King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (2 page)

All of these episodes are reported in the Bible bluntly and honestly, and sometimes with a touch of titillation. If the writing
of history and biography and literature in Western civilization originates with the biblical account of David, as some Bible scholars suggest, so does the stuff of bodice-rippers and tabloids—“the kind of details,” cracks Bible scholar Peter Ackroyd, “for which, in our more sophisticated times, the Sunday newspapers of the slightly less reputable kind pay handsomely.”
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One of the overlooked secrets of the Bible is its earthiness and ribaldry, and nowhere are these qualities more extravagantly on display than in the biography of David.

At Forest Lawn, a cemetery in Southern California, mourners and tourists alike are invited to gaze upon a reproduction of Michelangelo's famous statue of David, faithful in every detail except one: David's genitalia are covered with a marble fig leaf. But the original statue itself is unfaithful to the truth as recorded in the Bible—Michelangelo, apparently paying more attention to his model than to the Bible, depicts the greatest king of Israel as un-circumcised!

Similarly, in strange and not-so-subtle ways, attempts have been made to conceal the flesh-and-blood David from us. Within the Bible itself, David's life story has been rewritten and “overwritten,” as scholars put it, by generations of biblical authors and editors who were disturbed and confused by his taste for sex and violence. The Book of Chronicles, for example, is a bowdlerized version of David's biography as originally preserved in the Book of Samuel. If Chronicles alone had survived, and Samuel had been lost or suppressed in antiquity, we would know nothing of David's adulterous love affair with Bathsheba, or his passionate declaration of love for Jonathan, or the rape of David's daughter, Tamar, by his son Amnon, or the rebellion of his son Absalom, who very nearly succeeded in driving him from the throne.

“See what Chronicles has made out of David!” exclaimed Julius Wellhausen, the pioneering nineteenth-century Bible
scholar who was among the first to discern the thoroughly human hands and minds that created the biblical text.
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Even after the composition of the Bible was completed and the canon was closed, Talmudic sages and Church Fathers alike tried to make David over into a plaster saint by concealing, denying, or explaining away the sins and scandals that the Bible discloses. Starting in antiquity, for example, the rabbis decreed that the most salacious stories of David were not to be translated out of biblical Hebrew or read aloud in the synagogue. The sages whose writings are collected in the vast anthologies known as the Talmud and the Midrash conjured up a kinder and gentler David—one stubborn apologist simply dismissed the abundant evidence of David's wrongdoing that is plainly recorded in the Bible and insisted that David couldn't have sinned with Bathsheba.
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And the early Christian commentators preferred to focus on the messianic role of King David that can be teased out of the biblical text, where God is shown to vow an eternal kingship to David and his descendants.

The final emasculation of David is the work of the modern media. Today, David has been scaled down to the cartoonish figure of a little shepherd boy who slays the mighty warrior Goliath with a slingshot. To be sure, the theme of David and Goliath was no less favored by Michelangelo and Donatello, Titian and Rembrandt than it is by newspaper headline writers and Madison Avenue art directors. (Indeed, one example by Tanzio da Varallo appears on the cover of this book.) But there is something sad and sorry in the fact that the biblical figure of David, so potent and so full of passion, has been turned into a glyph for the ability of something very small to prevail against something very large.

The
real
David, as we shall discover, is not so small, not so simple, and not so child-safe.

David is writ large in the pages of the Bible, where his name appears more than a thousand times and where an “undersong” of
praise can be detected in passages where he is not mentioned at all.
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The faith of ancient Israel, according to some scholars, was not Judaism or even Yahwehism but “Davidism.”
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David may start out as a lad who tends his father's sheep in a country backwater, but he ends up as the king of all Israel and the conqueror of an empire that stretches from the outskirts of Egypt to the far Euphrates.

According to the Bible, David rules by the grace of God— “The Lord has established him king over Israel, and exalted him king for his people Israel's sake” (2 Sam. 5:10)
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—and every monarch in Western history who invoked the divine right of kings was relying on his example. That's why statues of King David and the other kings of Israel and Judah once decorated the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame—and that's why the statuary was taken down and hidden away during the French Revolution lest the mob take David's head along with those of the reigning king and queen.

But the Bible exalts David above and beyond his long reign as King of the Jews. In life he is praised as the king whom God selected to reign on earth, and in death he is transfigured into a king who will reign on high: David becomes a shimmering theological symbol, the precursor and direct ancestor of the Messiah whom God will send to redeem a sinful and suffering humanity. “And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and a twig shall grow forth out of his roots” (Isa. 11:1) is the prophecy of Isaiah, a supercharged line of biblical text that identifies David by reference to his father and is generally understood to predict the coming of the Messiah. In fact, Judaism and Christianity, which contend with each other on so many other issues, share the thrilling idea that David's blood will flow in the veins of the Messiah.

“If the Messiah-King comes from among the living, David will be his name,” the Talmud teaches. “If he comes from among the dead, it will be David himself.”
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And Paul embraces the same credo from a Christian perspective when he attests that Jesus of Nazareth “was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God.” (Rom. 1:3–4)

David is the very first man whom we can call “King of the Jews.” He is crowned as king of Judah, the tribe from which the Jewish people are descended, before he achieves kingship over all twelve tribes of Israel.
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A thousand years later, when the Magi follow a star to Bethlehem, they declare that they are searching for David's distant heir and successor, “he that is born King of the Jews.” (Matt. 2:2) (KJV) Even today, the same yearning is expressed in a few poignant words from the Talmud that are sung aloud as a children's song at Jewish day camps and as a messianic anthem among settlers on the West Bank: “David, King of Israel, lives and endures.”

