King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (35 page)

Absalom rode into battle at the head of his army, but he, too,
was defeated by the dense forest—and, as it turned out, by his own lovely head of hair. As envisioned by the Talmudic sages and the ancient chronicler Josephus—although never stated outright in the Bible—Absalom, on his mule, passed under the boughs of a tree in the forest of Ephraim, and his long hair was caught fast in a low-hanging branch.
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“He was taken up between the heaven and the earth,” is how the Bible lyrically describes the mishap, “and the mule that was under him went on.”

One of David's men saw Absalom hanging helplessly—and, we may imagine, in pain—from the branch of the tree, and he promptly reported the sighting to Joab. (2 Sam. 18:9)

“Why did you not strike him to the ground?” Joab wanted to know. And, despite David's order to spare his son, Joab suggested that he had placed a bounty on Absalom's head: “I would have had to give you ten pieces of silver, and a belt.” (2 Sam. 18:11)
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“If you were to put a thousand pieces of silver in my hand, I would not lift a finger against the king's son,” the soldier replied, “for we all heard that the king charged you and Abishai and Ittai, saying: ‘Beware that none touch the young man Absalom.’ ” (2 Sam. 18:11–12)
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David might be softhearted toward his own son, but Joab always seemed to be capable of clearer thinking and more ruthless action. As long as Absalom lived, Joab knew, he remained a threat to David, and it was only by killing him that Joab would be able to crush the insurrection and preserve the integrity of the monarchy that David had created.

So Joab dismissed the reluctant soldier, picked up three darts,
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assembled ten of his own men, and went in search of the tree in which Absalom was caught up. The scene would be comical if it were not so pitiful: Absalom “was yet alive in the midst of the terebinth,” dangling “between the heaven and the earth,” when Joab himself struck him “through the heart” with the darts. Apparently Absalom survived Joab's three sharp blows—did he groan in pain? did he beg to be put out of his misery?—and so the
ten young men who accompanied Joab set upon Absalom with their own weapons to finish the job, and they “smote Absalom, and slew him.” (2 Sam. 18:15) Or perhaps Absalom was already dead, and the wily Joab was only seeking to make it more difficult to pin the death of the king's son on one man.

Then Joab sounded the ram's horn to signal a cease-fire, and the army of David broke off the slaughter. As word of the death of their king and commander spread through the ranks, Absalom's army fell into open rout: “All Israel fled, every one to his tent.” The corpse of the slain Absalom was cut down from the tree, cast into a pit in the forest, and buried under a heap of stones—a traditional form of burial for a villainous and despised enemy. The biblical author pauses here to note that Absalom left no son “to keep [his] name in remembrance”—a signal that Absalom's claim on the kingship ended with his death. (2 Sam. 18:18)

David waited at the gates of his stronghold, and a watchman stood atop the city wall. At last the watchman spotted a lone runner approaching from the distance, and he reported what he saw to the king.

“If he be alone, then he has tidings,” mused the king, who knew that many men on the run was a sign of an army in rout, but a single runner meant only that a message had been sent from the front. (2 Sam. 18:25)
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In fact, Joab had dispatched two runners to relay the news to King David. One was a black-skinned man from Ethiopia—a Cushite, as the Bible puts it—who was apparently serving along with the other foreign mercenaries in David's army. The other was Ahimaaz, son of the high priest Zadok, who had begged Joab for the privilege of telling the king “that the Lord hath avenged him of his enemies.” Joab, however, knew that David was unlikely to share the young priest's enthusiasm when he learned that
Joab had defied his command to spare Absalom. (2 Sam. 18:19) Indeed, Joab may have remembered the fate of other men who had hastened to tell David that an enemy had been slain in battle!

“Why will you run, my son,” said Joab, “seeing that you will have no reward for the tidings?”

“Come what may,” the young man answered, “I will run.” (2 Sam. 18:22–23)
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Now the watchman on the city wall spotted the second runner, too, and he was able to make out that one of the two men was Ahimaaz.

