King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (24 page)

One woman had watched the whole remarkable spectacle with special care, but only at a distance from the crowds. From a high window in the royal palace, Michal—the daughter of King Saul and the first wife of King David—looked down into the street just as David and the Ark passed. But unlike the rest of the crowd, she was neither pleased nor impressed by what she saw.

“Michal looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before Yahweh,” the Bible pauses to note, “and she despised him in her heart.” (2 Sam. 6:16)

What so distressed the queen of Israel was the fact that the king had danced with such abandon that his brief linen garment repeatedly flew up and exposed his genitals to the crowd. By the time David showed up back at the palace, her anger had reached the flash point. So David, flush with excitement at the adoration of the crowds, found himself greeted not as an exalted king but as a husband in deep trouble with his wife.

“Didn't the king of Israel do himself honor today,” complained Michal as soon as David appeared at the palace, “exposing himself today in the sight of his subjects' slave-girls like some dancer!” (2 Sam. 6:20)
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David's high spirits evaporated in the heat of her harsh words, and he lashed out with equal rancor. “In Yahweh's presence I
am
a dancer!” he retorted. “Blessed be Yahweh, who chose me instead of your father and all his family, and appointed me ruler over Yahweh's people Israel.” (2 Sam. 6:21)
³³

Thus did David pointedly remind Michal that he was king and her late father was not; if she still lived in a royal palace, it
was because of him alone. What's more, if she felt humiliated by his promiscuity—if she was jealous of the powerful sexual allure that he worked on the other women of Israel—David vowed to punish her with more of the same.

“I will dance before Yahweh and dishonor myself even more,” he taunted, “but among the slave-girls that you speak of I will be honored.” (2 Sam. 6:21–22)
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The scene fairly sizzles with sexual tension and echoes with the bitter emotions of an estranged husband and wife. The Bible, as we have already seen, suggests that Michal had been forcibly separated from her second husband, Paltiel, and sent back to King David against her will. Now the Bible goes on to imply that David and Michal had already stopped sleeping with each other and never did so again: “And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.” (2 Sam. 6:23)

Like much else in the life of David, the estrangement of David and Michal can be viewed from the perspectives of theology, politics, and intimate human relations. The pious reading of the text holds that God punished Michal for her insolence toward the anointed king with the curse of childlessness, the worst fate that can befall a woman in the biblical hierarchy of values. A more worldly reading suggests that David simply shunned Michal from that day forward, contenting himself with the sexual favors of his many other wives and concubines and thus denying Michal a child. But from either perspective, Michal's childlessness changed the politics of succession in ancient Israel. King David sired many sons, and, as we shall see, they fought bitterly with each other for the throne. Since Michal, daughter of King Saul, did not produce a son, none of the potential successors could claim to bear the blood of
two
kings, Saul and David. The house of Saul reached a dead end in the marriage of David and Michal.

Above all, the fact that a moment of theological grandeur— the bringing of the Ark to Jerusalem—is linked so intimately to a moment of marital squalor reveals something telling about the Bible and, especially, the biblical life story of David. As we have seen, David is first and always a human being rather than a plaster
saint, and the biblical author who knows and loves David best is the one who is fascinated by the dirty little secrets of the king of Israel.

“The Lord had given him rest from all his enemies,” goes a brief notice in the Bible, and David's thoughts turned from matters of war and politics to the matter of God. So begins a curious passage in the Bible—“the theological highlight” of the Book of Samuel
³⁵
according to one scholar, or “monkish drivel”
³⁶
according to another, but one that casts a shadow over the rest of the Bible and the whole of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The scene opens in the royal palace that King Hiram of Tyre built for David in Jerusalem. To counsel him on his duties to Yahweh, David has summoned not a priest but a prophet named Nathan, a uniquely commanding figure in the life of David whom we meet here for the first time. The troubled king muses out loud to the prophet about the ironic fact that David himself, a mere mortal, enjoys the comforts of a palace while the Ark of the Covenant, the throne and footstool of the King of the Universe, is sheltered only in a rude tent. (2 Sam. 7:1)

“See now that I dwell in a house of cedar,” said the king, “but the ark of God dwells within curtains.” (2 Sam. 7:2)

That very night Nathan was granted a vision in which Yahweh explained it all.

First Yahweh reaffirmed the fundamental credo of the Israelites, a people that began as a tribe of shepherds and goatherds and always cherished the nomadic ideal of wandering and tent-dwelling.

“Shalt thou build me a house for me to dwell in?” said God in Nathan's vision. “For I have not dwelt in a house since the day that I brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but I have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle. In all the places
wherein I have walked among all the children of Israel, spoke I a word with any of the tribes of Israel, saying: ‘Why have ye not built me a house of cedar?’ ” (2 Sam. 7:5–6)

After instructing Nathan to reassure David that he need not feel guilty about his royal digs, God next told Nathan to remind David of the special favor that he enjoyed.

Next God promised that David, unlike the judges and kings who had ruled over Israel before him, would be the founder of a dynasty—a “house,” as the Bible puts it. The house of Moses ended with his death, and so did the house of Saul, but the house of David would produce generation after generation of kings.

