King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (19 page)

“As for Saul's regalia, the present narrative shows that David came by it innocently and by an agent acting on his own initiative,” explains Bible scholar P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. “So there is no genuine reason, we are to believe, to suspect David of any wrongdoing in the matter of Saul's death.”
³⁵

If we seek an answer to the question that asks itself—
Cui bono?
Who benefits?—the response is plain enough: David is the one whose path to the throne was cleared of a crucial obstacle by Saul's death. And, as we shall see, the death of Saul is only the first occasion on which David distances himself from a political murder that works to his advantage. But the Bible does not preserve any evidence of David's culpability, whether because no such evidence ever existed or because it has been concealed from us.

Indeed, David betrayed no pleasure or relief at the news of Saul's death. Rather, the man who had begged the Philistines for the opportunity to go into battle against Saul and the army of Israel
now rent his garments in a public display of grief, and his men followed his example. “And they wailed and wept and fasted until evening,” the Bible reports, “for Saul, and for Jonathan, his son, and for the house of Israel, because they were fallen by the sword.” (2 Sam. 1:12) The face that David showed to the men around him, the face he showed to the people of both Judah and Israel, was one of unrelieved grief and despair.

“Thy beauty, O Israel, upon thy high places is slain!” David began to rhapsodize. “How the mighty are fallen!” (2 Sam. 1:19)

The death of Saul and Jonathan moved David to eloquence, and here we find the first appearance of verses by “the sweet singer of Israel,” as David is later called in the Bible. (2 Sam. 23:1)

The biblical author seeks to authenticate David's famous words of praise for Saul and Jonathan by claiming to rely on a long-lost source that is supposedly even more ancient than the Bible itself. “Behold,” the Bible says of David's eulogy, “it is written in the Book of Jashar.” (2 Sam. 1:18) The undeniable grace and power of the elegy inspired the pious tradition that David was the author of the Psalter in its entirety. “As Moses gave five books of laws to Israel,” goes a midrash in the Talmud, “so David gave five Books of Psalms.”
³⁶
Although modern scholarship allows only that a few psalms in the Book of Psalms may date back to “the Davidic period,”
³⁷
the elegy for Saul and Jonathan inspires considerably more enthusiasm.

“His authorship is unquestionable,” writes Robert H. Pfeiffer.
“The deep pervading emotion shows that it was composed immediately after the battle of Gilboa, under the first shocking impression of the calamity.”
³⁸

Even if the eulogy can be attributed to David, the fact remains that the pretty sentiments found here are not much more truthful than the platitudes that are uttered over graves nowadays. Saul and Jonathan were bitterly divided over David: Jonathan loved him, Saul hated him, and Saul even tried to murder his own son and successor because he felt betrayed by Jonathan's love for David. But now David was ready to rewrite their history—and his own—in the words that he uttered so memorably: “In their lives, even in their death, they were not divided.”

Still, a certain sly irony can be detected in the eulogy. Perhaps mindful of the raw envy that burned in Saul when he heard the women of Israel declare their preference for David in song and dance—“Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands”—David now admonished the women of Israel to honor Saul in death even if they preferred David in life.

Even now, the words and phrases that fall from David's lips betray an appeal to the senses and an appreciation for the “delights” of dressing and undressing. David had experienced such pleasures at the hands of both Saul
and
Jonathan, each of whom stripped off his own apparel and armament and dressed David in them. And now, in one of the most provocative moments in the Bible, David openly declared the passion that he felt toward Jonathan.

To pious Bible readers of many centuries, these words have reflected the wholesome affection of a man toward his friend and comrade in arms. For others, however, the same words raise a tantalizing question.

Much effort has been expended in explaining away David's declaration of love for Jonathan, a declaration that suggests an undeniable homoerotic subtext. Commentators in all three Bible-based religions insist that what passed between David and Jonathan was something pure and pious. “The classic description of genuine unselfish love,” is how Rabbi Israel H. Weisfeld puts it,
³⁹
and Robert H. Pfeiffer vouches for David's machismo by pointing out that his grief over Jonathan is “intense and sincere, but nonetheless virile.”
⁴⁰

More recent scholarship proposes a political motive for the vows of love exchanged by these two men. The Hebrew word for love (
aheb
) may refer to “genuine affection between human beings, husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend,” concedes Bible scholar J. A. Thompson, but the same word is used with “political overtones” in the Bible and in various ancient texts from elsewhere in the Near East. “In this context, the verb
love
expresses more than natural affection,” Thompson argues. “It denotes rather the kind of attachment people had to a king who could fight their battles for them.”
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So perhaps we are meant to see only a political alliance, and not a pledge of love, when Jonathan declares his “love” for David. After all, Jonathan offered to renounce his claim to the throne and to support David's bid for kingship only if David promised to
protect him and his family when Saul was dead or gone. “I know that as long as I live you will show me faithful friendship, as the Lord requires,” Jonathan bargained with David, “and if I should die, you will continue loyal to my family forever.” (1 Sam. 20:14)
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But the passion in David's elegy cannot be overlooked, and the plainspoken references to love between men cannot so readily be explained away. “Male homosexuality was rampant in Biblical times,” insists anthropologist Raphael Patai. “The love story between Jonathan, the son of King Saul, and David, the beautiful hero, must have been duplicated many times in royal courts in all parts of the Middle East in all periods.”
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That's why, for example, we find intimacies between men in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the creation myth of ancient Sumeria, and that's why some open-minded commentators are willing to entertain the notion that the Israelites were not shocked to hear of one man's love for another man.

