King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (26 page)

The cabinet of King David was something entirely new in the history of ancient Israel. For that reason, David can be seen as a reformer and a modernizer, the man who invented biblical Israel by turning twelve nomadic tribes into a single nation with all the appurtenances that could be found in the imperial courts of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, some scholars argue that David aped the rituals and institutions of the pagan peoples and nations that surrounded the land of Israel. Just as the developing nations of the
twentieth century sought armament and constitutions and popular culture from the West, Israel in the tenth century
B.C.E.
may have found a role model in the superpowers of its day.

The so-called Jebusite hypothesis, for example, holds that David borrowed freely from the Jebusite and Canaanite rituals of court and temple. “The main source of this borrowing,” writes Bible scholar R. E. Clements, “would seem to have been Jerusalem, where David took over the tradition and authority of the Jebusite kingdom.”
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The solemn processional by which David brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem—and even the marital spat that it prompted—are seen by some as evidence that the faith of ancient Israel was deeply suffused with pagan borrowings. When a nearly naked David dances in “the grip of cultic ecstasy,” the biblical author may be echoing an ancient Canaanite text that describes the sacred marriage of El, the supreme god in the Canaanite pantheon, and his consort, Asherah. The raisin cake that David distributed to the crowds was the symbol of the cult of Baal, yet another Canaanite deity. The slave-girls who were said to “honor” David with sexual favors may have been temple prostitutes of the kind described in another pagan text from an important Canaanite archaeological site at Ras Shamra.
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Even the scene in which Michal watches David's antics has been likened to an ancient Near Eastern motif known as the Woman at the Window—an image of Astarte or some other goddess of love and fertility in the guise of a harlot showing herself at an open window. Similar images carved into Phoenician ivories have been recovered from archaeological sites in northern Israel, where they were apparently used as pagan icons. When David returns to the palace at the climax of the public ritual, ready to “bless” his house, as the Bible put it, perhaps we are meant to see a symbolic reenactment of the sacred act of intercourse between
El and Asherah. Significantly, Michal's punishment for spurning David is lifelong childlessness.

Indeed, some scholars see Michal as the pious believer in the God of Israel and David as an overenthusiastic innovator who borrowed a bit too heavily from pagan rites and rituals. When the Bible reports Michal's disgust at the dance that David performed, we may be witnessing not a wife's response to her husband's “sexual impropriety” but the shock and horror of a true believer at the “cultic innovation” that her husband was bringing to the strict Yahwism that was the faith of ancient Israel. “The linen ephod, the ecstatic dancing, and the apparent ritual nakedness of the king are motifs of ancient Near East mythology and priestly liturgies,” one scholar observes. “David's role … bespeaks changes in Israel—a return, perhaps, to the sense of king and temple that prevailed in the heyday of pagan culture in the land.”
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Just as David seems to have mimicked the pagan practices of the Canaanites, he appears to have modeled his cabinet after the court of Egypt or the “Egyptianized” monarchies of Canaan and Phoenicia. A “rational and bureaucratic mode of statecraft,” proposes Joel Rosenberg, “is David's specific innovation.”
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Thus the duties of the man described in the Bible as a “remembrancer” may have been comparable to those of his Egyptian counterpart—“a master of ceremonies and foreign minister”—and the scribe may have been comparable to “the personal secretary of the pharaoh and his
chef de bureau
.”
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The “Friend of David” may have been a kind of privy counselor and marriage broker patterned after an Egyptian courtier with the formal title of “the Friend of the King,”
¹²
and David's corvée resembles the program of forced labor by which the pharaohs built their mighty temples and pyramids. Even the soldiers known as the Thirty may hark back to the “royal cortege” of thirty men who served in the court
of Ramses II of Egypt three hundred years before the supposed lifetime of David.
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David, who had sown the seeds of more than one tribal blood feud during his years as a bandit and a mercenary, learned a practical lesson from the pagan kings whom he had served. Thus, he chose to surround himself with a personal bodyguard that consisted entirely of foreigners
¹⁴
—the “Cherethites” and “Pelethites” whose duty was to protect David from his own people are understood to have been “Sea Peoples” who, like the Philistines, came to the land of Israel from Crete or elsewhere in the Aegean. Some scholars propose that the Pelethites were, in fact, Philistines, and the Bible itself confirms that David's foreign mercenaries included a contingent of Gittites, that is, men from the Philistine city-state of Gath, the hometown of Goliath. (2 Sam. 15:18)

Even something so fundamental to the biblical history of ancient Israel as the “twelve tribes” may have been an innovation of King David. A fundamental assumption of the biblical authors is that the twelve tribes originated with the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob, but the “twelveness” of the tribes is not always in evidence in the Bible—a close reading reveals that the total number of tribes ranges from ten to thirteen.
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So the conventional wisdom of biblical scholarship—and the Bible itself—holds that David's single greatest achievement of statecraft was to forge the clans and tribes known loosely as “Israelites,” including his own tribe of Judah, into a single nation called “Israel” and to place the nation under the governance of a king, an army, and a royal bureaucracy.

