21. Adapted from JPS and AB. McCarter points out that “Geba” appears in place of “Gibeon” in the Masoretic Text, but he favors “Gibeon,” which appears in the Septuagint. “Gibeon” also appears in 1 Chronicles 14:16 in the Masoretic Text.
22. The site of Kiriath-jearim, sometimes also called Baalah and Kiriatbaal in the Bible, is believed to be located fourteen miles northwest of Jerusalem. (Josh 15:9, 1 Chron 13:5)
23. Yahweh Sabaoth is conventionally translated as “Lord of Hosts,” a phrase that does not convey the martial splendor that the biblical author intended.
24. The mice are mentioned in the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text, which refers only to the tumors. Some Bible commentators, including Martin Luther, have suggested that the Bible preserves the memory of an outbreak of bubonic plague that originated with diseased rodents from ships calling at the ports of the seafaring Philistines. Others propose that the tumors were symptoms of hemorrhoids or dysentery.
25. R. A. Carlson, David, the Chosen King (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1964), 59, citing but criticizing W. R. Arnold and W. Caspari.
26. The Hebrew word customarily rendered as “thousand” (elep) in various translations of the Bible may refer to a military unit rather than an actual head count. Thus, rather than a vast army of thirty thousand soldiers, David may have been accompanied by thirty units of infantry, each one consisting of only a dozen or so men.
27. Adapted from JPS and New JPS.
Obed-edom is described in the Bible as a Gittite (2 Sam. 6:10), that is, a man from the Philistine territory of Gath, whose king David had once served as a mercenary. Israel under King David, as we shall see, was multiculturally diverse, and even Philistines were admitted to the inner circles of his court. Remarkably, the Philistine from Gath was able to safely cohabit with the Ark even though a native-born Israelite died when he merely touched it.
28. The words attributed to David (“I'll bring the blessing back to my own house!”) appear in the so-called Lucianic recension of the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text. “In view of the light it casts on David's motives,” observes P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “it might have been deleted in MT by a scribe who wanted to protect David.” McCarter, II Samuel, 165–166.
29. Adapted from New JPS and AB.
30. Adapted from JPS.
31. Adapted from JPS and New JPS.
32. Adapted from AB and New JPS.
33. Adapted from AB and New JPS.
34. Adapted from AB and New JPS.
35. David M. Howard Jr., “David (Person),” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 2, 44.
36. Carlson, David, the Chosen King, 61, citing but criticizing W. R. Arnold. “The ideology and composition of 2 Sam. could hardly be more profoundly misjudged.”
37. Matitiahu Tsevat, “Studies in the Book of Samuel, III,” Hebrew Union College Annual 34 (1963): 73.
38. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 251.
39. See Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 73.
40. Elias Auerbach, Moses, trans. J. S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), 155.
Also see my Moses, chapter 9, “God of the Mountain, God of the Way.”
41. Deuteronomy may have been the “book of the Law” that was mysteriously discovered in the Temple at Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah in the late seventh century B.C.E. (2 Kings 22:8) Josiah was an ardent religious reformer who insisted on the centralization of worship in Jerusalem, and the newly discovered laws of Deuteronomy validated his reforms—a fact that leads some Bible scholars to suspect that the Book of Deuteronomy is a “pious fraud” that was composed at Josiah's direction!
42. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 73.
CHAPTER NINE
AT THE TIME WHEN KINGS GO FORTH TO BATTLE
1. Adapted from JPS.
2. The revenge of the Gibeonites on the house of Saul is reported in chapter 21 of Second Samuel, but Bible scholars suspect that the incident must have taken place before David offered to shelter Saul's last surviving son, Mephibosheth, as reported in chapter 9 of Second Samuel.
3. Adapted from JPS.
4. According to Numbers 25:4, God ordered Moses to “hang up [the chiefs of the people] unto Yahweh in the face of the sun” as punishment for the idolatry and “harlotry” committed by the Israelites with “the daughters of Moab,” and Deuteronomy 21:22–23 prescribes that the corpse of a man who has been executed for “a sin worthy of death” shall be hung from a tree. Both passages have been identified with crucifixion by some modern scholars, although the Masoretic Text and the Talmudic sages describe both forms of punishment as “hanging.”
5. The Bible knows Jonathan's lame son both as “Meribaal” (1 Chron. 8:34) and as “Mephibosheth” (2 Sam. 4:4), probably because the scribes who preserved the Masoretic Text sought to avoid any reference to the Canaanite deity Baal.
6. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, 353.
