King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (4 page)

At this moment, David is not only the reigning king of all Israel but also the conqueror of an empire that stretches from Egypt to the Euphrates—no ruler of Israel who came before him enjoyed the same imperial reach, nor would any who came after. He reigns from a palace of fragrant cedarwood, a rarity and a luxury in the ancient world, and the palace stands on a fortified hilltop in Jerusalem, a place that David conquered by force of arms. His favorite wife is the charming Bathsheba, but a dozen or so other wives and concubines await his pleasure in the bustling harem. As if to emphasize that all of these glories are the result of his own ruthless will, he has named his royal capital after himself: it is called the City of David.

The Court Historian is of course familiar with the official biography of King David, the exploits of courage and derring-do, the victories and conquests, the reforms and innovations. He has heard the courtiers praise David's artistry at the lyre and in the dance, in the elegy and the psalm, and he has heard the priests
celebrate David's piety and his observance of ritual, celebrating him as “a man after God's own heart.” But the Court Historian knows other tales that are told only in hushed tones and behind closed doors—David's fugitive years as a bandit and an outlaw, his stint as a mercenary in service to the enemies of Israel, his habit of seducing other men's wives.

Some of David's exploits seem so scandalous as to defy belief. Could it really be true that David once served as a mercenary under the detested Philistines and offered to go into battle against the rightful king of Israel? Did he really kill men, women, and children in order to eliminate the eyewitnesses to his crimes against the people of Israel? And what about the beautiful woman who was his principal wife and the mother of the crown prince—did he really conspire to murder her husband after he had lured her into his bed and then impregnated her with a bastard child?

The king whom the Court Historian served was, in fact, a bloodstained warrior who secured his crown through ruthless guerrilla warfare and cynical intrigue, a man of regal bearing but raw appetite, a man who did not hesitate to connive and even to kill in order to get what he wanted. And, remarkably, the Court Historian dared to set down in writing the whole truth as he knew it, leaving out no secret crime, no sin, and no scandal. Three thousand years later, the Bible brings us face-to-face with King David in all his complexity and contradiction.

Still, the formal biography of David in the Book of Samuel does not begin with David himself, and we will not encounter the man whom the Court Historian knew so well until much later in the biblical text. The story of David starts, appropriately enough, with a beguiling woman. Her name is Hannah, and she is only the first of many remarkable women who will figure crucially in his life.

Hannah, the Bible tells us, was heartbroken because she was childless—her affliction the same as the one visited emblematically
upon the matriarchs Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel in the Book of Genesis. Hannah's husband tried to comfort her by declaring his love and suggesting that it ought to be enough: “Am I not better to thee than ten sons?” (1 Sam. 1:8) But Hannah was tormented by the sight of the children that his
other
wife had given him. So she made a pilgrimage to the temple of Yahweh and prayed for a son.

She prayed silently, moving her lips without uttering a sound, but with such fervor that the priest of the sanctuary decided that she was a common drunk.

“How long wilt thou be drunken?” the priest scolded Hannah. “Put away thy wine from thee.”

“No, my lord, I am a woman of sorrowful spirit,” she protested. “I have drunken neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord.”

Touched by Hannah's earnest words, the priest sent her away with a kind wish. “Go in peace,” he said, “and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition.” (1 Sam. 1:14–17)

Hannah returned to her home, joined her husband in bed, and “the Lord remembered her”—that is, Hannah conceived at last and later gave birth to a baby boy. The pious woman had promised God to dedicate any son she might bear to a lifetime of service in the temple, and she kept her promise. She named the child Samuel, which is understood to mean “He-who-is-from-God,”
¹
and as soon as he was weaned she delivered him to the high priest.
²

What Hannah did not know was that God had already singled out Samuel to play a unique role in the destiny of Israel. One night, as he slept in the sanctuary of Yahweh, the child heard his name called by a voice that he presumed to belong to the high priest. And Samuel responded with the same formulaic phrase that is repeated throughout the Bible when a human being is summoned to perform a task by God—first Abraham (Gen. 22:1), then Moses (Exod. 3:4), and now Samuel.

“Here am I!” said the boy.

“I called not,” the old priest told Samuel when he harkened to the call. “Lie down again.” (1 Sam. 1:5) (NEB)

The voice called to him twice more during that fateful night, and twice more Samuel answered “Here am I”
(Hineni)
. At last the voice revealed itself to be the God of Israel, who now manifested himself before Samuel and spoke again. (1 Sam, 3:4–10)

“Behold, I will do a thing in Israel,” God told Samuel, “at which both the ears of everyone that heareth it shall tingle.” (1 Sam. 3:11)
³

Here, in the opening passages of the Book of Samuel, we find ourselves in a world of auguries and omens, priestcraft and prophecy, a world quite unlike the one inhabited by David himself. David, as we shall come to see, never actually
hears
the voice of God, and his biblical life story is strikingly modern precisely because we are shown how human beings use and abuse one another when God is silent and aloof. At the outset of Samuel, however, we are still in the “dreamtime” of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a time and place where a boy might be roused at midnight by a mysterious voice and suddenly find himself in the physical presence of God. Only later will David stride out of these mists and into the full light of history. For now, the Bible focuses on the crucial figure who is called by God to set into motion the chain of events that will one day put David on the throne of Israel.

