King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (25 page)

“Thou has promised a good thing unto thy servant,” said David. “Thou, O Lord God, hast spoken it, and through thy blessing let the house of thy servant be blessed forever.” Significantly, the word “forever” appears seven times in the seventh chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, where the eternal promise of kingship is woven deeply and vividly into the biblical tapestry.

Then the king rose and returned to the palace in the City of David. But his sense of well-being would not last long. War and rebellion, conspiracy and deception, murder and mayhem, sexual adventure and sexual assault—all depicted with brutal candor by the biblical authors—would soon put his life and throne at risk even in the face of God's unconditional promise of divine favor. At the worst moments to come, David would surely wonder whether God could be trusted to keep his promise at all.

D
avid was now approaching the high-water mark of his kingship. Secure on the throne, safely established in his own fortress-city, and afire with a kind of pious bravado, David set out to accomplish what Saul had tried but failed to do. In a series of brutal military campaigns and elegant diplomatic initiatives, David pacified the traditional heartland of ancient Israel and expanded its borders, transforming the land and people of Israel from a ragged coalition of feuding tribes into an empire. Under King David,
Eretz Yisrael
reached from the “river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates,” just as God had once promised the patriarch Abraham so long ago. (Gen. 15:18)

“And Yahweh gave victory to David,” the Bible devoutly (and repeatedly) notes, “wherever he went.” (2 Sam. 8:14)
¹

First he “smote the Philistines and subdued them,” apparently driving the last of the Philistines out of central Israel and confining them, once and for all, to the coastal strip that constituted the land of Philistia. (2 Sam. 8:1) Then, leading his army across the Jordan River on Israel's eastern frontier, he campaigned as far
afield as Damascus and the Euphrates River. As his army ranged through the ancient Near East, David subdued all of the traditional enemies who had long threatened the very existence of the land of Israel—the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, the Amalekites—and the smaller tribes and peoples submitted without a fight. After each victory, David left behind garrisons to occupy the defeated nation, and he carried tribute and plunder back to Jerusalem—“vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and vessels of brass.” (2 Sam. 8:10)

“And David reigned over all Israel,” the biblical author sums up, “and David executed justice and righteousness unto all his people.” (2 Sam. 8:15)

Still, there is a strange but significant imbalance in the biblical account of David's successes at statecraft and empire building. David is praised for his administration of “justice and righteousness,” but we are never shown or told exactly what he did to earn such praise. Similarly, the military and diplomatic achievements of David's early reign are hastily summarized in a few sketchy passages of the Book of Samuel. Far more attention is paid to what happens around the royal banquet table and behind the closed doors of the royal bedchamber.

Indeed, only a few of David's exploits are reported at all, and these brief reports are entirely consistent with the proud and ruthless warrior whom we already know David to be. After defeating the Moabites in battle, for example, David lined up the survivors in three groups, and he ordered the men in each line to lie on the ground, “two lines to put to death, and one full line to keep alive.” (2 Sam. 8:2) When David defeated the massed chariotry and cavalry of an obscure kingdom called Zobah, “a thousand and seven hundred horsemen,” he made sure that he would not face them in battle again by ordering all of the chariot horses to be hamstrung. (2 Sam. 8:4) When he withdrew from the land of Edom, he left behind a series of garrisons, “and all the Edomites became servants to David.” (2 Sam. 8:14) On the banks of the distant Euphrates, David erected a monument of stone bearing his name to mark the farthest reach of his empire. (2 Sam. 8:3, 13) (AB)

Still, the Bible makes no real distinction between the private affairs of King David and the public policy of the kingdom of Israel. Both aspects of the life story of David are so intertwined that they are not meant to be teased apart, and—as far as the more pious sources are concerned—both are meant to reflect the workings of God's will in the world of mortal men and women. All of these factors come into play in the curious tale of how King David suddenly resolved to do something to honor the memory of Saul and Jonathan. One day, abruptly and rather perversely, David was struck with the notion of canvassing Israel in an effort to find a man in whose veins ran the blood of King Saul.

“Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul,” asked David, “that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake?” (2 Sam. 9:1)

Saul was long dead. So were Jonathan and two of his brothers, all of whom had died in battle with the Philistines, and Ishbaal, the puppet-king who had been assassinated by his own officers. And, according to a grotesque incident that is revealed only much later in the biblical text, seven other sons and grandsons of Saul had been sacrificed by order of King David.
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So David would find it difficult to search out yet another son of Saul, and his interest in doing so must have seemed odd and ominous to the courtiers who knew well the fate that had befallen the house of Saul.

Indeed, the fate of Saul's children at the hands of David is one of the strangest episodes in all of the Hebrew Bible. At some unspecified point during David's reign, the Book of Samuel reports, the land of Israel suffered a famine that lasted for three years, and David sought a divine oracle to explain why.

“Blood guilt rests on Saul and his family,” God revealed, “because he put the Gibeonites to death.” (2 Sam. 21:2) (NEB)

The Gibeonites had lived in an enclave in the tribal homeland of Benjamin under the protection of the Israelites ever since
the original conquest of Canaan by Joshua. (Josh. 9:19–21, 27) Saul's supposed crime against the Gibeonites is never actually described, but David now wanted to atone on behalf of Saul—“the man who massacred us,” as the Gibeonites described him, “and tried to exterminate us.” (2 Sam. 21:5) (New JPS) David offered to bestow upon the Gibeonites a bounty of silver and gold, but they wanted only blood-vengeance.

“Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us,” the Gibeonites demanded, “and we will hang them up unto Yahweh.” (2 Sam. 21:4–6)

“I will deliver them,” David replied. (2 Sam. 21:4–6)
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David turned over two of Saul's sons and five of his grandsons to the Gibeonites, who promptly put them to death in a public execution. Exactly how the seven descendants of Saul died is not clear—the original Hebrew text has been interpreted to suggest that the men were “flung down” from a mountain (NEB), or “impaled” (New JPS), or “dismembered” (NJB), and the Anchor Bible boldly reports that they were “crucified”—which, if accurate, is the only reference to crucifixion in the Hebrew Bible.
⁴
Significantly, however, the Bible does specify that the men were killed “at the time of the barley harvest,” which suggests a ceremony of human sacrifice rather than a judicial execution. (2 Sam. 21: 9)

What is actually going on here, some scholars speculate, is the offering of royal blood to propitiate an angry god who has punished the people of Israel with famine, a ritual of human sacrifice that may have been borrowed from the practices of the pagan Canaanites and one that plainly violates the official theology of the Bible. Even if David cannot be fairly characterized as a participant in human sacrifice, the very notion that he surrendered the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites for “hanging” is shocking enough. After all, each one of the victims was the son or grandson of King Saul and, therefore, a potential rival for the throne of Israel. The whole incident is so unsettling that some scholars suspect that the passage was censored out of the sacred texts of ancient Israel and
restored later by one of the compilers and redactors who were the final editors of the Bible, which may explain why the passage pops up so late in the Book of Samuel.

Only one male descendant of Saul now survived, or so the Bible says, and he was an unfortunate cripple named Mephibosheth,
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son of Jonathan and grandson of Saul. The boy had been only five years old when his father and grandfather died in battle, and his nurse had taken him into hiding, apparently fearful that Saul's enemies were seeking to slaughter everyone in the line of succession. Indeed, she may have worried that David himself represented the greatest threat to the child's life. “And it came to pass,” the Bible reports, “as she made haste to flee, that he fell, and became lame.” (2 Sam. 4:4) Now, as David canvassed his kingdom for any surviving member of the house of Saul, it was the crippled Mephibosheth who was found.

