So I went to the necromancer, swallowed the powders, did the dervish, and crept into the cave. I repeated the magic words. Just one lamp burned. I put on the funny hat. I drew my hood close about my face as instructed and called upon the spirit of Moses. I got Samuel instead.
'Oh, Christ,' I exclaimed in disgust. 'What are you doing here?'
'You sent for me?' said Samuel, with the hollows of his eyes upon me. He was no less wintry in spirit than he had been in the flesh.
'I sent for Moses. Don't butt in.'
'Wouldn't you like me to tell you what's going to happen?'
'I'll stop up my ears,' I warned. 'I won't listen to a word. Get me Moses. I don't want you.'
'He's resting. He's still very tired.'
'Tell him I have to talk to him. I bet he knows who I am.'
'He's deaf as a stone.'
'Can't he read lips?'
'He's almost blind now.'
'His eye wasn't dim when he died.'
'Death sometimes changes people for the worse,' said Samuel funereally. 'His stutter is back, and bad as ever.'
'Tell me this,' I requested, hanging on the answer before I'd even put the question. 'Where is he?'
'Sitting on a rock.'
'Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?'
'There is no heaven. There is no hell.'
'There is no heaven? There is no hell?'
'That's all in your mind.'
'He's really dead?'
'As nail in door.'
'Then where is the rock?' I asked, springing cannily to trap him. 'Where did you come from just now? Where do you stay when you're not up here?'
'Don't ask foolish questions,' answered Samuel. 'Do you want me to tell you what's going to happen to you or don't you?'
'I swear I won't listen.'
'I've never been wrong.'
'In my ears I'll put cotton. I won't hear a word. You78 told Saul he'd be killed at Gilboa, didn't you? And that Jonathan and his two other sons there would also be killed, and that the men of Israel would be scattered and forsake the cities and flee from them.'
Samuel gave a croupy chuckle. 'It all came true, didn't it?'
'It's why I won't listen to you. Why did he go down and fight after hearing you? Why didn't he wait them out in the hills and hit them from there? We're good at guerilla work. He must have had a death wish.'
'It was his destiny, David.'
'That's bullshit, Samuel,' I told him. 'We're Jews, not Greeks. Tell us another flood is coming and we'll learn how to live under water. Character is destiny.'
Friedrich Nietzsche would have understood. If character is destiny, the good are damned. In such wisdom is much grief. If I'd known in my youth how I'd feel in old age, I think I might have given the Philistine champion Goliath a very wide berth that day, instead of killing the big bastard and embarking so airily on the high road to success that has carried me in the end to this low state of mind in which I find myself today. The past has no value unless the present's as good.
3 On the Day of my Killing of Goliath
Who could believe it? Who would believe the good fortune I found awaiting me in the valley of Elah when I walked into Shochoh that day with my ass, my family servant, and the small wagon of provisions from my father in Bethlehem and saw what was happening? Not I. Not by a long shot. Not in one million years would I believe it for a minute had I not been the one it was happening to. Someone brilliant must have set the stage for my climactic arrival.
When I appeared on the scene, I came with loaves and parched corn for my three brothers and with ten cheeses for their captain of a thousand, who was in command of about fifty-two volunteers from northern Judah. The valley of Elah is in northern Judah, and this time our families had elected to send people from our cities and towns to assist Saul in attempting to repel the newest incursion by the Philistines. There on our side that day, constituting the main strength in our line of resistance, were hundreds upon hundreds of those vaunted Benjamites, and not one of them spied the opening I did. But Benjamites have not been famous for their brains. Instead, they have been notorious for their madness, savagery, and fierce tempers and passions. Didn't they once rape to death the concubine of that wayfaring Levite passing through?
'Benjamin,' old Jacob had forecast in what goes down with us today as part of a rather long-winded and most peculiar deathbed blessing, 'shall ravin as a wolf. In the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.'
And wasn't Saul, that kook, my king and future father-in-law, a Benjamite?
