King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (13 page)

So David feigned lunacy to save his own life. Here is a moment that strikes Bible scholars as something new and remarkable— where else in the writings of the ancient world do we find a sacred history in which a God-chosen king turns himself into a drooling and gibbering idiot? Indeed, the scene depicts David as not merely undignified but cowardly. Yet David's ploy works and the king of Gath is utterly fooled.

“The man is mad!” complained Achish. “Am I short of madmen that you bring this one to plague me?” (1 Sam. 21:16) (NEB)

So David was escorted out of the court to the king's dismissive cry—“Must I have this fellow in my house?”—and hustled out of Gath. (1 Sam. 21:16) (NEB) David was still on the run, but now he did not seek refuge amid the familiar comforts of a royal court. Rather, he sought refuge in a cave, more like a runaway slave than a man who would be king.
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Word of David's desperate predicament—and the whereabouts of the cave in which he had barricaded himself—reached his tribal homeland, the land of Judah. Not only his brothers and the rest of his family but hundreds of men from the tribe of Judah sought out David's stronghold among the hills near Adullam.
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But David quickly saw that if he was no longer alone, he was also no longer in the company of kings.

“Flotsam, ruffians, and desperadoes” is how John Bright describes the men who rallied to David, and “bandit chief” is the
title he bestows upon David himself. Indeed, the blunt text of the Book of Samuel provokes the suspicion that the real David may have been someone far less exalted than the man we find in the pages of Chronicles or the Psalms.
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About the best case that can be made for David during his fugitive years is that he was a soldier of fortune who relied on guerrilla tactics to survive and prevail against the reigning king of Israel.

One member of David's outlaw band was a man who is identified in the Bible as a prophet but seems to have been a master of guerrilla warfare. Like Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, the prophet Gad understood that even the strongest urban fortress is always at risk of being surrounded and cut off by a superior force, and thus a guerrilla army is always safest when it is on the move through the countryside.

“Abide thee not in the stronghold—depart and get thee into the land of Judah,” Gad counseled. (1 Sam. 22:5)

David followed Gad's advice, moving himself and his band of partisans into the traditional homeland of the tribe of Judah, where he hoped to find support among his own people. Saul may have been elected to reign as the first king of the tribal confederation called Israel, but the Bible suggests that the loyalties to family, clan, and tribe were far older and far stronger than any sense of citizenship in the newfangled monarchy.

Saul himself played on the old tribal loyalties in his pursuit of David. As he presided over a council of war at his stronghold in Gibeah—sitting, spear in hand, under a tamarisk tree—Saul sought to convince his counselors and captains, all of them Benjaminites, that David, a man from the tribe of Judah, was their enemy, too. Surely, Saul suggested, David would favor Judah over Benjamin if he succeeded in defeating Saul and seizing the kingship.

“Hear now, ye Benjaminites, will the son of Jesse give every
one of you fields and vineyards?” Saul demanded, still unable to speak David's name aloud and using only his patronymic. “Will he make you all captains?” (1 Sam. 22:7)

Even now, when he so desperately needed his clansmen's solidarity, Saul could not control his raging paranoia. Somewhere out there, at this very moment, David lay in wait for him—or so the king complained—but Saul would be forced to face him alone. “All of you have conspired against me,” Saul railed. “There was none that disclosed it to me when my son made a league with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you that is sorry for me, or disclosed to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me.” (1 Sam. 22:8)

Only one man spoke up—Doeg the Edomite, the man who had spotted David in conversation with the priest Ahimelech in the shrine of Yahweh at Nob. Perhaps glancing at the spear in Saul's hand, he sought to prove his loyalty to the king.

“I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech,” the man reported, using the king's oblique term of reference for David. “And he inquired of Yahweh for him, and gave him victuals, and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine.” (1 Sam. 22:10)
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Doeg, of course, was embellishing the truth. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the priest of Nob “inquired of Yahweh”—a phrase that refers to the practice of using tools of divination to seek guidance from on high and suggests that Ahimelech had assisted David by appealing to God on his behalf.
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Perhaps Doeg was seeking to make Ahimelech appear as guilty as possible in order to distract Saul from the fact that Doeg had not disclosed a vital bit of intelligence sooner. If so, it worked. Saul was swept up in a new murderous frenzy, and he now turned his full attention to Ahimelech.

