26. Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.
27. Adapted from JPS, NEB and AB. David's coarse if colorful way of referring to a man as “one who pisses against the wall” is translated literally in the King James Version of 1611, which memorably reads “pisseth” rather than “pisses.” More recent (and more polite) translations of the Bible render the vivid phrase as “a male” (JPS) or “a mother's son” (NEB).
28. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
29. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
30. Adapted from JPS.
31. Adapted from NEB and AB.
32. Ahinoam's hometown of Jezreel was a village located near Carmel in the tribal homeland of Judah, rather than the better-known city of the same name in northern Israel.
33. The locations of Hachilah and Jeshimon are unknown to modern Bible scholarship.
34. Adapted from JPS.
35. Maon, a few miles south of Hebron, was yet another hilltop site in the rugged wilderness of the tribal land of Judah.
36. “Cover his feet” is the euphemism for defecation that appears in the Hebrew text to describe what Saul is doing in the cave. Some fussy translators favor a literal rendering of the idiomatic expression in order to conceal what is actually going on.
37. Adapted from NEB.
38. Adapted from NEB.
39. Adapted from JPS.
40. Here is yet another example of a dreamy association between two passages in the Bible. The very same words were uttered by Judah, founder of the tribe that bears his name, when he learned that his daughter-in-law, Tamar, had tricked him into impregnating her by disguising herself as a harlot and seducing him. (Gen. 38) David is the distant descendant of one of the twin sons who were conceived in that act of seduction and incest, and the biblical author is subtly reminding readers of David's lineage.
41. Adapted from JPS.
42. Adapted from NEB.
43. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
44. Ziklag is believed to have been a town located to the southeast of modern Gaza, originally within the tribal lands of Simeon and later assigned to Judah. (Josh. 14:31)
45. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
46. Adapted from JPS and NEB. “Negev” means “dry southern country” and here refers to the southerly districts of each of the named tribes. The “Negev of Judah,” for example, is apparently the district around the town of Beersheba in the tribal homeland of Judah. The Jerahmeelites and Kenites were non-Israelites who later came to be regarded as clans of the tribe of Judah. (1 Chron. 2:9, Josh. 14:14)
47. McCarter, I Samuel, 415.
48. Adapted from NEB and AB.
49. McCarter, I Samuel, 358–359, citing Budde and Smith.
50. Bright, History of Israel, 189.
51. Adapted from JPS and AB.
52. McCarter, I Samuel, 408.
53. Adapted from JPS.
54. Adapted from JPS.
CHAPTER SIX
GHOSTWIFE
1. Adapted from JPS.
2. The staging areas for the two armies were located in the northern stretches of Israel, near Mount Gilboa in the Jezreel Valley. The town of Endor was located in the same vicinity, and a modern village still bears the old name.
3. Adapted from JPS and AB.
4. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, 342; Lindblom, “Lot-casting in the Old Testament,” Vetus Testamentum 12, no. 2 (April 1962): 171–172.
5. Nowhere else in the Bible are we given such a clear example of how the Urim and Thummim were actually used to obtain an oracle from God. Curiously, these details appear in the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text, which preserves only an abbreviated version of the episode and makes no mention of the Urim and Thummim.
6. Lindblom, “Lot-casting in the Old Testament,” 171–172.
7. Adapted from JPS and AB.
8. Adapted from JPS and KJV.
9. P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., an expert and imaginative translator of the biblical text, renders “witch” as “ghostwife” in the Anchor Bible. He points out that the Masoretic Text “conflates two terms referring to a (female) necromancer,” that is, “ghostwife” and “ghostmistress.” McCarter, I Samuel, 418.
10. Adapted from JPS and AB.
11. Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.
12. Adapted from JPS and AB.
13. Gerhard von Rad, Moses (London: United Society for Christian Literature, Lutterworth Press, 1960), 31.
14. Martin Buber, Moses (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 7, n.1.
15. So unsettling is the incident at Endor that some scholars believe it was once removed from the biblical text by a redactor “who was offended by its content” and then restored much later by another redactor who put it in the wrong place, which explains why the chronology and geography of the account are somewhat fractured. McCarter, I Samuel, 422.
16. Adapted from JPS and AB.
17. Adapted from JPS and AB.
18. Adapted from JPS and AB.
19. Adapted from JPS and AB.
20. Adapted from JPS and AB.
21. Adapted from JPS and AB.
22. “Israel,” which means “he who striveth with God,” is the name given to Jacob after he wrestled with and defeated a mysterious stranger who may have been an angel of God or God himself. “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for thou has striven with God and with men, and has prevailed.” (Gen. 32:29)
23. In J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 66.
24. Niels Peter Lemche, “Habiru, Hapiru,” in Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, 6–10.
25. See Roland de Vaux, The Early History of Israel, trans. David Smith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), 215. “The band of outlaws whom David gathered around him “bear a strange resemblance to the movements of the warlike and looting Habiru who figure in the texts of Mari and Amarna. What is more, David's positions in the service of the Philistines and that of his men, whom the Philistines regarded as mercenaries and called ‘the Hebrews,’ are almost exactly parallel to that of the companies of Habiru who served the … various rulers in Palestine during the Amarna period.”
26. Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 677–678.
27. Johnson, Birth of the Modern, 679.
28. Adapted from JPS.
29. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
30. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
31. Hebron, located some nineteen miles southwest of Jerusalem in the Judean highlands, was the home and, later, the burial place of Abraham and Sarah, the first patriarch and matriarch of the Israelites.
32. The Septuagint depicts Saul with an arrow in his belly, but the Masoretic Text says only that he was “in great anguish by reason of the archers,” a phrase that the Anchor Bible renders as “writhed in fear of the archers.”
33. Beth-shan was a Canaanite town, apparently under occupation by the Philistines, in the Jezreel Valley of northern Israel.
34. Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.
35. See McCarter, II Samuel, 65.
36. Quoted in Mitchell Dahood, trans., intro., and notes, Psalms I, 1–50, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), xxx–xxxi.
37. Dahood, Psalms I, 1–50, xxx.
38. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, 351.
39. Weisfeld, David the King, 5
40. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, 351.
41. J. A. Thompson, “The Significance of the Verb Love in the David-Jonathan Narratives in 1 Samuel,” Vetus Testamentum 24, no. 3 (July 1974): 334, 335, 337.
42. Adapted from NEB.
43. Raphael Patai, Sex and Family in the Bible and the Middle East (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 169, 170.
44. Horner, Jonathan Loved David, 20.
45. Horner, Jonathan Loved David, 20, 24.
46. Horner, Jonathan Loved David, citing S. R. Driver (emphasis added).
47. Quoted in Frontain and Woj
cik, David Myth, 8.
48. Richard Howard, “The Giant on Giant Killing,” quoted in Frontain and Wojcik, David Myth, 9.
49. Ted-Larry Pebworth, “Cowley's Davideis and the Exaltation of Friendship,” in Frontain and Wojcik, David Myth, 101.
50. The Bible is uncertain about the number or names of Saul's sons, sometimes identifying three sons (Jonathan, Ishvi, and Malchishua) (1 Sam. 14–49) and sometimes four (Jonathan, Malchishua, Abinadab, and Ishbaal). (1 Chron. 8:33, 9:39) Ishbaal (“man of Baal”) is called Ish-bosheth (“man of shame” in the Masoretic Text (2 Sam. 2:8), perhaps a way for ancient scribes to avoid any reference to the pagan god of ancient Canaan known as Baal. Some scholars propose that Ishvi, Ishbaal, and Ish-bosheth are alternate names for one and the same person.
51. Gilead was a region on the east bank of the Jordan River, and Geshur was located in the vicinity of the Golan Heights. The Jezreel Valley lies near Mount Gilboa between the hill-country of Samaria and the Galilee. Benjamin was the smallest of the twelve tribes of Israel, and the one to which King Saul and his sons belonged. Ephraim was another Israelite tribe whose homeland was centered in the hill-country around the city of Shechem.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“SHALL THE SWORD DEVOUR FOREVER?”
1. Jabesh-Gilead was the frontier town on the far side of the Jordan River that Saul saved from the Ammonites at the very outset of his kingship, and now the townsfolk were repaying a debt of honor to their dead savior. See chapter 2.
2. Adapted from JPS.
3. Gibeon was located a few miles northwest of Jerusalem, and the pool mentioned in the Bible is identified with a deep pit cut into the native rock, eighty-two feet deep and thirty-seven feet wide, which was excavated in modern times.
4. Joab, Abishai, and Asahel were the sons of Zeruiah (2 Sam. 2:18), a woman who is identified as David's sister. (1 Chron. 2:16) Abner was the son of Ner (2 Sam. 2:12), a man who is identified as Saul's uncle. (1 Sam. 14:50).
5. Adapted from JPS and AB.
6. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Books V-VIII, vol. 5, 365.
7. Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), vol. 2, 266, 267. “The ‘game’ they played was no game but a group of serious duels in the full technical sense of the term…. It shows that this form of military engagement, possibly under the Philistine influence, had been taken over as an accepted practice by the professional soldiers, the picked men of valor of both royal households.”
8. New JPS, 472, n. f.
9. Adapted from JPS and New JPS.
10. Clinton Bailey, “How Desert Culture Helps Us Understand the Bible,” Bible Review 7, no. 4 (August 1991): 20.
11. Abishai, like his brothers, is depicted as a man with a rash nature and a taste for rough justice. For example, when David and Abishai came upon the slumbering Saul, it was Abishai who proposed to assassinate him in his sleep. “Let me strike him and pin him to the ground with one thrust of the spear,” Abishai implored David. “I will not have to strike twice.” (1 Sam. 26:8) (NEB) David refused to allow the assassination of King Saul, but he would be forced to contend with the impulsive “sons of Zeruiah”— Joab and Abishai—yet again.