Ironically, the glory that is heaped upon David tends to obscure the flesh-and-blood man. David is depicted in the oldest biblical passages as thoroughly mortal, which is to say that he is susceptible to all of the flaws and failings, all the sins and shortcomings, that afflict ordinary human beings. David is capable of embodying contradictory qualities at the same time—courage and cowardice, spiritual ecstasy and sexual frenzy, lofty statesmanship and low cunning and deceit—and the Bible confirms that he succumbs to his basest impulses as often as he answers to the angels of his higher nature.

Why then does the Bible preserve and exalt the memory of such a flawed man? How can David be, at the same time, “a man after God's own heart”
¹¹
and
a “bloodstained fiend of hell,”
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as he is variously described in the Bible? The most pious of the biblical authors rely on a simple theological argument to explain away all of the unsettling contradictions in David's personality: David complies
with God's
will
even if he defies God's
law
, and that's all it takes to earn a divine pardon for his sins of the flesh. But it is possible to read the same sacred text and come to a very different conclusion—something deep in our nature prompts us to overlook the private sins and crimes of a powerful figure who captures our fancy and wins our confidence. For that reason, no matter how often or how scandalously David sins, the Bible reader, like God himself, is always ready to forgive and even to praise him.

The very notion of charisma as a quality of leadership, a commonplace in the political vocabulary of our own era, can be traced back to King David. “Charisma” is given a technical definition in Bible scholarship: “the sudden appearance of a personal gift and power which was regarded in Israel simply as a charisma, the free gift of Yahweh to the individual, and which therefore swept the populace along with it.”
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But the word entered our modern vocabulary during the presidency of John F. Kennedy—and, in fact, the life of JFK may help us to understand how David was seen by the men and women of ancient Israel and the authors of the Bible. “Camelot,” the Arthurian term that came to be applied to the Kennedy White House, applies with equal force to the court of King David.

Each man, the biblical David and the modern JFK, was regarded in his lifetime as a charming and compelling public figure. Each man was an authentic war hero who put his life at risk and distinguished himself in combat. Each was praised for his grace, wit, and eloquence—David was “the sweet singer of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:1) and Kennedy was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for
Profiles in Courage
. Each was admired for his vigor and rugged good looks by the men and women in his thrall. Each acted with ruthlessness to achieve power, each was a sexual adventurer, and each was forgiven for his ruthlessness
and
his sexual aggression. Indeed, the notion that a powerful ruler enjoys the right to take
for himself “the fairest in the land” is not just a line out of a fairy tale; King David was presented by his courtiers with “a fair damsel” called Abishag after the whole of Israel had been canvassed for an appropriate consort, and Kennedy claimed the affections of Marilyn Monroe, the closest approximation to a goddess of love that the twentieth century produced.

Significantly, neither David nor JFK was toppled from the pedestal of public adoration by the disclosure of his dirty little secrets. David's squalid private life is luridly detailed in the pages of the Bible, and yet he never forfeits the favor of God
or
the biblical author. The same is true for John F. Kennedy, whose claim on the hearts and minds of his generation was not diminished when revisionist historians began to reveal the less savory aspects of his character and conduct. Even though the transgressions of both David and JFK provoke fear and loathing among the fussier citizenry, such revelations only excite the imagination and stoke the enthusiasm of their most ardent followers. Something deep in our nature prompts us to forgive a charismatic figure like David or JFK for excesses in the pursuit of power.

Although Bill Clinton is no Jack Kennedy, the same phenomenon was at work during the public frenzy that attended the disclosure of his sexual misadventures. Despite the best efforts of his political enemies to rouse public opinion against him, Clinton's adolescent gropings in the Oval Office did not truly surprise or shock anyone in America except the most puritanical of preachers and prosecutors. His performance as president received the highest public approval ratings at the very moment that the media were reporting the most scandalous details of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

One man who knows the life story of David quite well was invited to the White House to minister to the President and the First Family in the aftermath of the messy affair. Indeed, the Reverend Jesse Jackson obliquely recalled the far messier affairs of King David by reciting the words of the Fifty-first Psalm, a bit of biblical poetry that is understood to represent David's plea for forgiveness after his fateful act of adultery with Bathsheba: “Wash
me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,” intoned the Reverend Jackson,
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echoing the words traditionally (but wrongly) attributed to David (Psalm 51:4)—and, not incidentally, making the ironic point that Bill Clinton seems like a choirboy when compared to King David.

Strangely, but tellingly, the Bible depicts God himself as ready and willing to overlook the bloodiest deeds and nastiest sins of King David. The punishing deity who dictated so many stern laws of moral conduct to Moses does not appear to much care, for example, that David seduced and impregnated a married woman while her husband was serving as a soldier on the front lines and then conspired to murder the husband—thereby violating at least three of the Ten Commandments in one sorry episode.

“Yahweh,” explains Harold Bloom in
The Book of J
, “is the God who fell in love with David.”
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And here is where we glimpse a clue to one of the ultimate mysteries of the Bible. Why is God shown to be so much more enamored of David than of Moses or any other towering figure of the Hebrew Bible? Why is the life of David reported in such intimate, even titillating detail? Why were these sometimes troubling texts preserved with such care over the millennia? Why did the later biblical editors fail in their efforts to censor the life story of David? The answer to these questions may suggest the reason why the Bible was written, how it has endured for more than three thousand years, and why we still find ourselves so fascinated by it.

The authorship of the Bible remains a Gordian knot after some two thousand years of pious study and a century or so of modern scholarship. One theory proposes that the core of the Hebrew Bible originated as a formal biography of King David and the rest of the biblical text came to be attached to his life story in bits and pieces over the centuries. If this proposal is correct, we are confronted with the intriguing but unsettling notion that the
Bible as we know it today might not have come into existence at all but for an anonymous chronicler who set out to write a history of the king in whose court he served.