King Saul summoned all of the priests of Yahweh who served in the sanctuary at Nob—Ahimelech and the rest of his family
among them—to the royal court at Gibeah. Now it was their turn to endure the king's angry interrogation.

“Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse?” Saul ranted, accusing Ahimelech of treason. “You gave him bread, and a sword, and inquired of God for him, that he should rise against me, to lie in wait.” (1 Sam. 22:13)
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“Who among all thy servants is so trusted as David, who is the king's son-in-law and the commander of thy bodyguard and is honorable in thy house?” answered the priest, reasonably enough— after all, who would have turned away the king's son-in-law? And as for seeking a divine oracle on David's behalf, Ahimelech exclaimed: “Be it far from me! Let not the king impute anything unto his servant, nor to all the house of my father, for thy servant knoweth nothing of all this!” (1 Sam. 22:14–15)
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Saul did not deign to argue with the accused priest. Rather, he simply pronounced Ahimelech guilty and sentenced him to death. “You will surely die, Ahimelech—you, and all of your father's house.” (1 Sam. 22:16)
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Saul ordered the execution then and there: “Turn, and slay the priests of Yahweh!” he commanded the palace guard. Then, as if understanding that it would take more than an impulsive command to convince the soldiers to slay an ordained priest, Saul explained why the priests must die: “Because their hand also is with David, and because they knew that he fled, and did not disclose it to me.” (1 Sam. 22:17)
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The soldiers, however, did not heed the king's bloody order. They stood in silence; their weapons remained at their sides. Saul, further maddened by their insolence and insubordination, looked in panic around the court. We can imagine he saw only blank faces, and his paranoia must have sharpened as he calculated that all of them—his courtiers, his palace guard, his own tribesmen— had sided with young David.

And then his eye fell on the man who had been willing to inform on Ahimelech, a foreigner who would not be so fussy about spilling the blood of men who were consecrated to a lifetime of service to the God of Israel.

“Turn thou,” Saul said to Doeg, “and strike down the priests!” (1 Sam. 22:18)
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Unlike the men of Saul's own tribe, the Edomite did not hesitate to carry out the king's order—the informer-turned-executioner fell upon the priests and “slew on that day fourscore and five persons that did wear a linen ephod.”
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But the carnage did not end there: Saul ordered his death squad to descend on Nob itself. “And he smote Nob, the city of the priests, with the edge of the sword, both men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen and asses and sheep.” (1 Sam. 22:19)
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Men in power have always resorted to terror and even mass murder to discourage a local populace from sheltering an enemy and to make an example of those who are suspected of doing so. Nob is only the first in a list that includes Lidice, the Czech town that Nazi Germany eradicated as a punishment for harboring partisans in World War II; Deir Yassin, the Arab village that was terrorized by the Irgun and the Stern Gang in the War of Independence that brought the modern state of Israel into existence; and My Lai, the Vietnamese village where civilians were slaughtered out of fear and hatred of the Vietcong. Saul may have been mad, but the message that he sent to the rest of Israel by ordering the murder of the men, women, and children of Nob was cool and calculated: anyone who trafficked with David, however innocently, was at risk of death.

One priest managed to escape the mass murder. His name was Abiathar, and he was one of Ahimelech's sons. Significantly, Abiathar managed to carry off an ephod—not a priestly garment but a tool of divination. The Bible does not disclose how he eluded the sword on that day of slaughter, but we know where he sought refuge from Saul: “Abiathar escaped, and fled after David, and Abiathar told David that Saul had slain the priests of Yahweh.” (1 Sam. 22:21)

David listened to Abiathar's report of the massacre and recalled his visit to the shrine at Nob. “I knew on that day, when Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul,” David said, blaming himself for bringing down Saul's wrath on the
innocent men, women, and children of the town. “I have brought about the death of all the persons of your father's house.” (1 Sam. 22:22)

David, as we shall come to see, was capable of even greater acts of violence. Yet he was also susceptible to self-reproach and compassion. Indeed, a constant state of tension between ruthlessness and sentimentality was basic to his character. Now he was moved to the expression of concern, so eloquent and so heartfelt, that seemed to be his first impulse at moments of loss or danger.

