by Mary Burns
The meeting where my troubles with Joab began was alive with tension: the men were arguing the necessity of going out to fight Abner, King Ishbosheth’s chief captain (and the true power behind that throne), whose army was apparently on the march toward Hebron. It was mid-afternoon on a day very early in spring, still almost winter, but the time was coming on when men’s thoughts turn to war after the enforced inaction of the winter season. I saw it every year, especially among the younger men, restive from sitting at their parents’ hearths, playing bowls or sharpening their spears. David insisted on keeping his men in fighting condition, so there was always sword fighting and bow practice in the hallways and courtyards. But there were many Philistine villages to plunder, and much booty to be grabbed and glory to be found. I shook my head. Would it always be this way?
“But they are Israelites, our kin, our uncles’ sons!” Eliab, the eldest of David’s brothers, was speaking, his voice only a harsh whisper now from years of shouting and strain. “How can we fight them?”
“If they seek battle against us,” Joab said, his fist on the table, “there is no dishonor in defending ourselves.”
“True, true,” said Oman, the peacemaker. “But perhaps there is some other way, some deputation we can send, begin negotiations?”
“Pah! Women and priests do the talking!” Abinadab was scornful. “The only language Abner understands is a sword at his throat!”
Abishai, the second of Joab’s brothers, and very like him in looks though more sullen and wary in the shadow of his older sibling, spoke up. His eyes were cast downward to his hands on the table, playing with a bit of leather string—but not before I had seen him flash a glance at Joab. “Perhaps we can stop a war in its tracks with one hand-to-hand battle,” he said. His voice was even, but I could see his hands tighten on the leather thong. “As in the olden times, say, when David fought Goliath.”
An uneasy silence lay upon the room. My father took up the challenge easily.
“How quickly one’s own youth becomes ‘the olden times’,” he joked, and all his brothers, years older than David, smiled with him. He continued, more seriously, “You mean, I should fight Abner—he and I alone on the field?” It was said mildly, but I was not the only one who felt the iron behind David’s soft words.
“Ishbosheth is king, not Abner,” Joab broke in. “A king fights a king, and a captain fights a captain.” All eyes were fixed on him, and his own were blazing. “I will face Abner myself.” As he said this, he turned his gaze to me for an instant, staring with those black eyes into my very soul. I felt a chill sweep through me, but a moment later he was looking elsewhere, leaving me to wonder if I had imagined it altogether.
“So it is glory that you seek after all,” Oman said quietly. “And, perhaps, the rewards that come with it?” Even my father looked surprised at this from Oman, so direct a statement. But Joab took it well, I thought.
“There is nothing wrong with seeking the fame that comes through mighty deeds,” he said, lifting his head proudly.
“No,” said David, a tight smile on his lips. “Not if you seek the glory of the Lord, whose instrument you are.”
Chastened, Joab wavered only slightly. “Of course,” he said. “We are nothing without the power of the Lord.” But the set of his jaw as he said the words revealed to me that this was a concession, and he did not really believe it.
“And as for the rewards,” he continued with a slight shrug, “David has always been most generous with the spoils of war, and I am not looking for riches and cloth of gold.” As he said this, his eyes shifted from David’s face to mine for a split second, and again I felt a shiver of fear.
The argument continued for some time, with Abishai’s idea of one-on-one combat rather gaining ground. David was mostly silent, but I could see him watching Joab closely. What was this captain of his up to?
“Our scouts tell us that Abner and his men are camped at the Pool of Gibeon,” Joab said, rising from the table as if he could sit no longer. “If we leave now, we will meet them before their campfires are ready for the morning meal.” Other men began to stir, Joab’s brothers and cousins, muttering their agreement.
“And how do you intend to arrange this . . . encounter?” David’s voice cut through the clatter of chairs and words, and the men grew still. He and Joab looked only at each other.
