King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (21 page)

“One thing I require of you,” David sent word back to Abner. “You shall not see my face except you first bring Michal, Saul's daughter, when you come.” (2 Sam. 3:13)
¹⁷

Another measure of David's determination to reclaim Michal— and a measure, too, of David's characteristic guile—is found in the fact that he sent much the same message to Ishbaal. “Deliver to me my wife Michal,” David admonished the son of Saul, “whom I betrothed to me for a hundred foreskins of the Philistines.” Nothing in the law or tradition of ancient Israel entitled David to make such an audacious demand, but the threat of David's army was enough to frighten Ishbaal into compliance. And it was Ishbaal, always unsure of his grip on the crown and always deferential to more forceful men, who took his sister from her second husband and sent her to David as a kind of peace-offering.

The incident raises a question about David that will loom larger as the eye of the biblical author seeks out ever more intimate places in his life story. The Bible shows us, again and again, that David was a man who loved women. Indeed, the defining moment in his long and troubled life will result from his mortal weakness for one woman in particular. But it is also clear that David was capable of using and even abusing women. Here, for example, David did not seek to remarry his first wife out of tender emotions; rather, he calculated that Michal, a daughter of Saul, would be a valuable political asset in his campaign for the throne of Israel.

Michal's needs and desires in the matter do not enter into the equation. As a young woman, of course, she had declared her love for David. But did David love Michal? “That is precisely what the text leaves unsaid,” writes feminist Bible scholar J. Cheryl Exum, “suggesting that David's motives are … purely political,” both at the time of their first marriage and at the time
when he reclaimed Michal.
¹⁸
In fact, the whole incident raises the unsettling notion that Michal was forcibly separated from her second husband, Paltiel, and sent back to David's harem against her will. And as we shall see, her life as one of David's many wives was utterly loveless.

Perhaps the best evidence that Michal was taken by force is a poignant note that has been injected into the biblical account of these otherwise political proceedings. As Michal was escorted back to the court of David, Paltiel followed her in abject misery, “weeping as he went.” Only when the unhappy parade reached the outskirts of Hebron—Michal followed by her sobbing husband, and both of them under guard—did Abner turn the heartbroken man around and send him back home.

“Go, return,” the general ordered. “And he returned.” (2 Sam. 3:14, 16)

The sad story of Michal is the first, but not the last, example of a woman whom David takes for his sexual pleasure or political advantage without bothering to consider whether she is a willing consort.

Once Michal was restored to her first husband, Abner renewed his courtship of David. To ingratiate himself, he began to agitate on David's behalf within the tribe of Benjamin and among the elders of Israel. David still reigned only in the land of Judah, but Abner now campaigned for his elevation to the throne of all Israel. Even though the prophet Samuel had anointed David in secret, Abner seemed to know of David's claim of divine favor, and he piously invoked the God of Israel to justify his sudden change of colors.

“The Lord has spoken of David, saying: By the hand of my servant David I will save my people Israel out of the hand of the Philistines and all their enemies,” Abner said. “In times past you sought for David to be king over you—now do it.” (2 Sam. 3:17–18)
¹⁹

The Bible does not disclose why Abner experienced a change of heart. Perhaps he concluded that David was destined to take the crown away from Ishbaal, and he wanted to put himself on the winning side. Perhaps he resented Ishbaal's accusation of sexual scandal, whether or not he was guilty as charged. In any case, Ab-ner's declarations of loyalty persuaded David that he was now an earnest ally, and so David granted Abner the audience he had long sought. Abner arrived in Hebron with twenty of his men— all blooded in battle against David's army—but David welcomed his former enemies with a royal feast. As Abner's men drank and dined at the king's table, the turncoat general coolly offered to betray the man he had once championed.

