King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (23 page)

One nation, however, did not yet fear David—the Philistines. And, ironically, it was David's former ally who would put him to the first and crucial test of his kingship.

None of the grand exploits attributed to David escaped the attention of the Philistines, or so the Bible suggests. As long as David was merely king of Judah, the Philistines might have regarded him as a vassal and even an ally—after all, he had served them faithfully as a soldier of fortune! But whoever wore the crown of a united Israel would surely be regarded as an enemy of Philistia, and so it was that the Philistines declared war on King David. The army that marched on Jerusalem to dethrone King David was the very same army in which he had once sought to serve in the campaign against King Saul. But now it was David, not Saul, whose kingship was at risk.

The Philistines sent a task force to search out David and his men—but David, too, had his sources of intelligence. When he learned that a Philistine army was on the move, he went to ground in what the Bible calls “the stronghold,” presumably the City of David in Jerusalem but possibly his old stronghold at Adullam. Soon the enemy appeared in the lowlands of Rephaim, which lay on the approaches to Jerusalem and positioned the Philistines to split the northern and southern regions of David's united monarchy. Thus the old guerrilla fighter was faced with the same tactical decision that figured so crucially in his war with Saul—should he stay in his stronghold and and hope to survive a siege, or should he sally forth and fight?

“Shall I go up against the Philistines?” he inquired of God, presumably resorting to the casting of lots. God answered: “Go up!” (2 Sam. 5:18–19) (AB)

David and his men engaged the Philistines and succeeded in driving them off. Indeed, the Philistines fled in such haste that they left behind their own array of idols, which David and his men seized as spoils of war. The taking of an enemy's ritual paraphernalia was a common practice in ancient warfare—it was thought to humiliate the defeated enemy and celebrate the superior power of the god or gods of the victor. In fact, the Philistines had once taken the Ark of the Covenant, if only briefly, in an earlier battle with the Israelites. (1 Sam. 4:1–11) Lest we suspect that David and his men actually
used
the abandoned idols, the fussy author of Chronicles (but
not
the author of Samuel) insists that “David gave instructions and they burned [them] with fire.” (1 Chron. 14:12) (AB)

The first skirmish with the Philistines, as it turned out, was only a tactical victory. The Philistines regrouped and appeared again at the approaches to Jerusalem, and David resorted again to the tools of divination to seek instruction from God. Now, however, Yahweh is shown to give rather more elaborate advice than could plausibly have been extracted with a series of yes-or-no questions. God, displaying the tactical insights of a Napoléon or a von Clausewitz, now ruled out a second frontal assault on the Philistine lines. “Circle around them,” God said, ordering David to execute a flanking maneuver and carry out an assault on the undefended rear of the enemy. To express the tactical advantages of the maneuver, the biblical text slips into a kind of martial rhapsody.

“Then, when you hear the sound of the wind in the asherahs,” God tells David, referring to the upright poles by which the goddess Asherah was venerated, “look sharp, for Yahweh will have marched out ahead of you to attack the Philistine camp!” (2 Sam. 5:23–24)
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Here we find the kind of metaphorical flourish that is so often used by the biblical authors to depict a physical manifestation of
the ineffable God of Israel—Yahweh will manifest himself as a kind of storm god, and the sound of the wind is the evidence of God's physical presence. The very fact that God is shown to express himself in ornate prose rather than the yes-or-no answers of divination suggests that the passage is of late authorship. But the kernel of military intelligence that can be found within the husk of theology makes it clear that David's generalship was the decisive factor in defeating the Philistines once and for all.