“Homosexuality was both dignified and manly—in fact, often associated with heroes—in the cultures that surrounded Israel,” argues Bible critic Tom Horner. “And how could Israel not have been influenced by these cultures? How could it have adopted an entirely different sexual ethic, living as close as it did to foreign influences?”
⁴⁴

Of course, the essential message of the Bible is that God's Chosen People were supposed to be different from the rest of humankind—a “holy nation,” as God puts it. (Exodus 19:6) The sexual practices of the non-Israelites among whom they lived are routinely condemned as an “abomination.” But we have already seen that the Israelites, like everyone else in the world, were never quite capable of living up to God's lofty expectations. The best evidence was their stubborn demand for a king of their own, which may have disgusted God and his prophet, Samuel, but proved that the Israelites aspired to be just like everyone else, only more so, in the words of an old Jewish joke. Perhaps, then, the Bible preserves the evidence of a sexual dalliance between two men that would not have shocked anyone in the classical world.

“There can be little doubt,” Horner concludes, “except on the part of those who absolutely refuse to believe it, that there existed a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan. They were simply well-rounded men who acted fully within the standards of a society that had been dominated for two hundred years by an Aegean culture—a culture that accepted homosexuality.”
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Once our eyes are opened, homoerotic moments and meanings can be detected throughout the life story of David. When Saul complains about Jonathan's relationship with David, the cause for Saul's complaint gets a political spin in most translations. “I know that you side with the son of Jesse,” Saul rails at Jonathan, “to your shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness!” (1 Sam. 20:30) (New JPS) But some scholars detect “a slight textual corruption” in the original Hebrew text that distorts the meaning of Saul's words. Rather than scolding Jonathan for
siding
with David in a political dispute, Saul may have been expressing his shock and horror at Jonathan for
sleeping
with David. For that reason, some suggest that the ancient Greek versions of the Bible preserve a more accurate reading of Saul's words: “For, do I not know that you are an
intimate companion
to the son of Jesse?” is how some scholars would render the same text.
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The same sexual tension has been detected by artists and writers over the centuries. André Gide was tempted to see in King Saul himself a “possessive desire for the beautiful young shepherd who joins his court,” and to explain Saul's efforts to slay David not as a matter of madness or politics but rather as “an attempt either to repress his homosexual longing by killing its inspiration or to revenge himself on a beloved who spurns him.”
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Even Goliath is depicted as hopelessly smitten with young David in a poem by Richard Howard, “The Giant on Giant Killing”: “My eyes … fell upon David like a sword.”
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The subtitle of Howard's poem is “Homage to the Bronze
David
of Donatello (1430),” and it reminds us that David inspired contradictory emotions in the artists and poets of the
Renaissance. To Peter Martyr, David and Jonathan offered an example of chaste male friendship that he considered superior to the pairings in the pagan myths of Greece and Rome, perhaps because he did not believe them capable of expressing physical love for each other. To Abraham Cowley, their friendship on earth was exalted into something mystical. “The reward of their perfect love for each other,” Bible scholar Ted-Larry Pebworth explains, “is the eternal contemplation of God in the person of primal, absolute love.”
⁴⁹
But for artists such as Donatello and Michelangelo, who are said to have recruited their own young lovers as models for statues of David, the handsome warrior was the object of intense sexual yearning. And the same yearning can be teased out of the biblical text that inspired them—David was clearly a man given to carnal pleasure, and nothing in the Bible rules out the possibility that he took his pleasure with both men and women.

The most telling detail in the biblical account of David's eulogy for Saul is what happened
after
the elegy was spoken and David turned his thoughts to matters of pure politics. The death of Saul and the defeat of the Israelites created a vacuum of power in ancient Israel and an opportunity for David to fill it. By surviving Saul's efforts to kill him, David had triumphed over the king, and now he was ready to claim the throne as yet another spoil of war. So David considered whether now was the right time to sever his allegiance to the Philistines, return to his tribal homeland in Judah, and put himself in play for the kingship. The biblical author works out these calculations in the metaphor of an oracle, thus putting the divine imprimatur on matters of realpolitik, but David is clearly thinking like a politician now.

“Shall I go up into any of the cities of Judah?” David inquires of Yahweh, presumably by consulting the “sacred divination box” or one of its many equivalents.

“Go up,” God responds.

“Whither shall I go up?”

“Unto Hebron,” God answers, naming the traditional capital of Judah and one of the most sacred sites in ancient Israel.

And so David abandoned the refuge that had been provided to him by the king of Achish and repudiated the fiefdom that had been granted for his faithful service. The exodus from Ziklag was complete: David and his wives, Abigail and Ahinoam, and the whole of his little army, “every man with his household,” trekked out of Philistia and crossed the border into the land of Judah.

Surely it was a moment of anxiety for David. After all, his vassalage to the Philistines had lasted “a full year and four months”— the Bible is precise (1 Sam. 27:7)—and he had spent several years before his arrival in Ziklag at large in the countryside as a
habiru
. As he now trod the bloodied soil of his homeland, David must have wondered whether his belated gifts of Amalekite plunder to the elders of Hebron would be enough to restore him to their affections.

It turned out that David need not have worried. The Bible reports that he was welcomed as a favorite son, and any lingering resentment was erased by the death of Saul and the prospect that a man of Judah, rather than one of those detested Benjaminites, would now reign over the tribal homeland.