Is it any wonder I soon felt both impudence and scorn for all those Israelites and Judeans I saw hugging the ground as though facing annihilation at the mere sight of Goliath or at the sound of his voice? In almost no time at all I had been able to analyze the nature of the impasse that had fixed both armies in place for precisely forty days. With almost equal swiftness I then hit instinctively upon a probable means for its favorable resolution. From that point, there was no holding me back. I have not always been a perfect judge of human character, but I have never failed to recognize a golden opportunity when offered one on a silver platter or to go for the main chance when I found it close at hand. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I began to perceive how simple it was all going to be.
'What will the king do,' I could not help exclaiming to my brothers when the thought hit me that I might be the person singled out by destiny to defeat Goliath, 'for the one who fights and kills this Philistine?'
'What's it your business?' replied the eldest of my brothers, Eliab, and ordered me to go back home. He was an asshole. And the other two with him were no bargains, either.
Instead of complying, I returned to the carriage for a cloak of wool and slept the night on the ground in a secluded place above a small troop of men from Gad huddling in a natural passage behind an outcropping of yellow rock jutting from the hillside. It cheered me exceedingly to hear in the wary conversation of these men how sore afraid they were. The situation surrounding me seemed just what the doctor ordered. Greater and greater grew my faith that the morrow was going to be my lucky day, and I began to wonder if there might not be some cosmological validity after all to the startling prophecy of Samuel two years earlier, after his peculiar trek to Bethlehem with his red heifer on a rope to smear his scented olive oil on my face and tell me God had chosen me king. 'Saul is out and you are in,' he said when anointing me. Even with the supplement of herbs, Samuel's olive oil smelled faintly rancid. Nothing much had happened to me since.
The weather the next morning, on that day of my killing of Goliath, was, of course, warm and dry and brilliantly clear. The harvests of winter were in. Trees were putting forth green figs and the vines gave off a good smell. Another year had expired and it was again that gorgeous, balmy time when kings go forth to battle. I have always had this flair for nature writing, and it emerges sensuously in that well-known hymeneal song cycle of mine mistakenly ascribed to my drab sluggard of a son Solomon. The rain was over and game, the singing of the birds was come. How is that for descriptive excellence? The flowers had appeared on the earth. Our bed was green. Could Solomon have constructed images like those? Never my phlegmatic son Solomon, who couldn't tell a roe from a young hart if his life depended on it. One difference between us is that he is without feeling and I have always had too much. The first time I laid eyes on Abigail--I was girded for battle and thirsting for vengeance as I marched along the road to Carmel--my member grew hard as hickory and I sheepishly and modestly veiled it from her notice with a folded newspaper.
Oh, how my ears would prick up each spring when the muddy, chill winter was over and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land, signaling the approach of another new time for battle. There is no palliative like war--or a fervent immersion in dogmas of any kind-- for the terrors of loneliness that our inner lives ordain for us. Believe me, I know. The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never82 been a cure for
it. Being at war, however, always has been.
Keep in mind that never in my long and strenuous career have I lost a war or suffered a wound. I do not know the meaning of defeat. Find one scratch on my body from an enemy and I'll give you a barley field or a couple of my wives. That epochal morning, I awoke early and crept eagerly to the edge of a small precipice to ponder in closer detail all of the factors in this improbable stalemate. Everything I apprehended confirmed the soundness of my inspiration of the afternoon before; I could behold no flaws.
The spectacle itself beggared description. The Philistines in great number had pitched their camps at the base of the foothills of the mountains at the far side of the valley. Saul had set his men of Israel and Judah against them higher in the foothills of the mountains of the other side. The sandy plain of the valley below was divided almost equally by a shallow brook lying almost as a measuring line.