7. Clements, Abraham and David, 49, n. 10, citing Gerhard von Rad. Some scholars have speculated that the high priest Zadok may have been a native Jebusite rather than an Israelite, and the very notion that God might require a temple rather than a tent-shrine may be another borrowing from Canaanite religious practice. The Jebusite hypothesis and Zadok's bloodlines are hotly debated and sharply criticized by some Bible scholars. Chronicles, a relatively late book of the Bible, concocts a conventional lineage for Zadok, tracing him all the way back to Aaron, the brother of Moses and the first high priest of Israel. (1 Chron 5:27–41)
8. See Carlson, David, the Chosen King, 87; 89, f.n. 3; 91; 94–95, n. 2; citing, inter alia, J. R. Porter and Hos. 3:1.
9. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 118. Intriguingly, the Bible reveals that David himself was not a purebred Israelite. His ancestors included Tamar, a Canaanite woman who seduced her father-in-law, Judah (see chapter 11), and an equally beguiling Moabite woman, Ruth. (Ruth 4:18–22, 1 Chron. 2:3–15) When David fled from Saul and sought refuge in the wilderness, he prevailed upon the king of Moab to shelter his parents throughout his fugitive years. (1 Sam. 22:4) “Presumably, then,” explains P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “Jesse and his wife could claim some kind of a right of protection in Moab on the grounds of kinship.” McCarter, I Samuel, 359. And David courted and married a woman named Maacah, daughter of the king of Geshur, an Aramean kingdom located to the east of Galilee. (2 Sam. 3:3) Thus, some scholars suggest that David was an outsider—a habiru—who insinuated himself into the politics of ancient Israel. “The most important means of royal legitimation in the ancient Near East (and in most dynastic monarchies) is genealogical connection,” argues revisionist Bible scholar John van Seters. “But this is not used in the case of David. Isaiah can go back no further than Jesse when he speaks about a new dynastic beginning for the Judean monarchy.” John van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 152.
10. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 127.
11. McCarter, II Samuel, 255, 256, citing O. Eissfeldt.
12. R. N. Whybray, The Succession Narrative (Naperville, Ill.: A. R. Allenson, 1968), 3.
13. McCarter, II Samuel, 496–497, citing (and criticizing) the work of K. Ellinger.
14. Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1979), 362, 363, 371. “[The Israelites] had never thought of themselves as necessarily twelve in number. The twelve-tribe scheme was originated by David for administrative purposes in order to recruit the citizen army or militia, and possibly also to raise taxes and to impose the corvée.” Gottwald carefully qualifies his observations as only a “hypothesis.”
15. Bright, 200, 202.
16. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 137.
17. McCarter, II Samuel, 270.
18. Adapted from NEB.
CHAPTER TEN
THE DAUGHTER OF THE SEVEN GODS
1. The Hittites, a people that originated in the region that is now modern Turkey, once ruled an empire that contested with Egypt for dominanc
e in the ancient Near East. By the time of David, the Hittite empire was gone, although a few Hittites may have remained in the vicinity of Israel. The Bible, however, uses “Hittite” to identify several different peoples of the ancient world, including the Hivites and the Arameans, and so we cannot be sure of Uriah's origins.
2. Jan Wojcik, “Discriminations against David's Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature,” in Frontain and Wojcik, David Myth, 34.
3. Armstrong, Jerusalem, 40.
4. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 4, 103, citing, inter alia, Sanhendrin 107a.
5. Wojcik, “Discriminations against David's Tragedy,” in Frontain and Wojcik, David Myth, 29, citing, inter alia, Sanhendrin 107a.
6. Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.
7. Adapted from JPS.
8. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
9. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, 355.
10. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
11. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
12. William Foxwell Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, 2d ed. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), 305–306.
13. William Foxwell Albright, “Samuel and the Beginnings of the Prophetic Movement,” in intro. Harry M. Orlinsky, Interpreting the Prophetic Tradition: The Golden-son Lectures, 1955–1966 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1969), 161.
14. McCarter, I Samuel, 182.
15. McCarter, I Samuel, 182.
16. David is depicted as worshipping at “the house of Yahweh” (2 Sam. 12:20) (AB), but the Bible makes it clear that only a tent-shrine and not a temple was then in existence in Jerusalem. McCarter suggests that the “house of Yahweh” is either an anachronistic reference to the Temple of Solomon or else a Jebusite shrine that had been converted to the worship of Yahweh during the reign of King David. McCarter, II Samuel, 302.
17. Adapted from NEB, JPS, and AB.
18. J.P.E. Pedersen, Israel, vol. 4 (London: Oxford University Press: 1940), 455–457.
19. Walter Brueggemann, “The Trusted Creature,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 31, (1969): 489–490.
20. Some Bible critics have wondered out loud whether, in fact, Solomon was the one and only offspring of the adulterous affair, and the tale of an earlier child merely a cover story intended to conceal the illegitimate birth of the future king of Israel and builder of the Temple. Solomon's name may actually derive from the Hebrew word for “replacement,” and the argument has been made that Solomon was regarded by his mother as a replacement for the dead Uriah rather than for the fictional firstborn son who supposedly died.
