Dark History of the Bible

by Michael Kerrigan

  ‘An evil spirit from the Lord’ was to make Saul’s life wretched from this time on. The only thing that could calm him was one of his younger servants who was ‘a cunning player on an harp’ (16, 16). David, son of Jesse, a shepherd boy tending his father’s flocks when he wasn’t helping to carry King Saul’s weapons for him or entertaining him with his songs, was in time to play a far more important role.

  Racked by ‘emerods’, brought low by pain, the Philistines feel they have no alternative but to return to its rightful owners the Ark which they bore back to Ashdod so recently and in such great triumph.

  David and Goliath

  It was in mountainous country outside the city of Shochoh in Judah that the Jews and the Philistines next came to confrontation. Israel’s forces were shocked to see the Philistine champion take to the field. Goliath of Gath stood ‘six cubits and a span’ (so almost ten feet or three metres) tall:

  And he had an helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of brass … And the staff of his spear was like a weavers’ beam; and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron (17, 5).

  This giant mocked the Israelites, challenging them to find a champion who might be able to match him. None would step forward, for (unsurprisingly) ‘they were dismayed, and greatly afraid’ (17, 11).

  Only David would go out to meet Goliath. With some misgivings, Saul agreed to let him: he tried to arm him, but David preferred to use weapons of his own (17, 40):

  And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had … and his sling was in his hand.

  Seeing this mere boy approach him, Goliath ‘disdained’ him and asked ‘Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?’ But as Goliath came at him, his spear raised, David (17, 49):

  put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.

  David delights Saul with his playing – so much so that the ‘evil spirit’ is driven out from him. David’s harp was the only thing that could calm the King, and the shepherd-boy became his close attendant.

  Running forward, he seized his enemy’s own sword, ‘and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith’ (17, 51). Seeing their champion slain, the Philistines fled.

  David stands over his fallen foe, holding up his severed head as a grisly trophy. In the background, the Philistines flee whilst the Israelites give thanks. The famous scene is here depicted by De Sayvede Oude (1624).

  A King Eclipsed

  And this was just the start. From now on (18, 5), David:

  went out whithersoever Saul sent him, and behaved himself wisely; and Saul set him over the men of war, and he was accepted in the sight of all the people … And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of musick.

  Like the ‘timbrel’ played upon by Miriam (see previous chapter, ‘Way Across the Water’ section), the ‘tabret’ was a small hand-drum. Suffice it to say that David’s triumphs were very noisily acclaimed. More so than his master’s perhaps (18, 7):

  And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.

  Suffering such comparisons, Saul was ‘wroth’. Where would this adulation end? Where could it, but in his own displacement on the throne? ‘The evil spirit from God came upon Saul’ once more (18, 10):

  and David played with his hand, as at other times; and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand. And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice.

  In calmer frame of mind, the King was able to think more cunningly. He married David to his daughter Michal, to bind him closer. But each fresh triumph of his son-in-law’s was a new humiliation: his murderous rage towards David only grew. At last, after another javelin attack, Michal – who truly loved her husband – grew so fearful for his safety that she told him to escape. ‘If thou save not thy life to night,’ she said (19, 11), ‘to morrow thou shalt be slain.’

  The ‘evil spirit from the Lord’ never left King Saul, though the torments in his mind might temporarily be soothed by David’s playing. More than once, he attacked his beloved minstrel with a javelin.

  In Philip R. Morris’ nineteenth-century painting, Jonathan rehearses the signal by which he will let David (who’s leaving Saul’s service) know if it’s safe to return to visit him or if he needs to stay away.

  V

  THE BIBLE

  ‘NO SUCH THING OUGHT TO BE DONE IN ISRAEL’

  The Kingdom of Israel now established, there was leisure for more civilized sins – seductions, betrayals, infidelities and intrigues. But the battlefield slaughters continued as before.

  ——♦——

  ‘The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces.’ 1 SAMUEL 2, 10.

  David is a pivotal figure in many ways. Saul’s successor succeeded (as Saul hadn’t really managed) in bringing Israel’s tribes together into something like a nation as we would nowadays understand it. Later, for Christians, his reign would provide a sort of spiritual template for their Saviour’s. (Jesus’ father, Joseph, of course, claimed descent from the great king.) It’s arguable too that David, as the composer of the Psalms, was one of the first great poets of all time, who brought a new lyricism – a more intimate, personal feel, perhaps – to a Bible narrative that had come to be dominated by stories of battle and slaughter. The first obvious example of this is that of the love that sprang up between David and Saul’s son Jonathan – a love that is as obviously deep as it is undefined.