“Abner knows me,” Joab said. “I will call him to the Pool of Gibeon to talk.” He gazed at David coolly. “I think he will not refuse me.”
“Abner was never our enemy,” David said, almost as if he’d thought of this for the first time and was testing how it sounded. “We are all men of Israel.” Now he too rose from his great chair and began to pace around the room, passing behind the men sitting or standing in place at the table. I watched as man after man followed him with their eyes.
“Perhaps this notion of yours, Joab,” my father was saying, “is not half bad. It might bring our brethren closer to our side, give us all a path to walk together, instead of slaughtering each other on our common land.” He stopped behind the chair of Joab’s youngest brother, Asahel, and placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder. Asahel was as fair as Joab was dark, with a ready smile and a joyfulness about him that made others smile just to look at him. He looked up at David, his whole heart in his eyes. I thought he was the best of the three brothers, perhaps because he hadn’t yet caught the zealotry of battle and plunder; he’d only been out on one small skirmish recently, but he was obviously hungry for more.
“Of course,” David said, “I’m assuming you’ll win?” Hearing the question in his voice, for a moment no one spoke, then a spark of merriment in their king’s eyes was perceived by one after another, and they began to laugh, and pound the table with their fists. “Joab! Joab!” was the cry, and those nearest him slapped him on the back and gripped his hands in encouragement.
“Come, Joab,” said David as the council settled down. “Let’s you and I discuss the terms of this glorious battle, and your young men will ready themselves for a short, and we pray, a blessedly successful journey.” He and Joab retreated to David’s inner room while the others went their way to prepare, or, for the older men, to supervise the preparations.
By the time I walked back to Nathan’s study, where I always took my afternoon lesson in writing, the news of “Joab’s Challenge,” as it was already being called, had raced through the household, and I found that Nathan intended to accompany the soldiers.
“But why must you go?” I was uneasy and alarmed. Since the day we had seen the vision of the Beginning together, my feelings toward Nathan were no longer competitive or envious, but something much different, something I didn’t want to admit to myself. “You are not a soldier!”
We were standing just outside the doorway to the chief priest Abiathar’s rooms, where Nathan had gone to receive his blessing before he left. Despite the fact that Nathan had a bow slung on his back, and a quiver of arrows and a long knife in a sheath at his side, I repeated my protest.
“You are not a soldier!”
“I am part of the King’s household,” he said. “I am young and strong, and I can fight.” His usually soft brown eyes seemed harder, more focused. He smiled. “The men need a priest with them, too, and I am honored to go with them, to offer prayers to HaShem, whether in supplication or gratitude.”
My chest tightened, like a fist was closing over my heart. A wave of dread washed over me, and I grasped Nathan’s arm.
“Something very wrong is going to happen there,” I said, my voice a whisper. “It is not going to be the victory everyone hopes for!” My body shook with the chill knowledge, and Nathan’s face clouded over.
“Is it some vision you have seen?” he asked. “For I have seen nothing.”
I shook my head. It was the dread in my heart that had moved me to speak.
“Whatever happens,” he murmured, and he bent to kiss my cheek lightly, “it will be the will of God.” We looked at each other for a long mome
nt, then he picked up his bag and walked away.
* * *
I was too unsettled to sit patiently in my room, studying the little scraps of linen I kept hidden in my treasure box. I paced around, and finally flung myself on a couch strewn with pillows near a window open to the hills. At the edge of the windowsill was a small but perfect spider’s web, with some drops of dew still clinging to the fragile net. As I focused my gaze on the center of the web, my vision blurred, and I heard a voice addressing me.
“Janaia.” The voice was toneless, neither man’s nor woman’s. “The gifts of the Lord come at a great cost,” it said. “You can only have one, and someday you will have to choose.”
I came back to myself with a start, and looked around the room as if to find the source of the voice. Instead, there was a knocking at my door; a servant had come to lead me to my father’s room. He wanted to speak to me.
* * *
“Tell me what you saw in the council room today, daughter.”