21. Jan Wojcik, “Discriminations against David's Tragedy,” 26–27, citing Midrash Samuel.
22. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 4, 103, citing, inter alia, Shabbat 56a, Abodah Zarah 4b-5a. See also Wojcik, “Discriminations against David's Tragedy,” 29.
23. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 4, 104, citing, inter alia, Sanhedrin 107a.
24. Exum, Fragmented Women,173, 174.
25. Exum, Fragmented Women, 174, 175.
26. Frontain and Wojcik, David Myth, 3, describing the depiction of David and Bathsheba in Renaissance art and literature.
27. J. Blenkinsopp, “Theme and Motif in the Succession History (2 Sam. XI 2 ff) and the Yahwist Corpus,” in Supplements to Vetus Testamentum (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 52.
28. Heller, God Knows, 10.
29. Adapted from JPS and AB (emphasis added).
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE RAPE OF TAMAR
1. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
2. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
3. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
4. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
5. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
6. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
7. McCarter, II Samuel, 324, citing Sanhedrin 21a.
8. Gerald A. Larue, Sex and the Bible (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1983), 91–92.
9. Larue, Sex and the Bible, 91–92.
10. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 144.
11. Adapted from JPS.
12. Speiser, Genesis, 91–93. “Tradition had apparently set much store by these incidents, but the key to them had been lost somewhere in the intervening distances of time and space.”
13. James Plastaras, The God of Exodus (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1966), 208.
14. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
15. George Ridout, “The Rape of Tamar,” in Rhetorical Criticism, eds. Jared J. Jackson and Martin Kessler (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1974), 77.
16. Speiser, Genesis, 289–290.
17. G. E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 54–55.
18. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 58, n. 16. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see The Harlot by the Side of the Road, chapter 15, “The Rape of Tamar.”
19. Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, “Tamar and the Limits of Patriarchy,” in Anti-Covenant, ed. Mieke Bal (Sheffield, England: Almond Press, 1989), 140, citing a translation by Joennek Bekkenkamp.
20. McCarter, II Samuel, 322.
21. Dijk-Hemmes, “Tamar,” 140–141.
22. Jared J. Jackson, “David's Throne,” Canadian Journal of Theology 11, no. 3 (1965): 189.
23. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 127, 137.
24. Curiously, the Septuagint reports that David did nothing to punish Amnon and explains why, but the second phrase (“he would not hurt Amnon because he was his eldest son”) is missing from the Masoretic Text. Some scholars suspect that the phrase was censored out of the Masoretic Text to downplay the fact that David allowed his daughter's rapist to go unpunished. Others insist that it is merely an example of a scribal error known as “haplography,” that is, a phrase that was lost when some ancient scribe accidentally skipped a line while making a copy of the sacred text.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“BLOODSTAINED FIEND OF HELL!”
1. Adapted from JPS.
2. Adapted from JPS.
3. McCarter, II Samuel, 353.
4. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
5. Adapted from AB.
6. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
7. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
8. Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.
9. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
10. Absalom was actually the third-born son of David. The second-born, Chileab, disappears from the Bible after the report of his birth (2 Sam. 3:3), and he played no reported role in the struggle among David's sons to succeed their father on the throne of Israel. So inconsequential was the second son of David that the biblical authors were even confused about his name—he is sometimes called Chileab (2 Sam. 3:3), sometimes Daniel. (1 Chron. 3:1)
11. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin, 141, 143.
12. O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, trans. P. R. Ackroyd (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 12.
13. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
14. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
15. Adapted from JPS.
16. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 102.
17. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
18. Adapted from JPS and AB.
19. Adapted from JPS.
20. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
21. McCarter, II Samuel, 372.
22. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
23. Adapted from JPS and AB.
24. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
25. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
26. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
27. Adapted from AB.
28. Bright, History of Israel, 207.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“O ABSALOM, MY SON, MY SON!”
1. Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.
2. Adapted from NEB and JPS.
3. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
4. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
5. Adapted from JPS and NEB.
6. Thanks to the free-associative narrative style of the Bible, the incident is meant to remind reade
rs of earlier passages that faintly prefigure various events in the life story of David. Two spies from the conquering army of Israel were similarly sheltered from a king's patrol by a heroic Canaanite woman named Rahab, according to a passage in the Book of Joshua. As a reward for her heroism, Rahab was spared during the invasion of Canaan, and she identified herself to the Israelites by hanging a red thread from her window. (Josh. 2:1–19) Still earlier in the biblical narrative, a red thread figures in the tale of Tamar, who was impregnated with twin sons by her father-in-law and used a red thread to identify which of the two babies was born first. (Gen. 38:28) And the heroism of Rahab in lowering the Israelite spies to safety is reprised in Michal's rescue of David from assassins sent by King Saul! All of these dreamy linkages were meant to suggest the operation of divine will at every moment in the events of history.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 36