The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  He was almost restless in his successes.

  David plucked dry ears of the ornamental wheat that grew in the beds of his garden. He wandered toward the southern parapet of the roof, rubbing the ears in his palms, placing fresh kernels between his front teeth and cracking them. He glanced down into the city. A sparkling caught his eye, a flash of sunlight in one of the courtyards below. It was water in the cistern of a wealthy house. David looked more closely and saw a woman bathing there, alone, secluded. She lay on her back in the bright water, her body ivory white, her black hair floating like a radiance round her head. She had kicked a delicate foot. That was the flash that caught the king’s eye. And now he could not take his eyes from her.

  In a little while she rolled over, stood, and stepped up onto the pavement, raining water. She covered herself in a blue robe and vanished into the house.

  David woke. The wheat had turned glutinous on his tongue. He rushed into his own house and ran downstairs to the chambers of his secretary, Seraiah. He described the house with its open cistern. He named the street that bordered it, and he said, “Who lives there?”

  Seraiah said, “Ah, that’s Uriah’s house.”

  “Uriah? The Hittite? The building belongs to my Uriah?”

  “Ever since we were running from Saul, he has been your soldier. The same one.”

  “I appointed him an officer next to Joab,” David said. “He is very loyal.”

  “And he’s fighting even now at Rabbah.”

  “But there’s a woman in his cistern, someone I’ve never seen before.”

  Seraiah smiled. “Old Uriah has married a young wife. She’s the daughter of another good fighter of yours, Eliam—and her grandfather is Ahithophel.”

  “Yes, yes, friends of mine—but I’ve never seen her before,” the king repeated thoughtfully.

  His secretary nodded.

  Suddenly David demanded: “What is her name?”

  Seraiah said, “Bathsheba. Eliam called her his Daughter of Abundance.”

  “Bathsheba,” David said.

  That night he couldn’t sleep. Nor could he think of anything but the woman bathing. The image caused him a greater restlessness than he had ever suffered before, and the more he considered it in solitude and in darkness, the more convinced was David that he could not survive this torment.

  “Tobias!” cried the king. “Tobias!”

  An aide appeared in the doorway.

  David said, “Go to the house of Uriah the Hittite and tell his wife that the king of Israel has need of her immediately.”

  Tobias lit two oil lamps in David’s room, then left.

  David lay on his couch unmoving, willing himself not to think, waiting. He decided that he did not know what would happen. The night would grind on and he would see where it led him.

  But when the woman whom he had seen swimming in sunlight actually entered his bedroom and stood between the lamp flames looking at him, he knew. He knew what he would do.

  “Bathsheba,” David whispered, his voice thickened, breathless: “come here.”

  She came toward him like a white cloud. He put his arms into the coolness and drew her down to himself, and then he was making love to her and there was no stopping now, no thinking, no talking—but David heard someone sobbing and he hoped it was himself. He hoped it wasn’t Bathsheba. How dreadful, if he had caused Bathsheba to cry!

  Shortly before dawn the woman left the king’s palace and returned to her own home.

  David didn’t see her after that. The opportunity to meet seemed never to arise—and her courtyard, when he looked into it, was always vacant.

  But two months later, on the first day of the week, Bathsheba sent a message by her maid to the king, saying, “I am with child.”

  On the third day of that same week, a brief command was received by Joab at Rabbah:

  Uriah the Hittite, having served with distinction, deserves a rest. Cousin, send him home a while. Tell him his bed is soft and his wife is lonely.

  King David had no better servant than Uriah. None was more honorable, none more loyal than he. It should have been anticipated, then, that the man would greet his king as soon as he returned to Jerusalem. Yet David seemed baffled by the Hittite’s visitation, his helmet beneath his arm, his coat of mail still bound to his body.

  David said, “You haven’t bathed yet.”

  Uriah grinned, black grit wreathing his countenance. “I haven’t been home yet, sir.” He had a square face and generous eyelids. His hair was going grey. “I came first to venerate my lord.”

