The Secret Book of Kings

by Yochi Brandes

  “Meet Ahithophel,” she said proudly, “the father of my father, Eliam. He is the only person who can get us out of the dire straits we’re in. His advice is like the word of God.”

  “My advisors are no less clever than your grandfather,” replied the king in despair.

  But the plan that Ahithophel laid out left David agape. He knew it would restore the people’s love for him.

  Bathsheba stuffed a feather pillow under her dress and walked around the palace appearing quite pregnant. Half a year later, the king’s heralds spread word of the new son born to the king and Bathsheba, his wife. This news delighted the nation not one bit, but rather only intensified the outrage. “She is not the king’s wife!” the people cried. “She is the wife of Uriah the Hittite.”

  Ahithophel reassured David that everything was going according to plan and let his good friend Nathan the Prophet in on the secret. Nathan was overjoyed at the opportunity that had fallen into his lap to take the place of Gad as court prophet. One day, as the king was sitting as usual upon the throne of judgment, Nathan appeared before him, demanding that David listen to what he had to say about a matter and pronounce his judgment.

  Everyone who was there followed the prophet’s sad story with bated breath as he described the two neighbors, one a wealthy man and the other a pauper, and they wiped the tears from their eyes as they heard about the ugly fate of the pauper’s lamb.

  “Well,” the prophet asked the king when he had finished his story, “what should be done to the rich man who slaughtered the beloved lamb of his impoverished neighbor?”

  “As surely as the God of Israel lives,” the outraged king cried, “the man who did this deserves to die!”

  “You are the man,” Nathan thundered.

  The people gasped and regarded with admiration the brave prophet who would dare to reproach the king without fear or prejudice.

  “This is what God says,” the prophet went on. “‘I anointed you king over Israel in place of Saul. I gave his house to you, and his wives, and his kingdom. And I gave you even more. Why did you despise the word of God? Why did you strike down Uriah the Hittite with the sword? Why have you taken the pauper’s lamb?”

  “I deserve to die,” David mumbled the words that Ahithophel had put in his mouth, while at the same time bursting into rather convincing tears. “I have sinned against my God.”

  The furious eyes of the prophet softened abruptly. “God forgives those who confess their sins.” He was silent a moment, looking around at the people standing before him. “What punishment befits the king who has taken the pauper’s lamb?”

  They stared at him, perplexed. “You just said God forgives those who confess their sins,” they mumbled.

  “There is no forgiveness without punishment,” the prophet declared firmly, and turned back to face David. “The God of Israel will take away your sin, but the son born to you will die.”

  The people moaned in sorrow. “Ask our God to let the child live!” voices cried from all directions.

  But the prophet insisted, “The man who stole the pauper’s lamb must be punished. The child will die!”

  Seven days later, news of the baby’s premature death spread through the land, and the nation was moved by the king’s impressive ability to accept the judgment that had been imposed upon him.

  “He ended his mourning two days later?” they marveled.

  “That very same day,” came the reply. “The king washed, put on lotions, changed his clothes, and went to the Tabernacle to pray that God might send consolation to his miserable wife, Bathsheba, who had lost a husband and a son in a single year.”

  The people of Israel joined in his prayers, asking God to give the pauper’s innocent lamb another son in place of the son who had been taken from her.

  Rage bubbled up through my body and made my blood boil. How dare Nathan say that God gave David Saul’s house and kingdom? Who does this prophet mean when he speaks of Father’s wives that were given to David? Rizpah is one wife, so who is the other? Who do the people think of when they hear this nonsense?

  “Nathan’s parable is completely backwards,” Nebat said, breaking the silence. “The one who died was the pauper, not his lamb.”

  “Eventually, the people will realize they’ve been deceived,” said Mephiel hopefully. “The entire nation can’t be deceived for long.”

  Rizpah chuckled. “The parable of the pauper’s lamb will yet become the very symbol of fearless and profound prophecy. This Ahithophel is a genius.”

  “It’s too bad Father never had such an advisor,” Armoni sighed.