“David did as the Lord had commanded him, and he smote the Philistines from Gibeon to Gezer.” (2 Sam. 5:25)
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Gibeon, of course, was the place that figured so prominently in the civil war that followed the death of Saul. It was here that twelve men of Ishbaal's army and twelve men of David's army managed to kill each other off in a single round of ritual combat. Gezer was a frontier town on the border between Israel and Philistia, and so the biblical author is suggesting that David finally succeeded in driving the Philistines out of the heartland of Israel and confining them to a narrow coastal strip along the Mediterranean. The expulsion of the Philistines from Gibeon was a notable achievement because it was in the nearby town of Kiriath-jearim
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that the most sacred ritual object in all of Israel was located—the gilded wooden chest known in the Bible as the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark was a tactile symbol of both history and theology in ancient Israel. According to the Bible, the Ark was fabricated by a master carpenter named Bezaleel during the forty years of wandering in the Sinai. Moses himself provided the specifications—“two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it,” all of it fashioned out of acacia-wood, covered with pure gold, and fitted with rings and staves that allowed the Ark to be carried by the Israelites wherever they went. (Exod. 25:1 ff.) Within the Ark were stored the two stone tablets on which
Moses was believed to have inscribed the sacred law of Yahweh on Mount Sinai. (Deut. 10:1) Atop the Ark were two gold-wrought figures of cherubim—fierce sphinxlike beasts rather than the fat angels of contemporary Christmas cards—and God himself was imagined to have ridden on their outstretched wings as he led the Israelites through the wilderness: “Yahweh Seated-upon-the-Cherubim” is one of the many names of the God of Israel. (2 Sam. 6:2) (AB) Indeed, the Ark was carried into battle by the Israelites precisely because it was imagined to be the throne and footstool of Yahweh Sabaoth, that is, Yahweh in his fearsome role as the God of Armies.
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How the Ark first came to the town of Kiriath-jearim is the point of an especially bizarre tale preserved in the Book of Samuel. Twenty years earlier, when David was still a lad tending his father's sheep in Bethlehem, the Philistines had succeeded in capturing the Ark in battle, but later they insisted on restoring it to the defeated Israelites when they found themselves afflicted with an infestation of mice and a plague of tumors.
²⁴
To make amends to Yahweh over the hijacking of the Ark, and to persuade him to lift the plague, the Philistines struck on the idea of fashioning five mice and five tumors out of pure gold; they loaded the Ark and the golden offerings on a cart drawn by milk cows and sent the driverless cart in the direction of the Israelite border, where it finally came to halt in a village called Beth-shemesh.

The surprised locals, busy at work on the wheat harvest, greeted the Ark with an impromptu round of burnt-offerings, but their exultation did not last long. When a few of the curious reapers dared to peak inside the Ark, God promptly struck them dead, and, lest anyone miss the point, he smote fifty thousand others, too. So the people of Beth-shemesh hastened the Ark on its way—“Who is able to stand before Yahweh, this holy God? And to whom shall it go up from us?”—and it finally came to rest in the private house of the local priest in Kiriath-jearim, where the Ark remained for the next twenty years. (1 Sam. 6:20–7:2)

So long as the district around Kiriath-jearim remained under occupation by the Philistines, the Ark was inaccessible to the
people of Israel. Now David had evicted the Philistines, but he was not content to leave such a rare and precious relic in a backwater town. Indeed, some scholars suggest that David was a conqueror rather than a liberator of Kiriath-jearim, and he seized the Ark as a spoil of war!
²⁵
In any event, David resolved to bring the Ark from its humble setting in Kiriath-jearim to Jerusalem, where it would symbolize the centrality of the City of David in the newly reunited kingdom of Israel.

The Ark may have been regarded as a relic of the greatest sanctity in ancient Israel, but David was determined to use it for political purposes. The presence of the Ark in Jerusalem would attract worshippers from all over the land of Israel; it would link his new-minted crown and his newfangled capital to the most ancient traditions of the twelve tribes; and it would demonstrate to any doubters or dissidents that King David, unlike Saul or any of his sons, was the master of his own fate and the fate of all Israel.

David's army had numbered only six hundred during his years as a freebooter and an outlaw, but now the king of Israel summoned thirty thousand picked men from throughout the land of Israel to serve as a guard of honor in the solemn procession that would bring the Ark into Jerusalem.
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Ranks of musicians filled the air with “the sound of all kinds of cypress-wood instruments,” as the Bible describes the scene, “with lyres, harps, timbrels, sistrums, and cymbals.” (2 Sam. 6:5) (New JPS) The Ark was loaded on a cart fashioned out of virgin lumber and pulled by a brace of oxen, and two men—the sons of the priest in whose home the Ark had been sheltered—were detailed to walk alongside and guide the cart on the road to Jerusalem. David himself led the procession, leaping and dancing with ecstatic abandon.

