed to me, “thanks to Tel Dan.”
A MAN AFTER GOD'S OWN HEART
Thus strengthened in our conviction that a king called David once lived, however, we are left with a troubling question that cannot be answered by the Tel Dan inscription or any other archaeological relic. Exactly what are we meant to learn from King David as he is depicted in the Bible? Once we have read his biblical life story with open eyes—and once we have witnessed the shocking excesses of which he was capable—some of us may be left with the idea that he does not really belong in a book that holds itself out as a source of moral instruction for humankind!
David, as depicted in the Bible, is essentially “value-neutral,” according to a chilling phrase now used as a term of praise. That is, David did not promulgate a code of moral conduct, nor did he exemplify one in his own tumultuous life and times. The biblical David was a warrior and a poet, but he was never a lawgiver or a teacher. Aside from a few passages where some later biblical author has put pious and ornate words into his mouth, David seemed to embrace only the thoroughly modern notion that nothing succeeds like success—or, when it came to satisfying his sexual appetite, the equally modern notion that nothing succeeds like excess.
“The one indisputable point about King David is that he is one hard case,” writes Donald Harman Akenson. “He does what he has to do to preserve his power at all costs: just ask his seven brothers whom he jumped in the quest for the family's patrimony; King Saul whom he undercut as a monarch; Ahimelech, the priest whom he gulled out of Goliath's sword; Uriah, whom David arranged to have killed so that he could sleep with Uriah's wife, Bathsheba; and the tens of thousands of dead he left strewn about Palestine as he conquered his various neighbours, aggressive and pacific alike.” And if we overlook these “hard” facts, as preachers and teachers have tended to do, we miss the whole point of the biblical life story of David. “That is exactly how a monarch should act,” Akenson concludes. “He preserves his honour and his power; everything else is secondary.”39
The Talmudic rabbis were so troubled by the plain facts of David's life—the cunning, cynicism, and carnality that he displays unapologetically in the pages of the Bible—that they simply dreamed up a new and improved David. “Whatever leisure time his royal duties afforded him, he spent in study and prayer,” they imagined. “David's thinking and planning were wholly given to what is good and noble.” Indeed, they were even capable of asserting, against all evidence in the Bible, that “he is one of the few pious men over whom the evil inclination had no power.”40 The kinder and gentler David of rabbinic fantasy, however, is plausible only to someone who has never opened the Bible or who ignores what the Bible actually says of David.
Other Bible readers may prefer the vision of David that we encounter in the prophetic writings of the Bible—a wholly celestial messiah-king who is no longer a “man of war,” no longer a “man of blood,” no longer a man at all. “A son is given unto us,” exults the prophet Isaiah, and he offers a vision of heaven on earth that only grows more sublime as our experience of the real world grows more horrific. “And of peace there be no end,” writes Isaiah, “upon the throne of David.” (Isa. 9:5–6) Here he becomes the child-king who reigns in a utopia that resembles nothing in the life experience of the fleshly David.
And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
(Isa. 11:6–9)
Such images still exert a powerful tug on the hearts and minds of men and women who are aghast at the world in which we find ourselves nowadays, a world that tolerates and even encourages “ethnic cleansing,” child pornography, biological warfare, “squash” videos, and the miscellaneous horrors of modernity. Indeed, some corners of the Bible still offer a comfortable refuge for those who find themselves battered and bruised by what confronts us in newspapers and motion pictures, and on television and the Internet.
But more often the Bible is not a comforting book. If we are courageous enough to read it with open eyes and with an open mind, we discover that the Bible is provocative and challenging, unsettling and off-putting, sometimes even shocking and scandalous. And nowhere in the Bible are we confronted more forcefully with what it means to be a human being than in the biblical life story of David. The deepest of all the mysteries that confront us in the Hebrew Bible is the mystery of how a man as flawed as David can be a man after God's own heart.
One clue to the mystery is the very word that the Bible uses to describe David: he is, first and always, a man—or, if you prefer a gender-neutral translation of the Hebrew text, a human being. Even though the Bible insists on praising God above all, the deeply humanistic notion that man is the measure of all things is spoken out loud by David himself in Psalm 8, where he asks God a crucial question—“What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”—and then answers it in a way that affirms the primacy of humankind on earth.