  The word “Father” on the tongues of Mephiel and Armoni stirred my emotions anew every time. It was only when they spoke it that I remembered they were my brothers. The rest of the time I felt as if they were my sons.

  Armoni glanced at his mother, expecting her to agree, but Rizpah furrowed her brow and said nothing. “Bathsheba didn’t come to the palace to stay,” she said at last.

  We looked at her in confusion, trying to decipher her meaning.

  “She came to the palace to bear the crown prince.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Micah. “If and when Bathsheba gives birth, her son would be the youngest of the king’s sons.”

  Rizpah did not argue, but a year later, after Solomon was born, she reminded me of her conjecture and even reiterated it with greater confidence. “Bathsheba came to the palace to bear the crown prince.”

  “Solomon is the king’s youngest son,” I said dismissively.

  “People assume the firstborn son will inherit the crown, but the prostitutes who raised me heard stories of the palace intrigues of neighboring peoples, and they told me that most of the kings who have ultimately risen to the throne were not firstborn sons. Do you know what has enabled them to inherit the crown?”

  “They must be the most ambitious sons, the craftiest, the most devious, and possibly the cruelest,” I replied.

  “Those are important qualities indeed, but you are ascribing them to the wrong person. Most kings rise to the throne thanks to their mothers. A king has many wives, and each of them dreams of giving birth to the crown prince and becoming the queen mother. The competition is fierce, and the winner is the most ambitious, craftiest, most devious, and cruelest woman of them all. I know David’s wives, at least the most prominent ones, and I have no doubt that Bathsheba will be able to defeat them all. On top of everything else, she has at her side the wisest advisor there ever was. Solomon will be the crown prince, unless she bears another son and decides to push for him.”

  “Amnon, the firstborn, will never surrender his position. He isn’t especially impressive, but he has no shortage of aggression and ambition. That’s what Micah says about him.”

  “But his mother, Ahinoam of Jezreel, is a weak woman, and it’s the mother that counts.”

  “Not always. The nation of Israel crowned my father when his mother was no longer alive, and David lost his own mother when he was three. Israel’s first two kings took the throne by themselves; no mother pushed them along.”

  “You’re right about your father and wrong about the son of Jesse. It’s true that David did lose his mother at a young age, but he was raised by his eldest sister Zeruiah, who was like a mother to him, and she decided that he would be a king.”

  “How can you say that? You don’t know her.”

  Rizpah laughed scornfully. “I know Joab and Abishai, and I knew Asahel before he was murdered by Abner, and I know that David would have never captured the throne without them. And what do the three of them have in common? Zeruiah, of course. It is no coincidence that they decided to take her name rather than their father’s.”

  She grew quiet and lowered her head. She blushed. “For many years I accused myself of possibly being a member of that breed of women who push their way into the king’s bed in order to try to bear the crown prince. You must remember that after Ishvi was murdered, Adriel and Paltiel declared that they would serve as mere tem
porary rulers, and then after six years my son Armoni would assume the throne. I couldn’t understand how I was capable of rejoicing at the thought of my son’s future coronation after the terrible tragedies that had crushed our family. I feared that maybe deep inside I’d wanted it to happen.”

  “The tragedies were not your fault.”

  “I suddenly wasn’t so sure.”

  Rizpah’s odd confession brought back the memories I’d been working hard to forget. My life experience had taught me never to look back. The longing for my dead loved ones could be the end of me. I must look forward and hold on to what I still have, and I still do have so much: Nebat, the seven boys, Rizpah.

  I got up and hugged her. “You are not a member of that breed of women. While you’re no less intelligent than Bathsheba, you lack her kind’s most important trait: cruelty. You don’t have a cruel bone in your body.”

  We both laughed with relief and went on gossiping about the schemes of Ahithophel and Bathsheba. We regarded the court intrigue of David’s palace as amusing theater that had nothing to do with us. Could we have foreseen the calamity hovering over our heads? And even if so, could we have prevented it? These questions have been eating away at me for twenty years, and they drive me mad.