“I will arise and go, and will gather all Israel unto my lord the king,” Abner said, “that they make a covenant with you, and that you may reign over all that your soul desires.” (2 Sam. 3:21)

David accepted Abner's pledge of loyalty without a moment of self-caution. If the renegade general of a rival king was willing to come over to David's camp, he was ready to embrace his new ally without questioning his motives or his bona fides. The deal was done, and Abner “went in peace.” (2 Sam. 3:21)

Not everyone in David's inner circle was quite so trusting of Abner, who had changed his colors once and might change them again. David's own general, Joab, still nursed a highly personal grudge against the man who had killed his brother in battle. When Joab returned to Hebron after his latest foray against the Israelites to discover that Abner had come and gone with David's blessings, the headstrong general charged into the throne room and confronted David.

“What have you done?” Joab cried out. “Abner came to deceive you, and to learn all about your movements and to find out what you are doing!” (2 Sam. 3:24–25)
²⁰

The Bible does not tell us whether David answered these insolent words, but the scene suggests that Joab was unimpressed by the crown that David now wore and unintimidated by the man he had known as a comrade in arms long before David made himself
king of Judah. Indeed, Joab was never willing to defer to his uncle's authority, and now he took it upon himself to exact revenge on Abner without bothering to ask for permission—he dispatched his own messengers to summon Abner back to Hebron, “but David knew it not.” (2 Sam. 3:26)

When Abner appeared once again at the gates of Hebron, perhaps a bit bewildered by his sudden recall, Joab called him aside and asked for a moment “to speak with him quietly.” The unsuspecting Abner drew close to Joab and, we might imagine, inclined his head to hear what his former adversary had to say. And then Joab drew his dagger and delivered a deathblow to Abner, striking him in the groin, the very same spot where Abner's spear had penetrated the body of his dead brother. Asahel's blood cried out for revenge, as Joab saw it, and now revenge had been taken.

Surely David the outlaw would not have been shocked at the rough justice that Joab inflicted on Abner. David the king, however, could not afford to be implicated in the blood feud that raged between the clans of Abner and Joab. Just as he had done when the Amalekite reported the slaying of Saul, David disavowed the slaying of Saul's general. Although both deaths were ultimately to his benefit, David refused to alienate the people of Israel by acknowledging any role in these useful murders.

“I and my kingdom are guiltless before the Lord forever from the blood of Abner,” David mused aloud. “Let it fall upon the head of Joab, and upon all his father's house.” (2 Sam. 3:28–29)

A public funeral for Abner was held in Hebron. David himself followed the bier and delivered the eulogy, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of grief. “And the king lifted up his voice, and wept at the grave of Abner, and all the people wept,” the Bible reports, describing a display of political showmanship that seems eerily modern. “Know you not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?” David cried. Ignoring the entreaties of his own courtiers, he made a point of refusing to take food on the day of the funeral: “God do so to me, and more also, if I taste bread or anything else till the sun be down.” (2 Sam. 3:32, 35, 38)
And his public display of grief had precisely the effect that David had intended.

“And all the people took notice of it, and it pleased them,” the Bible records. “So all the people and all Israel understood that day that it was not the king's will to slay Abner.” (2 Sam. 3:36)
²¹

Back in the palace at Hebron, David complained to his courtiers about the ruthlessness of Joab and his brothers—“These men are too hard for me!”—and he piously called upon Yahweh to punish them. “Reward the evil-doer,” he prayed, “according to his wickedness.” But he recognized, too, that a hard man can be good to find in the treacherous world in which he lived. Joab, who has been described by modern scholars as a “good Machiavellian courtier” and the “toughest of ancient Near Eastern mafiosi,” was too valuable to the ambitious king of Judah to be sacrificed for the sake of public relations. (2 Sam. 3:39)
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And so David ordered Joab to join in mourning the man he had killed—“Rend your clothes, and gird you with sackcloth, and wail before Abner” (2 Sam. 3:21, 39)—but he neither dismissed Joab from his service nor punished him for slaying Abner. The day might come when a man of Joab's skills and temperament would turn out to be crucial to winning and keeping the throne. If Joab ever became dispensable, David must have resolved, he would dispense with him. And until then, Joab would remain in service to David as the general of his army and, from time to time, the royal hit man.