David and I stood looking out a window together, side-by-side. I was so tall I could nearly meet him eye-to-eye. We stood with our shoulders touching as we gazed out at the rooftops of Hebron in the twilight, and I felt as if we were one person, with the same thoughts and fears, longings and sorrows. I know he felt it, too, as his hand closed over mine where it lay on the windowsill, a touch that melted us together, one spirit in two bodies. I roused myself to speak.
“The young men are eager for fighting, and the old men are weary of it.”
David inclined his head slightly but did not speak.
“Abishai is the tool of his brother Joab,” I continued. “They are after something more than just the glory of fighting Abner.” I paused, and then my father spoke, one word.
“Zeruiah.”
“Their mother? What has she to do with war, or with Abner?”
“Something you could not know about, from long ago.” David’s hand tightened around mine slightly, then relaxed. “To put it simply, Abner took Zeruiah by force; he had long coveted her, and after her husband died, so very conveniently, during a raiding party in the north led by Abner, he tried to make her marry him, but she refused. This was about twenty years ago.” He turned then and looked at me, his eyes cold and green. “She bore a child.”
I took this in. “Asahel.” No wonder he was so different from his brothers. “Does everyone know this? Does he?”
David shrugged. “Asahel may not know, but his brothers do. Few others, and they have kept silent out of respect for Zeruiah and her husband, a kinsman of mine.”
“So she wants Abner dead, and by her son’s hand.”
David nodded. We turned back to looking out the window. The first star of evening was beginning to show, a faint glimmer against the darkening sky in the west. My father raised my hand to his lips and kissed it, then spoke again.
“You have more to tell me.” It was a statement, not a question.
I hesitated to speak up about Joab’s glances at me. I didn’t want to put ideas in my father’s head, but as I thought this, I realized how fruitless a notion it was—there was nothing I could think that he wouldn’t be thinking also.
“Joab . . . kept glancing at me.”
“And what do you think this means?
“I think he will ask you for me as his reward, if he should win this fight with Abner.”
David’s hand tightened once more around mine, but he did not look at me.
“He has already asked,” David said. “Today, before he left.” He turned to me again, his eyes darker now, unreadable. “A fitting prize for such a victory, don’t you think?”
Anger and fear rose in my breast. “Is that what you told him?” I tried to pull my hand away from his but he clasped it even tighter.
“You find the idea unpleasant?”
“Marriage, and a husband? Perhaps it is for me, perhaps not—but not with Joab!” I spoke more fiercely than I realized, but I felt there was truth in what I said. I struggled to free myself, and he caught both my hands in his, held them against his chest.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are, Janaia? Do you not know that every man in my company holds you as the highest prize he could gain—both as a beauty and the king’s daughter?”
I stopped struggling and stood still and proud in his grip. “I am no prize, to be bestowed on a man whose only merit is that he has killed the most!” He let go of my hands, and I took a step back. I was almost checked by the admiration and approval in his eyes, but heat like a flame was rushing through me, and my voice rang out clear and strong.
“I am the king’s daughter, and I am HaShem’s prophet, and I tell you, King, this day’s work will bring sorrow and grief a hundredfold upon your head, and the deeds of your captain and his brothers shall be a sign unto you, a foreboding of disaster that will visit your own house in time. You will anoint your head with ashes, and roll on the ground with grief, and fast for many days before the Lord God will re-consider His wrath and forgive you for your sins. All this will come to pass, even when you are King in the great city, King of all Israel.”
My words echoed around the room, and the very air trembled with prophecy. My father, stricken and amazed, could only stare at me in wonder.
I left the room, my utmost will required to walk the distance to the door without looking back.
Chapter 13
“Happy the man who follows not the advice of the wicked,
or loiters on the way that sinners take.” Psalms 1:1
Iburied myself in my studies, both music and writing, for the next few days, trying to distract myself from my worry about Nathan, and my fears about Joab. My spirit was high from the power I had experienced when I spoke so strongly to my father, and I felt renewed in my sense of purpose as a prophet of HaShem.