Yet thou hast made him but little lower than angels,*
And hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy hands,
Thou hast put all things under his feet.”
(Ps. 8:5–7)
Indeed, the theology of the Hebrew Bible can be—and must be!—reduced to a human scale, if only to allow us to understand the moral instruction that it embodies. The venerable Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad, for example, discerns the undercurrents of “Solomonic humanism” in the story of David—and, crucially, he defines it as nothing less than “a wholly new departure in spirituality, a kind of ‘enlightenment,’ an awakening of spiritual self-consciousness.”41 Similarly, when the prophet Micah wonders out loud what God demands of us, his answer is a simple moral credo that can be understood and acted upon in the here and now: “Only to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” (Mic. 6:8) Even the prophet Isaiah, whose
messianic visions are so sublime and yet so impossibly grand, wakes up to a much more urgent reality when he answers Micah's provocative question: What does God want of us?
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, cloth him,
And not to ignore your own kin.
(Isa. 58:7)42
David, of course, cannot readily be credited with the profound compassion or the fierce sense of social justice that inspired the prophets. But if we look beyond the brutal deathbed instructions that he issued to Solomon, his last charge to his beloved son seems to strike something of the same note. “Be thou strong,” said David to Solomon, “and show thyself a man.” (1 Kings 2:2) If we render the same phrase with a bit of Yiddish, we may come closer to understanding what God expected of David, what God expects of all of us—or, at least, what we ought to expect of ourselves. “Be a mensch!”
* Of the twelve tribes, only the tribe of Simeon rallied to King Rehoboam.
* * “Little less than a god” is a more straightforward translation of the Hebrew text. (Ps. 8:5) (NEB) By now, we should not be surprised to find a slightly paganistic notion falling from the lips of David, even if later and fussier translators insisted on invoking angels rather than gods.
Appendix
THE BIBLICAL BIOGRAPHERS OF DAVID
By almost any measure, David is the most commanding figure in the Hebrew Bible. His name is mentioned more than a thousand times, and more space is devoted to him than to any other biblical figure. Although the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and Moses are crucial to both biblical narrative and biblical theology, it is David who may have inspired the writing of the Bible in the first place. Indeed, David is present in the Bible even in passages where his name is never mentioned.
The life story of David sprawls across several books of the Hebrew Bible, and a great many different biblical sources can be identified in those books, or so modern Bible scholarship proposes.* The fundamental questions of authorship—the time, place, purpose, and identity of the biblical sources—are still hotly debated. For that reason, the discussion that follows is only an overview of a complex, controversial, and ever-changing body of scholarship.
THE BOOK OF SAMUEL
The biography of David is reported at the greatest length and in the greatest detail in the Book of Samuel. Since biblical Hebrew is a language written in consonants only, the Hebrew text of the Book of Samuel was compact enough to be contained on a single scroll. But when the Bible was first translated into Greek, a language of both consonants and vowels, two separate scrolls were required, and so the single work was divided into the First Book of Samuel and the Second Book of Samuel.
By tradition, the authorship of the Book of Samuel is attributed principally to the prophet Samuel, who figures importantly in its opening chapters. The portion of Samuel that depicts events after the death of Samuel himself is traditionally attributed to the prophet Gad. Modern scholarship, however, detects a great many sources within the text of Samuel, although neither Samuel nor Gad is among them.