Finally God pronounced a blessing on the house of David that is unprecedented in all of the Bible, an unconditional promise of divine protection that no other mortal—not Adam, not Noah, not Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, not even Moses—was ever granted. Here is what Bible scholar Matitiahu Tsevat calls the “blank check of unlimited validity made out to the house of David.”
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“He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever,” God said of David's successor to the throne of Israel without pausing to specify which of his many
sons he had in mind. “I will be for him a father, and he shall be to me for a son; if he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men, but my mercy shall not depart from him.” (2 Sam. 7:13–14)

God, in other words, might punish the kings who came after David for their wrongdoings, but he vowed that he would never abandon them as he had abandoned the house of Saul.

God's promise of eternal kingship to the house of David was something wholly new in the official theology of the Bible. God had entered into covenants with Noah and Abraham and Moses, but never before had he given such a sweeping promise of divine favor. Indeed, the deal that Moses is shown to broker between God and Israel was strictly an “if-then” proposition. “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse,” Moses announced to the Israelites in the name of Yahweh. “The blessing, if ye shall hearken unto the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day, and the curse, if ye shall not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord your God.” (Deut. 11:28) But God's vow to the house of David was perpetual and unconditional.

The biblical source that contributed Nathan's prophecy to the Book of Samuel is generally understood to be one of the priests who served the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem several centuries after David's reign. The royal theologian's motive was to put the divine seal of approval on the house of David, which continued to provide kings to rule over the southern kingdom of Judah for nearly five hundred years. So the prophecy of Nathan as we find it
in Samuel can be understood as an artful work of propaganda that was composed and written into the Bible long after the supposed lifetime of King David.

“Actual history is telescoped in 2 Samuel 7,” explains Frank Moore Cross. “While the promise was made to David, it is the house of David and the house of Yahweh that were bound together and promised eternity.”
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Indeed, one sure sign that a later author or editor reworked the text of Samuel can be found in the distinctly schizoid quality of Nathan's prophecy. At one point, God is shown to reassure David that he does not want or need a “house of cedar” for the Ark of the Covenant, his throne and footstool on earth, because he prefers to dwell in a tent like the earliest ancestors of the Israelites. Then, abruptly, God changes his mind and demands a temple instead of a tent—but he specifies that David's
son
, rather than David, will provide one: “
He
shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.”
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The first idea expressed in the prophecy of Nathan—God prefers a tent to a temple—is based on the simple and unavoidable fact that David did
not
build a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, a fact that the biblical author felt obliged to explain in theological terms. So he insisted that David did not build a temple because God specifically told him not to do so. But, at the same time, the biblical author reaffirms an article of faith that dates back to the earliest history of the Israelites: Yahweh, the God of Israel, preferred a tent to a temple because, like his Chosen People, he was a restless wanderer, a nomad, a tent-dweller.

The idea of Yahweh as “a god of the way,” a wandering god who accompanies his people from place to place, is believed to express the original theology of the Israelites. God favored a tribe of pastoral nomads as his Chosen People, according to the sacred history recorded in the Bible, and he rode along with them atop a portable shrine, the Ark of the Covenant, that served as his throne and footstool. The same idea may be preserved in the Ten Commandments, where the Tenth Commandment—“Thou shalt not
covet thy neighbor's house”—may have started out as a rejection of
all
houses by a tent-dwelling people. (Exod. 20:14) “It is the brief expression of the ‘desert-ideal,’ the tenacious adherence to the forms of nomadic life that alone were considered worthy of men and pleasing to God,” writes Bible scholar Elias Auerbach, drawing an analogy between the original Israelites of distant antiquity and the Bedouin tribes of more recent times.
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The second sentiment in Nathan's prophecy—God requires a temple, and David's son will build it—reflects the historical reality of ancient Israel as the later biblical authors knew it. Jerusalem was the site of the central sanctuary of ancient Israel, an opulent temple that was first built by David's son and successor and later rebuilt after its destruction by the Babylonians. According to the Book of Deuteronomy, God accepted worship and sacrifice only from a single central sanctuary—“the place which the Lord your God shall choose to cause His name to dwell there” (Deut. 12:11)—and that place was the Temple at Jerusalem.
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So the original version of Nathan's prophecy was “written over” to make it clear that God had wanted a temple all along.
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Still, a hard knot of contradiction remains in the text—if God wanted a temple, then why did he tell David not to build one? No clear answer is given in the troubled and troubling text of the Book of Samuel, but the author of the Book of Chronicles came up with one of his own. According to the Chronicler, David knew that it would be necessary to build a “house of God” in Jerusalem, one that “must be exceeding magnificent, of fame and of glory throughout the world.” So he assembled a supply of building materials—stone, cedar, brass, iron—and a corps of foreign stonemasons to work the stone. But, as David would later reveal to Solomon, his son and successor, God had told David that he was unworthy to build the temple because his hands were so bloodstained.

No such explanation, however, appears in the prophecy of Nathan as reported in the Book of Samuel. At the end of the fateful encounter between the prophet and the king, David left his palatial house of cedar and entered the tent where Yahweh was understood to dwell, and he delivered a long and ornate prayer of thanksgiving.