When word of Abner's assassination reached the court of King Ishbaal in far-off Gilead, “his hands became feeble, and all the Israelites were affrighted.” Abner had been the real power in the rump kingdom, and now Abner was dead and gone. How then could the cowering Ishbaal, who has been dismissed by Bible scholars as “an ineffectual weakling” and “a thoroughly unkingly
invertebrate,” stand up against the ruthless king of Judah who so clearly wanted to claim the crown of all Israel? (2 Sam. 4:1)
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Ishbaal's terror was wholly justified. Two captains in his army, Baanah and Rechab, following the example of their dead general, sought to win favor with David by delivering Ishbaal's head. So shabby was the court of King Ishbaal that he was attended only by a woman who busied herself with sifting wheat as she sat outside his door while he took his customary midday nap—and, fatefully, she had fallen asleep at her chore. The two conspirators walked right past her into the king's bedchamber, where they stabbed the sleeping man to death. (2 Sam. 4:5) (NEB)

The assassins paused only to hack off the king's head, and they carried it with them as they slipped out of the palace and fled toward the frontier. All night long they traveled in the direction of Judah, cradling the gruesome evidence of the favor they had done for David, urging each other on with speculation about how richly they would be rewarded for it.

“Behold the head of Ishbaal, the son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life,” the killers addressed David as they held up the severed head. “Yahweh has avenged my lord the king this day of Saul and of his seed.” (2 Sam. 4:8)

The boastful assassins may have been well pleased with their deed, but David declared that he was not. “When one told me: ‘Behold, Saul is dead,’ as though he brought good tidings, I took hold of him and slew him instead of giving a reward for his tidings,” David responded. “How much more, when wicked men have slain a righteous person in his own house upon his bed, shall I not now require his blood of your hand, and take you away from the earth?” (2 Sam. 4:10–11)

So, as he had done so many times before, David issued a death sentence. His soldiers fell on the two men, “and they slew them, and cut off their hands and their feet, and hanged them up beside the pool in Hebron.” The severed head of Ishbaal was given an honorable burial in the same grave that held the corpse of Abner, the man who had made him king of Israel and who had been
ready to unmake him. Buried along with their mangled remains was the brief dynasty that Saul had founded.

Years had passed since David was first called out of the fields by his father to meet a strange old seer named Samuel. On that day, the prophet had poured oil over his beautiful young head and promised him the throne of Israel as a gift from Yahweh. But over the years David must have wondered when the promise would be fulfilled. Of course, he did not wait in idleness for God to put a crown on his head, nor does the Bible suggest that God intended him to do so—David made his own destiny, both by force of arms and by backroom intrigue. Now at last David was rewarded with the prize that he had sought for so long, with such craft and cunning, and with such bloodthirsty ambition. At the age of thirty-seven, after seven and a half years on the tribal throne in Hebron, David was raised by popular acclaim to the kingship of both Judah
and
Israel.

We can imagine David's satisfaction when one of his courtiers announced that a delegation of distinguished men, the elders of all Israel, had appeared at the gates of his palace in Hebron and now awaited his pleasure.

“Behold,” the elders of Israel proclaimed to the king of Judah, “we are thy bone and thy flesh.” (2 Sam. 5:1)

These diplomatic words were perhaps intended to veil the ugly truth that all of them knew: David was the king of Judah, and Judah was at war with the rest of the twelve tribes of Israel. Indeed, the very notion of a blood relationship between David and the rest of the Israelites is seen by scholars as a late insertion in the original Hebrew text. Still, the elders of Israel were willing to put an end to the bloody civil war by conceding defeat, making a covenant with David, and acclaiming him as “king over Israel.”

“In the past, while Saul was still king over us, you led the forces of Israel to war and you brought them home again,” the elders
declared by way of obeisance, acknowledging David's heroism in war and his good standing with God, “and Yahweh said to you: ‘You shall be shepherd of my people Israel, and you shall be their prince.’ ” (2 Sam. 4:2) (NEB)

The long and glorious reign of David, king of Israel, had begun.