“Abide thou with me, fear not,” said David to Abiathar, offering the fugitive priest a place in his guerrilla army, “for he that seeketh my life seeketh thy life; for with me thou shalt be in safeguard.” (1 Sam. 22:23)

David's little army of outcasts and malcontents increased as new men sought out his latest encampment and put themselves under his command, but the head count never exceeded six hundred. To sustain themselves in the wilderness, David and his men raided farms and towns and carried off food and wine and livestock, extorted protection money from the wealthier landowners, and now and then earned a few shekels as mercenaries for the Philistines. As it turned out, David was skilled in the brutal craft of banditry. On one occasion, David led his men on a raid at a place called Keilah, a fortified town northwest of Hebron and south of Adullam. Significantly, Keilah was located within the boundaries of Judah, and thus its townspeople were fellow members of the tribe of Judah. The Philistines were reported to be terrorizing the local populace and stealing the wheat harvest right off the threshing-floors. David's men feared attacking a place deep inside the territory dominated by the Philistines, but he assured them that God had ordered the mission—and besides, the prospect of plunder made the effort worth the risk. So the Philistines were put to “a great slaughter,” and David and his men “brought away their cattle,” a crucial
prize of war for an army that had to feed itself on what it was able to steal or extort from the populace. (1 Sam 23:2, 3, 5)

One of the biblical sources, seeking to put a favorable spin on the facts, insists that the raid on Keilah was an action against the Philistines rather than the townspeople—“Thus David
liberated
the inhabitants of Keilah” (1 Sam. 23:5) (AB)
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—but the unmistakable subtext points to something less praiseworthy. If David regarded himself as the liberator of the people of Keilah, they felt no gratitude. Indeed, a close reading of the biblical passage reveals that men and women throughout the land of Israel—and even his fellow tribesmen in the land of Judah—regarded David with suspicion and sometimes even hatred.

David soon learned that Saul hoped to capture him by putting Keilah under siege. “God has delivered him into my hands,” Saul exulted. “For he has walked into a trap by entering a walled town with gates and bars.” (1 Sam. 23:7) (NEB) When told that Saul and his army were approaching, David resorted to the use of an ephod as a tool of divination, anxiously seeking an oracle from God.

“Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into his hand?” David asked.

“They will deliver thee up,” the ephod confirmed. (1 Sam. 23:12–13)
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Thus warned of the treachery of the townspeople he had just “liberated”—and perhaps reminded by the guerrilla-prophet Gad that a walled town can be a deadly place—David and his men “arose and departed” from Keilah and slipped into the wilderness.

“And David abode in the wilderness and remained in the hill-country,” the Bible reports. “And Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into Saul's hand.” (1 Sam. 23:14)
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From a new encampment in the Judean wilderness, within striking distance of the village of Carmel, David sent ten young men
to the estate of a rich Calebite named Nabal.
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“The man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep, and a thousand goats,” the Bible notes, and David sized him up as a likely benefactor. The modern term for what David had in mind is “shakedown.”

David carefully instructed his men on what to say to Nabal: David and his army had come across the rich man's flocks and herds in the wilderness, but they had taken none of his livestock and they had done no harm to the shepherds who tended them. The biblical text is heavy with the unspoken threat of violence— after all, why send
ten
men to deliver the message, and why deliver such a message at all? And, lest Nabal miss the point, David directed the young men to ask the rich man to show his gratitude for what David did
not
do to his sheep and his shepherds. (1 Sam. 25:2–8)