My feelings about what my father would do were less clear. Would the necessity of politics and the requirements of tradition force his hand and make him command me to be Joab’s wife? The approval I thought I had seen in his eyes when I defied him suggested to me that he would not go against my determined resolve and calling. And then there were my feelings for Nathan, who I was sure my father had no idea was even a consideration, though I had sometimes discerned in my mother an unusually curious interest about how my music lessons were progressing. I shook my head over my scrolls; I must not think of all these distractions. I must concentrate.
I was attempting to write down a song my father had composed the previous winter when the nights were long and dark, and everyone was weary and losing hope. He had taken to playing the harp again, and I marveled at his skill. There was magic in the way he touched the strings, and in his voice—a depth of sorrow and of joy that, I had to admit, was lacking in the songs I sang, skilled as I was.
This particular song of his was meant to reassure all of us, his family and his people, that we would not always be in exile, even in so lovely and holy a place as Hebron. We would see a time when the promise of the Lord to David would be fulfilled and our faithful adherence to Him would be rewarded; our enemies would be punished. The words, which he changed a little every time he sang it, were something like this:
I was having trouble finding the sounds and symbols to describe the wicked ones who “plunder and kill” or bring grief with their scorn and hatred. It was easier to think of these ideas than to write them down. Images of people I had known or seen would gather in my mind—that one, sarcastic and dour, always making people cry; another one, rumored to have murdered his first wife, his lips curled and thick, his eyes darting and always fearful. The thought passed through my mind that those who plunder and kill could also refer to my father and his men, but I shoved it away as unworthy.
The leaves of linen with their various symbols were laid out on the table before me. I was alone in my room, comfortable with a coal fire in the brazier and a soft breeze from the window that looked out to the mountains east of Hebron. I let my eyes wander through the letters and symbols to see if anything would str
ike me. I picked up one with a sign that was shaped like a plow—it could be the plow itself, Nathan had taught me, or the harvest, or the act of gathering in the harvest.
It could also mean plunder, a forceful taking of someone else’s “harvest.” Is that not what murderers did, plundered one’s life? And the scornful, they plundered the heart of the person they derided, robbing him of peace and comfort. And what is the heart if not the house, the tent? I put the two together.
Somehow, as I looked at this writing, I connected it with Joab. Was it just my fear of marriage that made me think he would plunder my heart, destroy my life and comfort? I had not forgotten the words I spoke in prophecy to my father, though we had not touched on the subject again. It occurred to me that Joab and his young men had been gone now for almost six days— surely he would have accomplished the single fight with Abner by now. What if Joab had been defeated, even killed? That would be a serious blow for David, for his reputation as king and the Lord’s Anointed. That could not happen. And yet, the dread I had felt when talking to Nathan, and again, to my father, returned to me now with great force, and I half-rose from my seat, trembling and anxious to find out if there had been any word. What if Nathan—?
The door to my room opened and Nathan walked in. My relief at seeing him, coming after my alarm the moment before, was so great that I nearly threw myself into his arms and did not at first notice his stricken face, his red-rimmed eyes.
“Janaia, Janaia,” he said my name, patting me awkwardly on my back as I wrapped my arms around him in greeting. I immediately felt the distance between us and let him go as swiftly as I had descended upon him. Stepping back, I saw his face and read the grief and sorrow in his eyes.
“What has happened? Nathan?” He didn’t answer; he stumbled toward the low couch near the window and sat down heavily. There was water steaming in a kettle on the hearth, and saying nothing more, I brewed a tisane for him, as he had done for me on the day of our shared vision. When he held the cup in his hands and had drunk a little, I sat down next to him and simply waited. In the silence, I became aware of disturbing sounds from the courtyard, shouts and then wails and screams throughout the house.