King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (15 page)

But David, in a sudden display of piety and integrity, declared himself to be shocked—shocked!—at the suggestion. “God forbid that I should harm my master,” he scolded. “He is the Lord's anointed!” (1 Sam. 24:7)
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Here, as elsewhere in the Book of Samuel, one of the biblical sources has taken care to absolve David of any culpability, whether direct or indirect, for the fate of King Saul and his dynasty. Still, David was not too pure of heart to engage in a prank that can be seen as a tactic of psychological warfare. Sneaking up behind Saul as he was defecating, David drew his dagger, sliced off the hem of Saul's robe, and then slipped away unnoticed. Moments later, as Saul rearranged his garments and left the cave, David followed the king and called out to him.

“My lord the king!” David said. “Why do you harken to the ones who say: ‘David seeks to hurt you’?” (1 Sam. 24:9)
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Saul must have been no less amazed at the sight of his fugitive son-in-law standing above him on a rocky crag than David had been only moments before at the sight of the king of Israel squatting in the cave.

“Behold, this day your eyes have seen how Yahweh delivered you into my hand in the cave,” David continued. “Some bade me
kill you, but I said: ‘I will not put forth my hand against my lord, for he is Yahweh's anointed.’ ” Then David held up the strip of cloth that he had just sliced from the royal cloak. “My father, see the skirt of thy robe in my hand!” he cried. “I cut off the skirt of thy robe, but I killed you not!” (1 Sam. 24:11–12)
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Saul, always thrown off-balance by sudden upwellings of emotion, was overwhelmed by the tender words that fell from the lips of the man whom he regarded as a traitor and an assassin, a conspirator and a usurper, a bandit and an outlaw.

The interlude, which reads like a fairy tale from first to last, ends abruptly and implausibly as Saul concedes his crown to David: “And now, behold, I know that you will surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel will be established in your hand.” Then the reigning king is reduced to begging the future king for mercy: “Swear now to me by the Lord that you will not cut off my seed after me.” (1 Sam. 24:21–22)
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So the two bitter enemies part as friends in the biblical account of the encounter at En-gedi. But history reasserts itself when the narrative resumes a moment later: David is again on the run with Saul in pursuit, as if the encounter between the once and future kings of Israel at the fairy-tale oasis had never happened at all.

After so many hot pursuits and breathless escapes, David tired of the fugitive life and started to yearn for a more secure existence. “One of these days I shall be killed by Saul,” he thought to himself, apparently calculating that his good fortune might not last
forever. And the Bible is blunt about what David did next: “The best thing for me to do will be to escape into Philistine territory. Then Saul will lose all further hope of finding me anywhere in Israel, search as he may, and I shall escape his clutches.” (1 Sam. 27:1)
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So once again David sought refuge with the hated enemy of his people. He resolved to offer himself and his skills as a soldier of fortune to the king of Gath, and so he returned to the court of King Achish, where he had once played the mad fool to save his own life. With six hundred armed men under his command, the battle-hardened guerrilla commander cut a considerably more formidable figure than the lone fugitive whom Achish had beheld on David's earlier visit. A bit of David's customary swagger can be detected in his bold words to Achish.

“Grant me a place in one of the cities in your country,” he proposed. Then he posed a rhetorical question that was tinged with menace: “Why should I remain in the royal city with your majesty?” (1 Sam. 27:6)
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David and his army did not intend to leave the king and his city in peace unless they were given safe refuge elsewhere, or so his words implied. And the threat was not lost on Achish, who evidently decided that it would be better to comply with David's demand than to try to expel him from Gath by force of arms. So he gave David the town of Ziklag.
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“That is why,” the Bible notes in passing, “Ziklag still belongs to the kings of Judah to this day” (1 Sam. 27:6)
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—an intriguing aside that suggests the passage was composed at a time when men with David's blood in their veins still reigned in ancient Israel. Harried out of his homeland by King Saul, forced to seek protection wherever he could find it, and perfectly willing to make a deal with the traditional enemy of his people, the future king of Israel was now a vassal of the Philistines.

David and his men marched out of Gath and set up a base of operations in Ziklag. They were soon joined by their wives and families, and the army in exile was fortified by Benjaminite defectors who had apparently lost faith in Saul, at least according to
the revisionist account in the Book of Chronicles: “They were among the mighty men, his helpers in war.” (1 Chron. 12:1) The escape from Judah into Philistia had accomplished precisely what David had hoped for: “And it was told to Saul that David was fled to Gath, and he sought no more again for him.” (1 Sam. 27:4)

Safely ensconced in the land of the Philistines under the patronage of the king of Gath, David and his men supplied themselves by raiding the nomadic desert tribes whose settlements and pasturages lay to the south of Gath in the direction of Egypt, “the Geshurites and the Gizrites and the Amalekites.” (1 Sam. 27:8) The Bible suggests that he confined his predations to non-Israelites and left his own people unmolested, but confirms in plainspoken language that David was merciless toward his victims.

Significantly, David no longer bothered to consult Yahweh about his choice of targets, and no longer did he dignify his raids as blows against the Philistines, as he did when he marched to the “rescue” of the townspeople of Keilah. Indeed, David dutifully reported back to his new liege, King Achish, with a daily accounting of his plunder.

“Where was your raid today?” the Philistine king would ask.