The core of the Book of Samuel, which consists of the formal biography of David, is sometimes described by scholars as “the history of David's rise to power” or, more elegantly, the Court History of David. For that reason, its author has been dubbed the Court Historian, although he is sometimes identified rather less evocatively by the letter code “S,” a fanciful reference to Samuel. Because his account is so intimate, some scholars speculate that he may have been a member of the court of King David and perhaps even an eyewitness to some of the events he describes. Other scholars place him in the reign of King Solomon, David's son, or at an even later point in the history of ancient Israel. In any case, the Court Historian probably enjoyed access to the archives, battle reports, and chronicles of the royal house of David, and he cites a book, now lost to us, where David's famous elegy of Saul and Jonathan was preserved: “Behold, it is written in the book of Jashar.” (2 Sam. 1:18)
The work of the Court Historian has inspired enthusiastic praise from Bible scholars and literary critics alike. “David's biographer was a man of genius,” writes Robert H. Pfeiffer. “Without any previous models as guide, he wrote a masterpiece, unsurpassed in historicity, psychological insight, literary style, and dramatic power.”1 Richard Elliot Friedman, in The Hidden Book in the Bible, argues that the same literary genius created both the Court History and the portions of biblical narrative attributed to the source known as “J,”* while Harold Bloom imagines in The Book of J that “J is a Gevurah (‘great lady’) of post-Solomonic court circles, herself of Davidic blood, who began writing her great work in the later years of Solomon, in close rapport and exchanging influences with her good friend the Court Historian, who wrote most of what we now call 2 Samuel.”2
But the Book of Samuel includes passages and whole chapters that are thought to be the work of sources other than the Court Historian. The portion of the text that is devoted to the Ark of the Covenant, for example, is considered the work of a different biblical source and is sometimes labeled “the Ark Narrative” to distinguish it from the rest of Samuel. The account of how Solomon bested his brothers in the struggle to succeed David on the throne of Israel is regarded as a separate work by some scholars, who identify it as “the Succession Document.” Other sections of Samuel, including the passages where Samuel condemns the very idea of kingship and fearlessly scolds the king of Israel, are thought to have originated among the same circles that produced and preserved the prophetic writings of the Bible.
The task of identifying and describing the sources of the Book of Samuel is rendered all the more challenging because, like many other books of the Bible, Samuel was extensively edited and “overwritten” by later biblical sources. The most important of these later sources is the school of priests and scribes known collectively as the Deuteronomistic Historian. Embracing the distinctive theology and rhetorical style that were first presented in the Book of Deuteronomy by a biblical author known as the Deuteronomist (or “D”), the Deuteronomistic Historian is credited with at least one and possibly several editorial revisions of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—a process that brought the history of ancient Israel into conformity with the Deuteronomist's worldview. The Deuteronomistic Historian, at work no earlier than the seventh century B.C.E. and perhaps later, is probably responsible for the theological spin that we find in the Book of Samuel and, notably, the pious speeches attributed to David.
Precisely because the Book of Samuel is so frequently overwritten by multiple sources—and because the text has been edited and revised so extensively over the centuries—the attribution of any given passage may spark debate among Bible scholars. Then, too, various passages of the Book of Samuel come down to us in what scholars describe as a “difficult” or “troubled” or even “corrupted” form. For that reason, significant differences can be identified in various passages of Samuel as they are preserved in the Masoretic Text, the ancient Greek translation of the Bible known as the Septuagint, other ancient translations, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
THE BOOK OF KINGS
The life story of David continues into the First Book of Kings and concludes in its opening chapters. The rest of Kings is devoted to the history of the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, starting with the reign of Solomon and continuing through the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. and the conquest of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. Some scholars suspect that the opening passages of Kings, where the last days of David's life are described, originally appeared as part of the Book of Samuel and were moved into the Book of Kings by the Deuteronomistic Historian or some other biblical editor.
Like Samuel, the Book of Kings was originally contained on a single scroll and was divided into two books by the translators of the Septuagint. And as in Samuel, the authors of the Book of Kings report that they have relied on several archival sources now
lost to us, including the Book of the Annals of Israel and the Book of the Annals of Judah. But Kings is wholly lacking in the moments of literary grace, political acumen, and high drama that make Samuel such a compelling work of literature. Rather, the Book of Kings is mostly a theological exercise—the Deuteronomistic Historian judges every king according to whether or not he adhered closely enough to the strict legal code that we find in the Book of Deuteronomy.
THE BOOK OF CHRONICLES
The life story of David is reprised in the First and Second Book of Chronicles, but it is a very different David who is presented here. Composed sometime in the late sixth century B.C.E. or later, perhaps by the same priestly source who composed the Book of Nehemiah and the Book of Ezra, Chronicles retells the history of Israel strictly from a theological point of view. The Chronicler, as the source of Chronicles is sometimes called, felt obliged to censor out all the lurid details of David's life as we find them in Samuel, including the love affair with Bathsheba, the murder of Uriah, the rape of Tamar, and the rebellion of Absalom. And he felt free to rewrite the history of David, rendering him as an unfailingly pious king and crediting him with an active role in preparations for the building of the Temple at Jerusalem. Appropriately enough, the original title of Chronicles in the Septuagint was Paraleipomena, which means “things omitted.”
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 32