  ‘Passing the Love of Women’

  In the Bible narrative, the epic and the lyric strands were very closely intertwined. The two youths met in the first flush of David’s victory over Goliath. Jonathan was with his father when the shepherd boy came back to report to Saul (1 Samuel 18, 1):

  And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

  Jonathan’s love for his hero was advanced by his father’s admiration for his protégé, for Saul took David into his own house and would not let him go back to his father’s (18, 2):

  Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his girdle.

  If this little scene of Jonathan’s undressing carries an erotic charge, it’s never earthed in anything more explicit. Were David and Jonathan ‘gay’ lovers, as we would understand it? The biblical account is coy – or unconcerned. But the high-minded view that it doesn’t matter either way has never been good enough for those traditional moralists who are outraged at the very suggestion of a sexual relationship between the two men. Or – more recently – for those who would see them as gay-rights pioneers.

  Whatever the nature of their relationship, it was evidently extremely close and deep. When Jonathan was killed in battle on Mount Gilboa, and his father, Saul, committed suicide in his own grief, the inconsolable David mourned both men’s death in a heartrending lament (2 Samuel 1, 19):

  The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! … Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings.

  For Jonathan there was special praise: if David’s tribute ‘very pleasant hast thou been unto me’ (1, 26) sounds underwhelming to modern ears, it’s rounded off with a more obviously impassioned tribute: ‘thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.’


  David bows before Jonathan in token of the respect which is due to him as the King his master’s son: then, however, with greater intimacy, ‘they kissed one another, and wept with one another’ (1 Samuel 20, 41).

  Displeasing to the Lord

  Not that David was one to turn up his nose at the ‘love of women’. One sleepless evening, indeed, going up on to his palace roof in Jerusalem to take the air, ‘from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon’ (2 Samuel 11, 2). The king sent for the woman: her name was Bathsheba, and she was married to a man named Uriah. Despite this David made her his mistress. Soon he had word from her that she had conceived and was ‘with child’ (11, 5), at which point a romantic story of forbidden love (or a squalid case of sexual exploitation, depending on how one looks at it), became something more serious and sinister.

  Bathsheba’s pregnancy was not just an inconvenience and a moral shame but, potentially, a political scandal. Uriah was away, doing his patriotic duty fighting the Ammonites at the siege of Rabbah, while David was at home consorting with his wife. Concerned to cover his tracks, the king had Uriah summoned back to Jerusalem to report on the progress of the war. Having heard what he had to say, he sent him home to relax – and, he clearly hoped, to have sexual relations with his wife. But Uriah, loyal to his comrades ‘encamped in the open fields’ (11, 11) and exposed to all the risks of war, didn’t consider this appropriate: ‘Shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?’

  With an incongruously courteous tip of the hat, King David’s messenger in this sixteenth-century engraving accosts the bathing Bathsheba, bringing her the royal summons from his master. The young wife seems completely unperturbed.

  What had seemed a cunning plan thwarted, the king in his frustration wrote a secret letter to Uriah’s general, Joab. ‘Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle,’ the letter read, ‘and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die’ (11, 15). So, when the unwitting Uriah returned to the front he carried with him his own death warrant. This time, David’s strategy was successful. The story had a happy ending of sorts: having mourned her husband for the appointed time, Bathsheba married her lord and lover. ‘But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord’ (11, 27). Bathsheba bore a baby son, but he soon fell sick. For all David’s fasting and prayers of repentance, the boy died (12, 18).

  ‘Having mourned her husband for the appointed time, Bathsheba married her lord and lover’.

  All in the Family

  David’s first wife, we saw in the last section of the previous chapter, was Michal, the daughter of Saul. Bathsheba, widow of Uriah, was number eight. The others flit by all but unnoticed in the Bible narrative, as for the most part do the miscellaneous concubines whose sons, however, are acknowledged later in the Books of Chronicles.

  Since polygamy was, at this time, not just lawful for the Jews but an established custom, there’s nothing intrinsically ‘dark’ about it, it might be said. But, like any system of family construction, it came accompanied by its own set of difficulties and tensions that could on occasion erupt into ferocious violence.

  Pikemen and armoured knights fill the foreground of what is a much larger, medieval painting representing the Siege of Rabat. King David sent Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to the frontline here, knowing that it meant his certain death.

  ISLAMIC DAVID

  DAVID, BEING BOTH a prophet and a king, has a special significance for Muslims. In an Islamic tradition that has never accepted the modern Western idea of a separation of powers of religion and the state, he may even be seen as a prototype for the Muslim Caliph.

  There is no place in the Islamic narrative for the flawed and fallible figure of Jewish and Christian tradition. The story of David and Bathsheba – and of the murder of Uriah – are absent here.

  So it was with Amnon, son of David’s second wife Ahinoam, who had married him after his flight from Saul – and, necessarily then, from Michal. As he grew into manhood, Amnon found himself falling in love with Tamar, David’s daughter by Maachah, a younger queen. As half-siblings, the two could have no lawful sexual relations, but Amnon’s desire kept growing and would not be suppressed.