Suspense was building by the minute with the spreading light and growing heat of the new day. All on our side were waiting for Goliath to appear again. The air was incandescent with flashes from the encampments of the Philistines. They were accustomed to armor and we were not, and the glare of the rising sun was soon reflecting magically from what appeared at moments to be an enchanted, molten lake of all that burnished metal they had brought to wear, brandish, and ride in. So much burnished metal you wouldn't believe, so much iron and brass they had. It was with good reason we had arrayed ourselves for battle farther up in the hills than they: we were scared to death of them, for those were still the days when the people of Israel could not drive out of the valleys or the plains any of the inhabitants owning chariots of iron.
There, in fiery and intimidating abundance, were the chariots of iron. There were the ranks upon ranks of Philistine archers. There were the heralds with their purple banners and their magnificent trumpets of silver of a whole piece. It was all just as I had always pictured war to be, and the amplitude of splendor brought a tingle of excitement to my youthful cheeks. I gazed in marveling expectation at the gleaming formations of Philistine foot soldiers of a natural height superior to all other peoples in Palestine, formidable as deities with their double-edged straight swords of iron that could splinter in a single swipe our clubs and axes and maces and our curved swords of bronze, all mounted on shafts of brittle wood. Some luck we had, right? Some wisdom. With all our legendary aptitudes and common sense, with all the useful tips from God to Abraham, Moses, and Joshua, we still had to learn from bitter experience with the Philistines that iron was harder than bronze and that a double-edged straight sword with a point was superior to our short hook-shaped ones sharpened on just the outside. That's the main reason you find us doing so much smiting all through the Pentateuch, and so little thrusting, hurling, and shooting. Smiting is just about all you can do with an axe or a club or a curved sword molded like a sickle with just the exterior edge whetted. The only spears and javelins we possessed were the several captured in small brushes with the Philistines or discarded in their disorderly retreat after Saul's triumphant assault at Michmash. What a battle that must have been! But who knew how to use such weapons? Saul missed me with his javelin all three times he sought to kill me, and I was seated off guard no more than twenty feet away. He missed Jonathan too from across the royal dinner table the night Jonathan took my part against him and tried to intercede. Maybe somewhere inside him some small core of sanity persisted and his heart was not really set on killing us, or on killing us that way himself. Once I was king, I know I always preferred to have others do my killing for me.
No doubt we were outclassed that day in the valley of84 Elah. But the Philistines had no true history in hill fighting and no plans for attacking us with any probability of success. Their chariots were worthless on anything but level ground. We were protected against their archers by the natural shelter of the rocks and caves we had found in which to station ourselves. Had they foolishly tried to move up against us with their chariots, archers, and armor, we would have pounced upon them like leopards. That dumb they were not.
But we were powerless too, because they did have those chariots and archers and suits of armor, and until me, no Israelite could win a pitched battle on low ground without employing some clandestine or psychological device or receiving supernatural assistance in the form of some rare aberration of nature.
So they could not come up. And we could not go down. And each morning, therefore, and each afternoon they sent forth their mightiest warrior, Goliath, to bait us anew with his flaunting call to a single combat. When I saw him the first time, I could not believe my eyes. His stride was tremendous, his lumbering walk was swaggering and impatient. Moving too rapidly for his overburdened shield carrier to keep pace, he marched from his army's tents to a position beyond the brook and lifted back his head to repeat his humiliating dare. The heat was dry and remorseless, yet he came in a helmet of brass and a coat of brass mail that itself must have weighed about five thousand shekels. He had greaves of brass on his legs and a buckler of brass on his shoulders, and he looked more like a Greek warrior at Troy than a settler in the marshy coastal lowlands of southern Palestine, not far from Sinai. The staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam and had a huge head of iron. He stood about six cubits tall, I estimated--maybe even six cubits and a span, I granted, giving him the benefit of the doubt.