  “Ah,” said David. It was the evening of the Sabbath. His own hair and beard were perfumed, a contrast that caused him some discomfort. He, too, smiled and said, “How is Joab?”

  “The anvil? Oh, he laughs and jokes and loves us all.”

  David frowned. “I asked about Joab.”

  “I know.” Uriah ducked his head. “I was poking fun at the commander.”

  “Oh. Of course. And how do the troops fare?”

  “We do not rush matters,” Uriah said more seriously. “Few of us have died. Joab is more patient than I’ve ever known him to be.”

  “Good, good,” said David. Now he smiled like sunlight and put his hand on the officer’s shoulder. “Thank you for the news,” he said. “Go down to your house and your new wife, Uriah. Wash your feet. Take your ease. Have pleasure. Go.”

  Uriah bowed and went out the door.

  King David took his own ease that night. He slept better than he had in a week.

  But when he stepped outside in the morning to speak a word to Benaiah, he found Uriah the Hittite sleeping in the doorway with the rest of the king’s bodyguard.

  “Uriah!” David shouted, louder than he had intended.

  The man woke and bounded to his feet.

  “Why are you here? Why didn’t you go down to your own house?”

  The Hittite said, “All my brothers are camping in the open field. Shall I eat and drink and lie with my wife when they have no comfort at all?”

  David frowned. He glanced at Benaiah. “You let a tired soldier sleep here, as if on duty?”

  Poor Benaiah didn’t know how to answer such a question.

  David stared at Uriah a moment, then he said, “Stay with me the rest of the day. Eat with me. Drink with me.” He smiled and said, “These are commands, Uriah. Obey me.”

  Uriah did. On the first day of the week David fed him royal food, and from noon until night he gave him a rich wine for drinking.

  When it was dark outside, Uriah went to the king and threw his arms around him, a crushing embrace.

  David laughed. “You’re drunk, my friend,” he said.

  Uriah tipped his strong, grey face to the ceiling and roared with laughter.

  David said, “Go home. Go home to the woman who is waiting to please her soldier. Go.”

  Uriah winked at the king. He waggled a forefinger of caution, then rolled out of David’s chambers, down the stairs, out of the palace.

  David was too taut to sleep again that night.

  As soon as dawn broke in the east, he dressed and went downstairs. He opened the great doors of the palace, and his heart sank. There was Uriah, snoring among the king’s bodyguard, still stinking and unwashed.

  So the king returned to his room. In his own hand he wrote on a new clay tablet:

  Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, then draw back that he may be struck down and die.

  David closed the tablet, sealed it with his royal seal, carried it out to Uriah the Hittite and gave it to him, saying, “Return to Rabbah. When you get there, give this to Joab.”

  On the Sabbath of the second week a messenger came to the king in his palace, craving an audience. David met him in the midst of his bodyguard. Benaiah was present.

  “They may all hear your news,” said David.

  So the messenger said, “Joab told me to ride as fast as I could, to tell you that he attempted a direct attack on the city. But archers
shot at your servants from the wall. Four of the king’s officers are dead. Uriah the Hittite is dead, too.”

  David nodded sadly. “Tell Joab not to let this matter trouble him, for the sword devours now one and now another.”

  But when Benaiah went and told Bathsheba that her husband and his friend Uriah had died, she lifted her voice in a loud wail of lamentation. She went into her courtyard and paced continually, weeping and wringing her hands.

  David watched her from his lofty gardens. He watched for seven days, a proper period for mourning.

  On the first day of the third week, King David sent Tobias and ten royal maidservants to Uriah’s house with crimson garments, a gold necklace, and an onyx brooch carved white on black. They returned to the palace with the pale Bathsheba now robed in exquisite raiment, and she became his wife.

  Late in the winter, during the latter rains when almond trees bloomed white in the streets of Jerusalem, Bathsheba gave birth to a son.

  She never named the child.