  * * *

  As if to confirm Rizpah’s suspicions, Nathan the Prophet appeared before David and informed him that God loved Bathsheba’s son very much and, thus, the boy would be named Jedediah—“friend to God.” The king was very glad to hear that God could fall in love with babies the moment they were born but reminded the prophet that the parents were the ones to name their children.

  “The God of Israel has decided that the child’s name will be Jedediah,” the prophet insisted.

  “His name is Solomon,” declared David.

  “Fine,” the prophet growled in submission. “I will call him Jedediah for God’s sake, and you can go on calling him whatever you want.”

  Micah described this public event in such an entertaining manner that we were nearly choking with laughter. Our days in the palace were nothing but dull routine, and in the absence of anything new in our own lives, we took a great deal of interest in the scheming of Ahithophel and Bathsheba, and we thirstily drank up the stories that Micah brought us. The one who was most keen for them was Rizpah, who began to devote the majority of her time and thought to them. The seven boys had other things to do, like riding horses, reading, playing music, and studying. Micah’s stories amused them and brought some color into their lives, but the stories never became their main interest.

  “Ahithophel has killed two birds with one stone,” Rizpah marveled. “He has turned Solomon into the favorite son, the beloved of God, and also put him on a par with Abraham and Jacob, the fathers of our nation, whose names were changed by God himself.”

  “Perhaps it was Bathsheba’s idea,” I said. “I’m curious to see that woman in the flesh.”

  I only got the chance to do so five years later, at the proclamation ceremony of the crown prince. David was fifty-six years old, and judging by his robust health and sharp mind he still had many years ahead of him on the throne, but Ahithophel had convinced him to officially proclaim Amnon his crown prince so as to spare the younger princes, who might otherwise have aspirations for the position and allow themselves to be dragged into dangerous scheming. When Micah brought us this news, I teasingly told Rizpah that she might have been wrong about Bathsheba and Ahithophel, for here they were submissively accepting the appointment of the firstborn son as crown prince. But Rizpah remained confident in her assertion that all of Ahithophel’s counsel was aimed at nothing other than making Solomon king, and that even if the details of his plot were not yet clear, they would become so in time.

  I had no interest in taking part in the proclamation ceremony, but the king’s messengers delivered the invitations to our doorway and ordered us all to appear.

  “What’s changed?” I wondered. “Why has David suddenly remembered that we exist?”

  “He wants the crowds to see that even the descendants of Saul are swearing allegiance to the crown prince,” explained Micah. “Ahithophel told him it was important.”

  “Of course,” Rizpah added proudly. “Everyone in the land loves our boys. Whenever they see them, they long for King Saul.”

  Indeed, even though we were imprisoned in the palace and forbidden from leaving the grounds, our boys’ reputations were known everywhere. I don’t know who spread the tales, but it must have been that the visitors who ran into them in the palace courtyard from time to time brought back admiring stories of their beauty and height, and perhaps even about their wisdom and kindness, so reminiscent of their father and grandfather that hearts ached with longing for him.

  “Don’t delude yourself,” I said bitterly. “The people have quite forgotten their first king.”

  We attended the ceremony as required, watching indifferently as Amnon struggled to squeeze his broad face into the expression of a crown prince. He looked so pathetic in his elegant royal gown that we could barely contain our laughter. I noticed that almost everyone’s eyes were pinned on Absalom, who stood beside his father with Kileab, the son of Abigail. I tried to look away from David. Whenever I saw him, or even merely thought of him, an involuntary shiver still sliced down my body and filled me with feelings of guilt.

  “Absalom is gorgeous,” I whispered to Rizpah. “We have to admit that he is even better looking than our boys.”

  “Too good looking,” Rizpah declared scornfully, and she put her arms around her twin sons, standing on either side of her. “Our sons are men. Absalom looks like a statue.”