What were we to do with him? Saul and his general staff had been huddling over that one for forty days.85 Our archers might have driven him back, killing or wounding him if he did not withdraw, but we had no archers. Even then I could detect that it is extremely difficult to employ bowmen with maximum tactical efficiency when you have no bowmen. Had we the bowmen, they would have been useless, because we had no bows and arrows. Had we bows and arrows, we would not have known how to use them. I promised myself right then, you know, to teach my men the use of the bow and arrow' someday, if ever I had any men and ever we found ourselves with bows and arrows. You can find that written in the book of Jasher--if you can ever find the book of Jasher. Another resolution I made that day dealt with Philistine iron: I wanted it. Why did I want Philistine iron? I'll tell you why. Do you know what happened every time Philistine iron came up against smart Jewish brains? Jewish brains were spilled, that's what happened. You can find that written too in the book of Jasher, if ever you do find that book of Jasher.
When Goliath finally drew to a halt and spoke, his voice traveled clearly through the dramatic hush that had fallen over all the valley from the moment he first came forth, and his words could be heard distinctly. At the edge of the bluff in the place I had found for myself. I heard him repeat with no alteration of vocabulary what I had heard him say the late afternoon before. My respect for him diminished considerably when I realized he had committed his speech to memory and had no penchant for extemporizing. But what can you look for from a Philistine? Does one find taste in the white of an egg?
'Why are ye come out to set your battle in array against the Philistines?' were the scornful words he thundered, and went on again with the same declaration he had been delivering without variation each morning and afternoon for those previous forty days. All in the army of Israelites were dismayed and greatly afraid. And all they could think to do was lie on the ground, and shrink deeper into their holes and trenches, and clutch at the earth as though in peril of falling off. 'Am not I a Philistine and ye servants to Saul?' he taunted with a voice that went booming like explosions through the gullies of the mountains behind us, and would doubtless have precipitated avalanches of snow in the Alps or the Himalayas were we Europeans or Asiatics joining for battle in one of those frozen climes. 'Choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me. If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then shall ye be our servants and serve us. I defy the armies of Israel this day. Give me a man, that we may fight together. Or else go back to your caves and your tents and your huts and allow us to pass where we please.'
; The heavy breathing of a grasshopper was just about the loudest noise to be heard in the silence that followed. I must admit my heart skipped a beat when I saw him the first time. When I saw him the second, it was all I could do not to laugh out loud.
For here in the hills on our side of the valley were close to seven hundred picked ambidextrous Benjamites, all of them slingers who could throw with deadly accuracy as easily with the left hand as the right. And here by the thousand were those patronizing, anti-Judean smart-asses from Ephraim, who, with all their inflated pride in their vineyards and their elite pretensions of superiority, still probably would not be able to pronounce the world shibboleth without hissing if their lives again were at stake. There were men of Manasseh, and hundreds upon hundreds more from all other clans and tribes in the north and west who had this time heeded the summons of Saul. There we were, God's chosen people, if you can believe it, every one of us descended at least in part from canny Sarah and able Abraham. But something rotten in the genes must have contaminated the thinking processes of everyone present but me, for in no other brain but mine did the obvious consideration arise that Goliath might be successfully met in single combat on conditions different from those implied in his own preparations for the fray.
Frankly, the way I saw it, Goliath didn't stand a chance. The poor fucker was a goner. With either hand, every one of those chosen men of Benjamin could sling stones at a hairbreadth fifty yards away and never miss. Skimming flat ones with jagged edges, they could drop clusters of grapes from the vine at the stem. I myself could sever a pomegranate from a bush at thirty paces nine times out of ten. I could blast the pomegranate itself to a splashing pulp just about every time I tried. And the face of Goliath was larger than a pomegranate. Between the brass of his chest and the brass of his helmet, from his neck to his hairline, was exposed an area of bare flesh as large as a good-sized Persian melon. What I shortly was to find myself saying to Saul in the flat-roofed tent of goatskin in which he made his headquarters was almost entirely true: I really had killed a lion, a small one, making off with a lamb when I was out keeping my father's sheep, after crippling it first with a shot from my sling, and I had stunned--not killed--a bear. With the bear I fibbed a little.
God Knows Page 8