  David thought to name him, for the baby was alabaster, fragile, translucent, and his father’s heart was moved by the pale beauty and the weakness of the tiny boy.

  But David was interrupted.

  A prophet named Nathan requested an audience, saying he could not wait till the child was circumcised. The matter wanted an immediate judgment.

  “Sir,” said Nathan, “two men have a dispute. The one is rich, with many flocks and herds. The other is so poor that he had but one little ewe lamb which he brought up with his children. She used to eat from his table, as dear as a daughter to him.

  “Now, a traveler came to the rich man, but he was unwilling to give up any of his own sheep, so he seized the poor man’s lamb and slaughtered her and cooked her for his visitor’s food.”

  When David heard the nature of the dispute and the injustice done to someone so powerless, he was outraged. “As the Lord lives,” he said, “anyone who can do such a thing deserves to die.”

  “Is that,” said Nathan, “the king’s judgment?”

  David said, “Surely the rich man must restore to the poor man four times what he took.”

  Nathan said, “How does one restore a life?”

  David looked at the prophet with exasperation. “Even a rich man can’t make the dead to live again.”

  “Exactly,” Nathan said. He took a stand immediately before the king and said, “David, you are that rich man. As for the poor man, thus says the Lord: I delivered you from Saul. I gave you the houses of Judah and of Israel. I gave you wives—and if that were too little, I would add as much more. Why, then, have you despised the word of the Lord? Why have you slain Uriah the Hittite with the weapons of the Ammonites—and then taken his wife to be your wife?”

  David took hold of the throat of his garment and began to tear it slowly, from top to bottom. His face had gone haggard with grief.

  “I have sinned,” he whispered, staring at Nathan, his thin chest appearing where his royal robe had been. “I have sinned against the God of Israel.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Nathan! I have sinned!”

  “Yes.”

  In that same moment a nurse came to the king. When she saw his condition, she almost withdrew, but he said, “What!”

  She bowed and trembled. “Sir, I’m sorry,” she said in a faint voice. “Your son is sick.”

  “Which of my sons?” David cried. “Which one?”

  “The infant.”

  King David ran down the corridors of his palace. He ran to the thirty rooms reserved for his wives and his children. He ran into the apartments of Bathsheba, and found them crowded with women.

  “Get out!” he cried, and they departed in absolute silence.

  David saw the baby, seven days old. There could be no circumcision tomorrow. Its tiny body was hot and dry, its breath but fleeting pants. All its skin seemed shrunken, but the baby wasn’t crying. David’s son was not complaining. It turned huge eyes toward its father, and its father could not tolerate the trust he thought he saw in them.

  David rushed from the room. He fled upstairs to his own rooms and fell on his face and cried out, “Have mercy on me, O God! Wash me from my sin! I know my sin. I have seen my sin. It is against you that I have sinned, and you are right to punish me. Me, O Lord my God. Punish me—but let my poor son live—”

  All day long King David prayed, loud enough that Tobias and all the servants heard him. He didn’t eat. He fasted. And he prayed the next day, too, the eighth day of his young son’s life.

  “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,” he prayed. “O Lord, let me hear gladness again, that the bones which you have broken might rejoice—”

  Tobias came into the king’s room to read a message from Joab:

  I have taken Rabbah’s water supply. We are ready to take the city itself. Come, O King, and lead the defeat, lest it be called by my name.

  But David did not respond. He did not rise from the floor. He continued fasting and praying.

  Two days later Tobias came and read a second message:

  Are you the king, or am I? Which of us shall defeat the Ammonites for the Lord and for Israel?

  David remained where he was. Tobias had no evidence that he had even heard the words. Neither did Joab.

  On the fourteenth day after the birth of the infant, Joab wrote:

  Is the king of Israel dead, that he no longer answers his commander?

  And on the fifteenth day the nameless baby died.

  Tobias was afraid to tell David that the child was dead. He spoke to servants outside the chambers, saying, “When the baby was still alive the king wouldn’t listen. How can I say it’s dead? King David may do himself harm.”