Mephibosheth was fetched back to Jerusalem and ushered into David's throne room, where he promptly fell on his face in abject terror. David, as we have seen, had been careful to distance himself from the battlefield deaths of Saul and Jonathan and the assassination of Ishbaal. Even when seven prospective claimants to the crown of Saul were put out of contention in a single mass execution, David preserved a kind of plausible deniability—the Gibeonites, not David, spilled their blood. But surely poor Mephibosheth, the last known survivor of the house of Saul, must have ached with anxiety when David summoned him out of hiding.

“Fear not,” said David to the crippled man who now groveled in front of him, “for I will surely show you kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore to you all the land of Saul, and you shall eat bread at my table.” (2 Sam. 9:7)

Mephibosheth, however, continued to cower.

“What is thy servant,” said Mephibosheth to the king, “that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?” (2 Sam. 9:8)

But David did exactly as he promised. The lands and houses that had once belonged to King Saul were put under the custody of an old retainer named Ziba, who was charged with the duty of managing the estate for King Saul's grandson. “But Mephibosheth dwelled in Jerusalem,” the Bible carefully notes, “for he did continually eat at the king's table.” (2 Sam. 9:13) The biblical author would have us believe that David was acting out of love for Jonathan; after all, Jonathan had extracted a solemn promise from David to care for his survivors. “I know that as long as I live you will show me faithful friendship,” Jonathan had said, “and if I should die, you will continue loyal to my family for ever.”

But surely the irony was not lost on the original readers of the Bible: Mephibosheth is one of “the lame and the blind” who “are hated of David's soul.” (2 Sam. 4:8) Yet now David insisted that the lame grandson of King Saul “shall eat at my table as one of the king's sons.” (2 Sam. 9:11) Perhaps David was concerned only with public relations. “Did David hope by this theatrical act of kindness to a descendant of Saul,” wonders Robert H. Pfeiffer, “to offset the silent indignation of the Israelites after the slaughter of Saul's sons?”
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Even so, we know enough about David by now to imagine a more calculated reason for keeping Mephibosheth within his intimate family circle. As a man well acquainted with conspiracy, both as a practitioner and as a target, King David wanted the last survivor of the house of Saul where he could keep a watchful eye on him.

An intriguing glimpse into David's inner circle is offered in a few spare lines of the Bible that describe the men who served in his royal cabinet. On these brief and oblique observations by the biblical author, modern Bible scholarship has come up with a description of how David worked a revolution in ancient Israel. With the assistance of these confidants and commanders and
henchmen, David reinvented the army, government, and religion of ancient Israel, dragging the people out of their primitive tribal existence and showing them how a modern cosmopolitan state of the tenth century
B.C.E.
ought to function.

The Bible reports, for example, that Joab was placed in charge of the army of Israel, presumably the tribal musters that rallied to the king in times of war. But, significantly, David did not rely only on the tribal militia to protect his life and his throne—a man named Benaiah commanded the corps of foreign mercenaries who served as David's praetorian guard. (2 Sam. 8:18) And David's standing army included a few especially distinguished warriors who pledged their loyalty to him—these were the “mighty men,” as the King James Version renders the Hebrew term
gibborim
, who served in elite units designated as “the Three” and “the Thirty.” (2 Sam. 23:8, 13 ff.)

King David was attended by both a chronicler (literally, a “remembrancer”) and a scribe, both of whom may have prepared and preserved the very annals on which significant portions of the biblical account are based. (2 Sam. 8:16–17) According to later notices in the Book of Samuel, the cabinet included a privy counselor known formally as “the Friend of David” (2 Sam. 15:37) (AB), and a man who served as overseer of the corvée, a program of labor conscription that supplied the king with the manpower to build his palaces and fortifications. (2 Sam. 20:24) Two men shared the office of high priest in King David's court—Abiathar, the lone survivor of King Saul's slaughter of the priests at Nob, and the mysterious Zadok, a man of dubious origins who may not have been an Israelite at all.