“Against the Negev of Judah,” David would respond, naming the desert stretches of his own tribal homeland, “and against the Negev of the Jerahmeelites, and against the Negev of the Kenites.” (1 Sam. 27:10)
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Here David was teetering on the verge of treason. According to the conventional reading of the biblical text by pious commentators, David's reference to “the Negev of Judah” was meant to deceive the king of Gath into believing that David was raiding the towns and villages of his tribal homeland as a loyal vassal of the Philistines when, in fact, he confined himself to murdering and plundering only the traditional enemies of his people, such as the Amalekites. But the text raises the unsettling notion that David was willing to make victims of his own people, too—an interpretation that would explain why many Judahites were so quick to inform on him to King Saul.

Whether or not David was a traitor in service to the Philistines may be debatable, but the Bible leaves no doubt at all that he committed the kinds of atrocities that we call war crimes. As if already considering the political repercussions of his banditry on his future efforts to gain the throne, David adopted a brutal policy of leaving no eyewitnesses to his deeds.

The biblical author seems to anticipate a gasp of horror from his readers—“You mean
David
did
that
?”—and so he affirms the accuracy of his account. “So did David,” the Bible continues, “and so hath been his manner all the while he dwelt in the country of the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 27:11)

Here David betrays a cynicism so deep that it still has the power to shock us: the man who had won the hearts and minds of all Israel is apparently willing to afflict his own people on behalf of their worst enemy, and he makes sure that no one will be left alive to testify against him later on. Achish's cynicism, however, was even deeper. “Surely he has become loathsome to his own people, Israel!” the king of Gath smugly observed. “I shall have him for a servant always!” (1 Sam. 27:12) (AB)

Achish's sense of mastery—“a slave of eternity” is the literal translation of the words (
obed olam
) he used to describe David
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— was only strengthened when he put the mercenary general to a test of loyalty. When the armies of Philistia were mustered for yet another attack on the land of Israel, Achish summoned David to his court and questioned him closely.

“You know,” Achish said to David, “that you and your men must take the field with me.”

“Good,” David answered smartly. “You will learn what your servant will do.”

“Then I will make you my bodyguard for life!” snapped an exultant Achish in response to David's declaration of loyalty. (1 Sam. 28:1–2)
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At this bleak moment in the biblical narrative, the troubling question of David's nature and motives is left unanswered. Was he really so quick and so willing to take up arms against the king of Israel? According to the conventional reading of the Bible, David never meant to join the Philistines in battle against the Israelites but sought to deceive Achish by affirming his willingness to do so. After all, if David had declined to go to war with the Philistines, he would have put his own life at risk then and there. So he gave the answer that Achish wanted, thus passing the loyalty test for the moment, and he hoped that the king of Gath would not call his bluff by ordering him and his men to march against Saul and the army of Israel.

The exploits of David during his fugitive years are described with shocking candor by one of the original authors of his biography as we find it in the Bible. But an open-eyed reading suggests that another pen was at work on the same text, a pen in the hand of a spin doctor who tried to put every act of brutality and betrayal in the best possible light. Thus, the Bible has been decorated with “correctives”
to the awkward passages where “the future king of Israel is depicted in the embarrassing role of a Philistine-hired mercenary,” all in an effort to “explain away the facts of history.”
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The best example is the spin that is put on David's raids in the ill-defined stretches of “the Negev of Judah.” By parsing out the words and phrases selected by the biblical source, we are meant to conclude that David was seeking to deceive the king of Gath. “David, no traitor at heart and not wishing his fellow countrymen to think him such, continued to play a devious game,” insists Bible historian John Bright. “While convincing Achish by false reports that he was conducting raids into Judah, he actually devoted himself to harrying the Amalekites and other tribes of the southern desert whose incursions had always plagued neighboring Israelite clans….”
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Far less subtle is the biblical source who put a theological spin on the otherwise realistic episodes of David's outlaw years. When David is tutored in the art of guerrilla warfare by the prophet Gad, for example, it is a man of God rather than a man of war who acts as his mentor. (1 Sam. 22:5) David seeks permission from God before going into battle. “Shall I go and smite the Philistines?” he asks by means of divination, and God responds: “Go and smite the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 23:2) When David cuts off the hem of King Saul's robe while he is relieving himself, David is shown to reproach himself for his prank: “Yahweh forbid that I should do such a thing to Yahweh's anointed!” (1 Sam. 24:7) (AB) And Saul, who is depicted throughout the Book of Samuel as a homicidal maniac, turns suddenly sweet and gentle when he discovers that David has spared his life, and he literally thanks God for his salvation. “The Lord handed me over to you and you did not slay me,” he says. “May the Lord reward you with goodness for the goodness you have done for me today.” (1 Sam. 24:19–10)
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Perhaps the best evidence that these passages consist of theological subtext rather than history or biography can be found in the “doublets” that appear in the text of Samuel. A doublet, as we have noted, is a tale that is preserved in the Bible in two or more
versions—Saul is twice shown to learn of David's whereabouts from the men of Ziph; the king twice leads an army of three thousand men in pursuit; and, most notably, he is twice spared from death by David, first in the cave at En-gedi, and then, a few chapters later, when David and his men slip into the royal barricade at “the hill of Hachilah.”

Significantly, the second doublet seems to flicker between military adventure and miracle story. David relies on his spy network to find out the location of Saul's war camp, and he uses his skills as a guerrilla fighter to infiltrate the camp by night. Yet the biblical text can be read to suggest that David is assisted by a rare instance of divine intervention: God has sent Saul and his men into a trancelike sleep called
tardema Yahweh
(“the slumber of Yahweh”) (1 Sam. 26: 12), the same comalike state that Adam experienced when God extracted a rib in order to create the first woman. (Gen. 2:21)
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“God hath delivered your enemy into your hand,” whispers Abishai, one of David's trusted commanders, in the second of the doublets. “Now let me smite him with the spear—one stroke, and I will not smite him a second time!” (1 Sam. 26:8)
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