“He is a good man,” said David hopefully, “and comes with good tidings.” (2 Sam. 18: 27)

“All is well,” called Ahimaaz as he trotted up to the gate. He bowed to the king, pressing his forehead to the ground, surely breathless with exultation as well as exertion. “Blessed be the Lord thy God, who hath delivered up the men that lifted up their hand against my lord the king.” (2 Sam. 18:28)

But David did not pause to join in thanksgiving to God. He did not ask for details of how the battle had been won. He did not utter a word of congratulation or celebration. Rather the king asked the courier a single question, the only question that really mattered to him.

“Is all well with the young man Absalom?”

“I saw a great commotion,” mumbled Ahimaaz, perhaps realizing the enormity of the blow he was about to deliver and finding himself unable to give the king a straight answer, “but I did not know what had happened.” (2 Sam. 18:29) (NEB)

Now the Cushite approached the gate.

“Tidings for my lord the king,” declared the second messenger. “The Lord has avenged you this day on all those who rebelled against you.” (2 Sam. 18:31)
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Thus does the biblical author play out the suspenseful account, denying the truth to David long after we have witnessed the fate of Absalom. Now, once again, King David asked the only question that seemed to matter to him.

“Is all well with the young man Absalom?” David asked the second messenger.

“May all the king's enemies and all rebels who would do you harm,” burbled the Cushite, “be as that young man is.” (2 Sam. 18:32) (NEB)

David puzzled out the bitter truth that was concealed within these ornate but oblique phrases—and his heart broke.

Word soon reached Joab that David had been shattered by the news of Absalom's death. The king spent the day with his head in his hands, weeping and moaning in a public display of grief. Instead of a triumphal march from the front to the stronghold where David waited, the soldiers slipped back into the city “by stealth,” as if they were cowards running away from a defeat rather than conquering heroes returning from battle to reclaim the royal capital. “And the victory that day,” the Bible notes, “was turned into mourning unto all the people.” (2 Sam. 19:3)

Joab was made of tougher stuff. The old soldier reacted to the king's grief over Absalom—the man who had done his best to kill
him
first—not with sympathy but with rage and disgust, and he did not hesitate to tell David so.

“You have put to shame this day all your servants, who have saved you and your sons and daughters, your wives and your concubines,” ranted Joab at the cowering king. “You love those that hate you and hate those that love you! For it is plain that if Absalom were still alive and all of us dead, you would be content.” (2 Sam. 19:6–7)
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David may have been God's anointed and, once again, king of all Israel, but Joab recalled their freebooting days too well to regard him as anything but a mortal man. So Joab barked out orders to David, a general commanding a king, reminding him of where his duties lay.

“Arise, go at once, and give your servants some encouragement,” Joab told David. “If you refuse, I swear by the Lord that not a man will stay with you tonight, and that will be worse than all the evil that has befallen you from your youth until now.” (2 Sam. 19:8)
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A chastened David rose at Joab's command, perhaps wiping his tear-filled eyes. David took his rightful seat at the city gate, the traditional gathering place where the judges and high priests of ancient Israel had conducted public ceremonies and exercised the power of high office. “Behold, the king doth sit in the gate,” the people said to one another, as if to confirm that the king was back in his right mind, the shattered monarchy was repaired, and all was as it should be. (2 Sam. 19:9)

But nothing would ever be the same for David or the kingdom he had created. “The king ceases to be king,” points out Bible critic David M. Gunn. “From this point on, he is simply and essentially man.”
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Against all his political wiles, his ruthlessness in battle, and his will to power—or, for that matter, the favor of the God of Israel—David was now helpless in the face of a loss that neither politics nor theology was able to soothe.

T
he sight of King David at the gate of his capital-in-exile reassured the loyalists who had rallied to his banner in the war against Absalom. The land of Israel, however, was still in crisis. Now that Absalom was dead, and while David still lingered in his distant stronghold, no king reigned in Jerusalem. And the Israelites, leaderless and fearful, reverted to their old tribal feuds and rivalries.