  But David heard the whispering, and he called out, “Is my son dead?”

  Tobias couldn’t find the words. He stood mute in the hallway.

  But old Rothem, the ancient broom-woman, answered. “He is dead,” she said.

  David said nothing. Soon Tobias heard motion in the king’s apartment, water poured from jar to basin, the rustle of raiment.

  That evening the king appeared downstairs in the palace, his hair brushed clean, his red beard trimmed and anointed, his clothing clean. He went out to the tent where the Ark of God was, and he worshiped. Then he returned and called for food and ate.

  Tobias gaped at his lord the king. He was a helpful servant, but he was not old. There was much he did not understand.

  David saw his bewilderment and said, “As long as my son had life, I thought the Lord might be gracious and let him live. But now he is dead. No fasting can restore his life. I cannot make him live again. One day I shall go to him, but he will never return to me.”

  On the following day, King David rode out with Benaiah to Rabbah and joined Joab in fighting the Ammonites. Rabbah fell before their assault, and its citizens crept out like skeletons. Young King Hanun went down on his knees and begged for his life. David put the heel of his right foot on the back of Hanun’s neck, a sign of absolute subjection. Then there was brought to him a crown weighing sixty-five pounds, set with a most rare jewel. David went to a public place in the city and placed this crown upon his own head, declaring himself to be the king of the Ammonites.

  When all these wars had ceased, David remembered the day he had seen his small son sick, the tiny body tight inside its pitiful skin. He recalled the trust in the baby’s eyes, and how he rushed from the room in anguish. Now, these many days later, it occurred to him that he and the infant had not been alone in the room. A woman had been sitting and weeping silently behind him. She had stayed when he escaped. Bathsheba, the baby’s mother.

  In the days of his kingdom’s complete peace, then, David went and comforted his wife with soft words and with singing. Soon she conceived, and in midwinter, shortly after the barley fields had been sown, Bathsheba gave birth to a second son.

  On the day of its circumcision, they named the baby Solomon.

  Then Nathan the prophet came to
David and Bathsheba to say that the Lord loved this infant with a particular love. So they added to his name a second name: Jedidiah, Beloved of the Lord.

  V

  DAVID HAD MANY SONS older than Solomon. By his fortieth year he had produced a handsome generation from which would come a king to rule Judah and Israel in his stead.

  Hadn’t the Lord God promised it?

  For he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure.

  Born to David in Hebron—now grown and strong and stalwart, each in his own right—were five men. Amnon, the oldest, was a man of hungers and passions not unlike David’s own. Absalom, next oldest, was simply beautiful. He had that abundance of black hair which David had loved in Saul and Jonathan. The father’s heart was moved even just to gaze upon Absalom. A straight, smooth brow; a cunning mind; a man of sweet words; a man most politic and courtly, yes: he had a royal bearing.

  Adonijah, the third living son, displayed a tendency to pout. A bit withdrawing and woundable. But he was an excellent student! He needed no scribe to write his letters for him. David took pride in the learning of his third son.

  But he scarcely noticed the fourth and the fifth, perhaps because their births occurred when he was consumed with the consolidation of his kingdom. Shephathiah and Ithream, then, remained close to one another all their lives. They were the last children born in Hebron, just before David’s move to Jerusalem—and there the king’s new house seemed to teem with sons, thirteen born in less than ten years. It was natural that these two should form a quiet alliance. Neither one had aspirations to power nor any desire to reap the rewards of their parentage. When they were thirteen and fourteen years old they watched, as did everyone in the palace, the dramatic birth of a pale child, the surviving son of Bathsheba, Solomon; they noted how carefully the boy was raised, how little real freedom he had, how seldom he was alone—and how sober it made him. They were glad to be plain and unnoticed. And then, through no fault of their own, they were witnesses of an assassination between brothers—their own brothers!—so cold-blooded that these two gathered their things together and moved away from the house of David forever.