12. Adapted from JPS and New JPS.
13. Adapted from JPS and New JPS.
14. Anson Rainey, “Concubine,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, corrected ed. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, n.d.), vol. 5, 862.
15. Adapted from JPS and New JPS.
16. The fact that David would be forbidden to remarry his wife under biblical law (Deut. 24:1–4) apparently does not occur to him or the biblical author, perhaps because, as some scholars propose, the Book of Deuteronomy was not yet in existence.
17. Adapted from JPS.
18. J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented Women, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, supplement series 163 (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1993): 22.
19. Adapted from JPS.
20. Adapted from New JPS and NEB.
21. Adapted from JPS and AB.
22. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 166–167; Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 102.
23. Bright, History of Israel, 192; McCarter, II Samuel, 122.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CITY OF DAVID
1. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 1, 285, citing, inter alia, Targum Yerushalmi, MHG I, and Tehillim 76.
2. Weisfeld, David the King, 167, citing Pirke Rabbi Eliezer 36.
3. A very different tale is told in the Book of Judges, where it is reported that, shortly after the death of Joshua, “the children of Judah fought against Jerusalem, and took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and set the city on fire.” (Judges 1:8) Amihai Mazar, one of the leading excavators of Jerusalem, shrugs off the inconsistent report in Judges as either “fictional” or perhaps a distorted memory of an assault by non-Israelites. Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000–586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 333.
4. Bright, History of Israel, 195.
5. McCarter, II Samuel, 134–135.
6. McCarter, II Samuel, 140. David was expressing a distaste for the disabled that pervades the Bible, whose authors regarded a person with certain physical imperfections as ritually impure and unfit to participate in ceremonies of worship and sacrifice. (Lev. 21:16–23, Deut. 23:1–2) Thus, the Bible links David's hatred for “the lame and the blind” to the laws of ritual purity. “That is why they say: ‘No one who is blind or lame shall come into the Lord's house.’ ” (2 Sam. 5:8) (NEB)
7. The excavation of a vertical shaft beneath the walls of Jerusalem in the nineteenth century by the British army engineer Charles Warren prompted a flurry of enthusiasm among Bible scholars, who identified the so-called Warren Shaft with the watercourse that is apparently mentioned in the biblical account of David's assault on the city. More recent and more temperate archaeologists are no longer convinced that the Warren Shaft dates as far back as the events described in the Bible.
8. The eyesight of the patriarch Isaac was impaired in his old age (Gen. 27:1), and the patriarch Jacob suffered an injury to his thigh during his wrestling match with God. (Gen. 32:26)
9. McCarter, II Samuel, 138–139, citing, inter alia, A. Finklestein, Pirke Rabbi Eliezer 36, Josephus, and J. Heller.
10. Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 37.
11. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
12. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 165.
13. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 166–167, citing Hannelis Schulte (biblical citations omitted).
14. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, The Theology of Israel's Historical Traditions, trans. D.M.G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 39.
15. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 230.
16. Adapted from New JPS.
17. The Millo is believed to have been an earthwork, perhaps a ravine filled and packed with soil and debris, which was used to create building sites on the slope of the peak where the original Jebusite citadel and the City of David were located. The Chronicler, by the way, adds an intriguing detail that is missing from the Book of Samuel: “Joab restored the remainder of the city.” (1 Chron. 11:8) (AB)
18. Tyre was the capital of ancient Phoenicia, which was located on the northern frontier of Israel in what is now Lebanon. According to the Bible, King Hiram was still on the throne several decades later and provided cedar and craftsmen to King Solomon to build the Temple at Jerusalem. (1 Kings 5:15–26) The cedars of lebanon were valued as building materials in the ancient world and were used in the construction of temples and palaces as far away as Egypt in the fourth millennium B.C.E. and Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E.
19. A concubine, as the term is used in the Bible, was not merely a mistress or a sex slave. Rather, she was a “secondary wife” who enjoyed some, if not all, of the legal protection afforded to a wife whose ma
rriage had been ritually consecrated. Crucially, the offspring of a man's concubine were recognized as his children for purposes of inheritance and succession. The fussy author of Chronicles, apparently sensitive to the unsavory associations of concubinage, refers only to David's wives. (1 Chron. 14:3)
The head count of David's children varies from eleven to seventeen in the ancient versions of the Hebrew Bible.
20. Adapted from AB. Other translations of the “troubled” text of 2 Sam. 5:24 are far less lucid. What the Anchor Bible renders as “the sound of the wind in the asherahs” is translated in the JPS as “the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees” and in the NEB as “a rustling sound in the tree-tops.”
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 35