  Nathan the Prophet announced importantly that, by the king’s decree, his firstborn son, Amnon, would inherit the throne when the time came, and the crowd replied with a recitation of the oath of allegiance. Out of boredom, I looked to my side, at the seating area of the wives and princes, and ran my eyes over them, trying to figure out which ones I was able to recognize. They all appeared focused on the ceremony, so I could stare at them as much as I liked. I suddenly noticed that one of the wives standing across from me had turned her head in my direction. Standing at her side was a chubby boy of about five, chewing on a mouthful of figs.

  I immediately knew who they were.

  Bathsheba’s eyes ran over my ankles, up to my waist, past my neck, and locked in on my face. I tried to smile at her, but her gaze paralyzed me. I couldn’t move.

  After the ceremony I told Rizpah about the petrifying way Bathsheba had glared at me. “That woman scares me,” I admitted.

  “Amnon is the one who should be afraid. He’s the first one she’ll take out to make way for her fat son. I still don’t know how she’ll do it, but it’s only a question of time.”

  That time arrived sooner than expected. Rizpah had assumed that Bathsheba and Ahithophel would wait for Solomon to come of age, but the fate of the crown prince was sealed within only seven years, when desperate screams sliced through the air in the middle of the night, and everyone in the palace awoke with a start. We, too, were awakened, and before we could figure out what was going on, Micah got into his wheelbarrow and rode quickly to the center of the action. But this time we had no need for his spying. The information quickly made its way to us in the form of Tamar daughter of Maakah, Absalom’s sister, who was running amok all through the palace, ashes in her hair, her gown torn, scratching at her forehead with her fingernails, pacing and screaming.

  Rizpah watched her in horror. I knew she was recalling what Abner had done to her, and I tried to get her to come back home, but she wouldn’t move and kept her piercing gaze fixed on Tamar.

  “Amnon!” Tamar screamed. “Amnon has defiled me!”

  By the time Micah returned with the rumors he’d been working so hard to collect all morning, Rizpah had already recovered. She had recovered so much, in fact, that she grilled Micah about the relationship between Absalom and Ahithophel.

  “They’re friends,” Micah admitted. “But what has tha
t got to do with the rape of Tamar?”

  “How friendly are they?” Rizpah demanded to know.

  “Ahithophel is Absalom’s advisor.”

  “And what does David have to say about that?”

  “David only rarely needs Ahithophel’s counsel, and he doesn’t mind if the man spends his many hours of leisure time with Absalom.”

  Rizpah nodded her head slowly. “That’s what I thought,” she muttered.

  We knew she wouldn’t share her thoughts with us before she formed a full and clear picture in her mind. In the meantime, Micah satisfied our curiosity, reporting daily on any new developments. David’s reaction surprised us. Rather than putting his rapist son on trial and punishing him, or at the very least removing him from his position as crown prince, the king demanded that his daughter keep quiet, and he returned to his usual business as if nothing had happened.

  “David knows that Tamar wasn’t really raped,” Rizpah said, not hiding her pleasure at the astonished looks on our faces. “The moment I saw her screaming I knew it was an act.”

  “How did you know?” Nebat interrupted.

  Rizpah and I exchanged quick looks. The five older sons remembered Abner’s rape and understood that Rizpah was speaking from experience, but Nebat, and perhaps Micah and Benjamin as well, were probably too young to remember and most likely had heard nothing about it.

  “Why would she do such a thing?” Elhanan asked in wonder, and Joel seconded him, adding that a girl lying about rape caused much more harm to herself than to her alleged rapist. No one would want to marry her, and she would remain alone and desolate her whole life. He said the word “desolate” with such empathy that my heart ached. Rizpah and I had decided long ago that our survival hinged on remaining focused on what we had left and not what had been taken away, but every once in a while we gave in and cried in each other’s arms over the isolation our beloved boys had to suffer. We yearned to see them marry and have children, but we knew the chances were slim. They did visit the whorehouse of the king’s soldiers, which David had given them special permission to do, and sometimes we allowed ourselves to dream of a girl, even a prostitute, who would win one of their hearts and become his wife. But the years wore on, and none of our sons started a family.