So holy was the Ark, however, that even the pious showmanship of David was not sufficient to soothe the God of Israel, or so the Bible allows us to understand. At one awful moment, as the
cart passed a threshing-floor on the road to Jerusalem, the oxen stumbled and one of the attendants, a man named Uzzah, reached out to steady the Ark. His only motive was to make sure that the throne of invisible Yahweh did not tumble to the ground. But the mere touch of a mortal hand was apparently an offense to Yahweh, because “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error, and there he died for his error.” (2 Sam. 6:7)

David, always so bluff and brave, so rough and ready, was badly rattled by the incident at the threshing-floor. “David was afraid of Yahweh that day,” the Bible reports, and he wondered whether Uzzah's death meant that God was symbolically withdrawing his imprimatur on David's kingship by preventing the Ark from being installed in the City of David. “How can I let the Ark of Yahweh come to me?” fretted David. So he ordered a halt to the procession, dispersed the soldiers and the musicians, the singers and the dancers, and stashed the Ark in a house on the road to Jerusalem, the residence of a man called Obed-edom, where it remained for the next three months. (2 Sam. 6:9)
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Only when David was assured that the auguries were good— “Yahweh has blessed Obed-edom's house and all that belongs to him because of the Ark of God”—did he try again to bring the Ark to the City of David. “I'll bring the blessing back to my own house!” he figured. (2 Sam. 6:12) (AB)
²⁸
But now he took even greater precautions to soothe the temper of the mercurial Yahweh and, not incidentally, to put on an even more spectacular display for the tens of thousands of Israelites who had gathered to see their king as he brought the holiest relic of Israel into the city he had named after himself. (2 Sam. 6:12)
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The spectacle is eerie and even grotesque. Slowly and solemnly, the oxcart bearing the Ark began to roll in the direction of Jerusalem once again, guarded by soldiers, attended by singers and musicians, watched by thousands of awed onlookers who lined the road. Every six steps, the whole procession halted as David himself offered up an ox and a fatling sheep, an orgy of sacrifice that must have left the road to Jerusalem soaked in blood.

To demonstrate his piety—and, we might imagine, to make sure that every eye was on him alone—David had shed all of his royal apparel and wore only the brief linen ephod that was the customary garb of a consecrated priest. Thus attired in nothing more than a loincloth, the handsome king capered and whirled like a dervish as the ram's horn shrieked, the cymbals clanged, the woodwinds droned, and the crowds reveled in a pious frenzy.

“And David danced before Yahweh with all his might,” the biblical author writes. “So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of Yahweh with shouting and with the sound of the horn.” (2 Sam. 6:14–15)
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At last the solemn procession reached the walls of Jerusalem, passed through the open gate, and came to a halt inside the fortified citadel known as the City of David. Here David presided over yet another public spectacle that resonated with sacred meaning and political showmanship.

First David pitched a tent and placed the Ark inside—a gesture that invoked the most cherished traditions of the Israelites, a nation whose sacred writings celebrate their origins as of tent-dwelling nomads and depict a tent as God's preferred meeting place with his greatest prophet. Then David once again arrogated to himself the role of high priest, sacrificing “burnt-offerings” and “peace-offerings” to Yahweh and pronouncing a blessing over the people of Israel in the name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the fierce and punishing aspect of God. Finally David did what kings have always done to ingratiate themselves with their subjects: he hosted a public feast, handing out to each man and each woman “a loaf of bread, a cake made in a pan, and a raisin cake.” Only then, after a day of both bread and spectacle, did the people of Israel disperse, “every one to his house.” (2 Sam. 6:18–19)
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On the day when Saul had been acclaimed as the first king of Israel, the crowd had included a sprinkling of doubters and dissenters. “How shall this man save us?” they muttered at the sight of him. (1 Sam. 10:27) Today, by contrast, the masses were smitten by the handsome young king, or so the Bible suggests. Indeed, we may imagine how the men and women of Israel chattered
excitedly among themselves as they wandered back to their homes, munching on raisin cakes and buzzing about the eye-grabbing dance that David had performed. If such was the word on the streets of Jerusalem, then King David's audacious gesture had been wholly successful.