“And all the people were at strife throughout all the tribes of Israel,” the Bible notes. “The entire army was complaining to all the staff-bearers of Israel: ‘So now why have we no plans for bringing the king back?’ ” (2 Sam. 19:10–11, 12)
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The old king, it seems, was sulking. David had not forgotten that Absalom's rebellion had begun in Hebron—the capital of the tribal homeland of Judah and the place where David himself was first crowned a king—and he resented the disloyalty of his own tribe in rallying to Absalom's kingship. Indeed, he marked the fact that the other tribes of Israel had clamored for his return to Jerusalem but his own tribe of Judah remained insultingly silent.

“Ye are my brethren, ye are my bone and my flesh,” went his petulant message to the elders of Judah. “Why are ye the last to bring the king back to his house?” Standing on protocol, David refused to return to Jerusalem until he was accorded the proper expression of remorse and respect from his own tribe. At last the elders of Judah sent the message that David had demanded—“Re-turn thou, and all thy servants” (2 Sam. 19:15)—and the people of Judah thronged to the banks of the Jordan River “to meet the king, to bring the king over the Jordan.” (2 Sam. 19:15, 16)

The king's homecoming to the City of David is described in the Book of Samuel in a phantasmagorical scene, and the matter-of-fact quality of the earlier narrative is replaced by a blend of symbolism and surrealism. The other biblical sources, so plainly fascinated with the hard facts of military history or the intimate scenes of a family in crisis, are joined here by an author who is caught up in a kind of fever dream. Now and then, the flesh-and-blood David seems to disappear in a swirling mist of myth and memory.

The scene opens on the banks of the Jordan River. A ferryboat “passed to and fro to bring over the king's household.” Suddenly, the humbled enemies of King David—all the men who had cursed him to his face or plotted behind his back—began to appear, one by one.

First came Shimei, who had once condemned David as a “bloodstained fiend of hell.” Now he fell to the ground before the restored king, buried his face in the earth, and begged for his life.

Next came Ziba, the servant whom David had assigned to care for Mephibosheth, Saul's only surviving son. In his haste to abase himself before the returning king, Ziba did not wait until David had stepped out of the boat but instead waded into the swirling waters of the Jordan to greet him.

Finally, Mephibosheth, the last potential claimant to the throne once occupied by King Saul, appeared at the riverside. And just as David had once tried to convince the king of Gath of his harmlessness by feigning madness, Mephibosheth shambled up to David like a homeless lunatic. “He had neither dressed his feet,
nor trimmed his beard, nor washed his clothes,” the Bible reports, “from the day the king departed until the day he came home in peace.” (2 Sam. 19:25)

The sight of these old enemies offended Abishai, Joab's brother, who believed that their betrayals merited nothing less than the ultimate punishment. “Shall not Shimei be put to death for this,” asked Abishai, “because he cursed the Lord's anointed?” (2 Sam. 19:22)

But David only shushed Abishai. “What have I to do with you, ye sons of Zeruiah?” he asked yet again. The king was in an expansive mood, and he impulsively declared a general amnesty: “Why should any man be put to death this day in Israel? I know now that I am king of Israel.” (2 Sam. 19:23) (NEB)

“My lord the king is as an angel of God,” said Mephibosheth, whose mind was not so disordered that he could not engage in a bit of ornate flattery for the man who had just spared his life. (2 Sam. 19:28)

David's largesse symbolizes the urgent interest of the biblical sources in the healing of old wounds. The house of David must be put back in order, and a nation in disarray must be united again. Blood-vengeance and tribal feuds must end, and the self-perpetuating cycle of insult and injury must be broken once and for all. And so David, mild and forgiving, is made to serve as a symbol of theological law and order—God's anointed was back where he belonged, and the time had come for healing rather than vengeance.