“Israel was no longer a tribal confederacy led by a charismatic
nagid
who had been acclaimed king, but a complex empire organized under the crown,” explains John Bright. “While David's court was no picture of sybaritic luxury, it was hardly the rustic thing that Saul's had been.”
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Indeed, David proved himself to be a daring and energetic leader who constructed “a fully imperial conception of kingship,” and did so “out of whole cloth.”
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Here then is King David as the biblical authors wished to remember him—and, more important, as they wished
us
to remember him. He reigned over not only a kingdom but an empire. He commanded the conscripted labor of his own people to build roads and cisterns, fortresses and palaces, and he accepted tribute from conquered kings and peoples throughout the ancient world. He was cherished by his loyal subjects for the “justice and righteousness” that he dispensed, and he was feared by his defeated enemies for the ruthless and powerful army that served him. He was attended by a royal court that resembled and perhaps even rivaled that of the pharaoh of Egypt, and his harem teemed with wives and concubines and children. Above all, according to the Bible, he enjoyed not only the favor of God but the divine promise of eternal kingship for his sons and successors.

And yet, as the Court Historian makes no effort to conceal, the zenith of power passed quickly and tragically.

The first sign of David's subtle turn of fortune was an ugly diplomatic rebuff by one of his new tributaries, the kingdom of Ammon. David had subjugated the Ammonites, as we have seen, and their king had become his vassal. When the old king died, David sent emissaries to the new king of Ammon to comfort him on the death of his father. “I will show kindness unto Hanun, the son of Nahash,” David thought to himself, “as his father showed kindness unto me.” (2 Sam. 10:2) But the counselors of the Ammonite king agitated against David. “Do you suppose David means to do honour to your father when he sends you his condolences?” they whispered. “These men of his are spies whom he has sent to find out how to overthrow the city.” (2 Sam. 10:3) (NEB)

So on the orders of the king of Ammon, the royal messengers from Jerusalem were subjected to a series of indignities—half of each man's beard was shaved off, and each man's garment was cut halfway up from the ground so that his buttocks were laid bare, a public humiliation that McCarter compares to “symbolic castration.”
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Then all the emissaries were sent back to King David as living symbols of Ammonite defiance.

When David learned of how his emissaries had been abased and disfigured, he resolved to punish the insolent Ammonites with a new campaign—and, in the meantime, he ordered the messengers to remain in Jericho until their beards grew back, thereby sparing himself
and
his ambassadors any further embarrassment. The people of Jerusalem, at least, would not see the contempt with which the new king of Ammon regarded the king of Israel.

Realizing that “they had fallen into bad odor with David,” the Ammonites fully expected a punitive expedition, and so they began recruiting soldiers of fortune from the land of Aram and other neighboring kingdoms. Against the Ammonites and their mercenaries David sent an Israelite army under the command of Joab. “Be of good courage,” Joab declared, echoing the words that Moses spoke to Joshua, the original conqueror of Canaan, “and let us prove strong for our people, and for the cities of our God.” (2 Sam. 10:12) So impressive was the sight of David's army that the Arameans and then the Ammonites broke and ran, and Joab returned in victory to Jerusalem.

The victory, however, was only temporary. The Ammonites regrouped, recruited a fresh supply of Aramean mercenaries from beyond the Euphrates, and marched in the direction of Israel again. At news of the renewed threat from the insolent Ammonites, David placed himself at the head of the army and led the fighting men of Israel across the Jordan River to engage the enemy on its own soil. Again the Arameans were put to rout, and David followed to inflict a bloody punishment on the fleeing soldiers: seven hundred charioteers and forty thousand infantrymen of the mercenary army from Aram were slain on David's orders. (2 Sam. 10:18)

“When all the vassal kings saw that they had been worsted by Israel, they sued for peace and submitted to the Israelites,” the Bible concludes. “The Arameans never dared help the Ammonites again.” (2 Sam. 10:19)
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As for the Ammonite king himself, however, David resolved that further punishment was necessary. He would bring the war to the gates of Rabbah, the royal capital of Ammon, and he would extract a price in blood for the shaved beards and exposed buttocks of his couriers. But the Court Historian pauses here to note an odd and somehow ominous fact: the army of Israel would go to war, but David, the warrior-king who had been blooded in so many battles, would stay home.

Some of the old fire had gone out of David, or so the Bible seems to suggest. He was now well into middle age, and apparently he was no longer willing to endure the discomforts and dangers of a long march and a hard campaign in enemy territory. So he sent Joab and the army to fight, and he remained behind in the royal palace in Jerusalem. But as it turned out, David still burned with the white-hot sexuality that had always made him so compelling to both men and women. So it was that King David, idle and alone, embarked upon a sexual adventure that turned out to be at once the greatest love of his life and the scandal that signaled a sea change in his once-glorious destiny.

T
he turning point in the life of David—and, in a real sense, the whole sweep of biblical history—is described in a single sentence that throbs with unresolved sexual tension and acute moral peril.

The Bible suggests that David rose from an afternoon nap and idled on the rooftop of his palace in order to catch a cool evening breeze. But we might also imagine that David woke from his slumber in a state of agitation and perhaps even sexual arousal. And perhaps he wondered whether he might be able to spot some willing woman from his observation point atop the palace—the Bible
suggests that the king's bed was placed on the rooftop, at least during the warm seasons of the year, and more than one alluring woman may have displayed herself within sight and reach of the king, so handsome and so powerful! And so, when David spotted a naked woman at her bath on a nearby rooftop, he may have found exactly what he was looking for.

And here the biblical life story of David hangs in suspense for one exquisite moment. Will David, the anointed of God, turn away from the tantalizing sight of the bathing woman and return to his own bed, alone or in the company of one of his many consecrated wives? Or will he plunge forward into a new adventure in forbidden carnality? Will he spurn temptation in the way we would expect of “a man after God's heart,” or will he yield to the demands of his own mortal heart?