  Tamar brings food to her half-brother, under the impression that he’s ill. In fact, it’s a ruse so he can get her close to him and rape her. Having had his way, he hates her ‘exceedingly’, and drives her from his house.

  Eventually, in utter despair and frustration, Amnon consulted his friend Jonadab (‘a very subtil man’, 13, 3). On his advice, he remained in his room one day, pretending to be ill. He begged his father that his half-sister Tamar should come and tend him. She dutifully complied, bringing him some cakes to eat. But he ‘took hold of her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my sister’ (13, 11). When she refused, Amnon, ‘being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her.’

  AN OEDIPAL STRUGGLE

  DAVID’S THIRD SON, Absalom, was the pride not only of his father but of his people. He wasn’t merely handsome, he was perfect (14, 25):

  In all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.

  It seemed only natural that such a paragon of princes should have his own impressive retinue of ‘chariots and horses’ (15, 1), and ‘fifty men to run before him’ as he went.

  It was perhaps inevitable too that Absalom should start envying his father’s authority. Soon he was setting himself up as a rival to David, waiting by the gate of Jerusalem to ask visitors their business and hearing cases they had hoped to bring before the king. In this way, we are told, Absalom ‘stole the hearts of the men of Israel’ (15, 6) – David was being sidelined by his son.

  Absalom’s rivalry with his father was quite clearly the sort that Sigmund Freud was later to characterize as ‘oedipal’. He named his complex, of course, after Oedipus, the character in Sophocles’ play who killed his father, Laius, before marrying his mother, Jocasta.

  Oedipus Tyrannus is of course a tragedy of errors: Oedipus has no idea who his father is when he kills him; nor do either he or his mother have the slightest awareness of their ensuing ‘crime’. Freud might profitably have asked himself what subconscious force prompted him to look to the classical sources for prototypes of psychological tensions that were only too clearly evidenced in the scriptural traditions of his own Jewish background.

  Absalom’s resentment against his father finally flared up into an out-and-out revolt against his royal rule – which began with the son’s rape of his father’s concubines. In all, 20,000 fell in the ensuing slaughter. Absalom himself was killed and his father devastated. The tensions of the father–son relationship were never so strikingly dramatized.

  Turning heads, of both sexes, Absalom steals the hearts of the Jewish people. But this adulation is not enough for King David’s third son, who must outdo his father, or die (and kill – even massacre) in the attempt.

  As soon as he’d had his way, Amnon felt an overpowering sense of repulsion. He ‘hated her exceedingly’ (13, 15), ‘so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.’ He drove her angrily from his house, ‘And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment’ (13, 19).

  Two years later, her younger brother Absalom avenged her wrong. He hosted a feast, got Amnon drunk and had his servants assassinate him on his way home.

  The Angel of Death descends over Israel bringing pestilence (in 2 Samuel 24), with the loss of 70,000 lives. The Lord had apparently been angered by David’s presumption in conducting a census of his kingdom.

  A Sinful Census

  The early history of the Jews in Canaan saw a cycle of prosperity, paganism, punishment and penitence for a people whose loyalty to their one God was only gradually secured. Now, however, that Judaism had been firmly established in something like its final form, rival religions no longer appealed. There were still t
emptations, though: with all the rich trappings of regal power around him, the king was in danger of making an idolatry of his own self-regard. So, at least, seems to have been the case with David, and his desire to extend his own personal power as monarch through the conducting of a census in 2 Samuel, Chapter 24. His intention appears to have been to ascertain the number of recruits he could call on for his armies – a judiciously far-sighted aim, perhaps, but one that set his own secular considerations as king above his duty to the Lord. Furious at what he saw as an act of insubordination, God sent down a ‘pestilence’ that took the lives of 70,000 people.

  ‘With all the rich trappings of regal power around him, the king was in danger of making an idolatry of his own self-regard’.

  Clever, or just callous? Solomon makes his famous ‘Judgement’ in the case of the two women claiming a single child. When he suggested cutting the boy in two, the real mother backed down. Depicted by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1617).

  Wisdom – and Ruthlessness

  Bathsheba’s second, and surviving, son was to be David’s heir. Solomon is primarily remembered for his wisdom. Most famously, he arbitrated (1 Kings, Chapter 3) between the two women who argued over who was the mother of an infant son by calling on one of his guards to cut the boy in half. (Both had just borne sons, but one had accidentally killed her child by overlaying him in bed.) While the fraudulent mother seized on Solomon’s solution, her opponent showed her true maternal devotion by immediately relenting, and relinquishing her claim. A good story – although it does at the same time suggest a ruthless streak in Solomon, one that was to be manifested in other areas of his life.