To understand why King David's life story begins with the calling of the prophet Samuel, we must first pause to consider some of the Bible's deepest mysteries: Who wrote the book that three faiths regard as Holy Writ? When and where did the biblical authors live and work? And why were they so much at odds with one another on matters of both theology and history? The answers to these questions reveal why the Bible is such a crazy-making book, so full of flaws and contradictions, so confusing in its depiction of who God is and what God wants that the Almighty comes across as a deity with a multiple-personality disorder. Above all, the answers
reveal why the Bible celebrates a man like David—as sullied and sinful as any potentate of the ancient world—as “a man after God's own heart.”

The Bible, according to the consensus of modern scholarship, is a patchwork of ancient texts that were composed and compiled by countless authors and editors, men and women alike, over a period of a thousand years or so. Among the strands of the biblical tapestry are history and biography, myth and legend, poetry and prayer, sacred law and secular law, rites of animal sacrifice and rituals of sympathetic magic, carpentry instructions and dermatological procedures, military tactics and dietary advice, and much else besides. The various biblical sources lived and worked at different times and places in the distant past, each one serving his or her own moral, political, and theological agenda, each one putting words into the mouths of biblical characters, and each one putting his or her own spin on the history of ancient Israel.

The oldest passages of the Book of Samuel, as we have seen, are generally attributed to the source known as the Court Historian, a man or woman who may have been an eyewitness to the reign of David and who dared to tell his remarkable life story with both deep compassion and brutal honesty. Later, the oldest passages of the Book of Samuel came to be overwritten with the work of other sources—priests and scribes, archivists and chroniclers, apologists and propagandists, bards and troubadours—who felt at liberty to embellish and edit the Court Historian's work.

The composite text was given a high polish by a source known as the Deuteronomistic Historian, a term used by Bible scholars to identify a school of priests and scribes who brought the Book of Samuel and other biblical books into line with the distinctive theology that is first announced in the Book of Deuteronomy. And the Bible as we know it today bears the fingerprints of one final set of editors known collectively as the Redactor (or “R”). Thus, the Bible is an elaborate tapestry rather than the work of a single author, human or divine, and we can tease out the strands that were woven into the narrative fabric by the various sources,
each one putting a moral or political or theological coloration— or “spin”—on the text.

The opening passages of the Book of Samuel, for example, seem to be the work of an author who embraces the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel, an author from the same circles that produced the fiery theological manifestos of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
⁴
Unlike the Court Historian, the prophetic author is not much interested in the realpolitik of ancient Israel or the sexual adventures of its princes and kings. The only real concern of the theological spin doctor who describes the calling of young Samuel is the profound and enduring mystery of how God works his will in history. So this author composed the prequel to the life of David that appears in the opening passages of the Book of Samuel. That is why we meet Samuel—one of those cranky, carping, God-inspired men and women whom we call prophets—long before we meet David himself. And that is why Samuel is presented as a man with grave misgivings about the very idea of monarchy.

In the Bible, as elsewhere in life and literature, nothing succeeds like success, and so David is forgiven for his sins and scandals by the Court Historian. But the prophetic sources lived long after the reign of David, and they witnessed the ultimate failure of kingship in ancient Israel. The dynasty founded by King David continued to reign for nearly five hundred years, but the Bible describes almost all of his successors as a sorry collection of apostates and blasphemers whose misconduct resulted in invasion and conquest, destruction and dispersion. For that reason, the first voice we hear in the Book of Samuel belongs to a biblical author who prefers holy men to kings and priests, and the tale opens with the prophet Samuel, the man whom God selects to make and break the kings of Israel.

Samuel was born in the land of Canaan a couple of hundred years after its conquest by the coalition of twelve tribes known as
b'nai
Yisrael
, the Children of Israel, at a time when things had gone terribly wrong for the Chosen People. The Bible characterizes Canaan as the Promised Land, “a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exod. 3:8) But, as it turned out, Canaan was not a virgin paradise. Rather, the land promised to the Israelites teemed with tribes and peoples—“seven nations greater and mightier than thou,” as God had warned the Israelites (Deut. 7:1)—who regarded Canaan as
their
homeland. Here begins the first and longest-lasting of the problems created by the disparity between what God promises and what God does in the Hebrew Bible.

At first God had vowed to cleanse the Promised Land of its native dwellers. “I will send my terror before thee,” God promised Moses. “I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before.” (Exod. 23:27, 31) But he was so angry and disappointed with the “stiff-necked” Israelites, who were always so faithless and so defiant, that he changed his mind. “I will
not
drive them out from before you,” God later told Joshua, successor of Moses and conqueror of Canaan, “but they shall be unto you as snares, and their gods shall be a trap unto you.” (Judg. 2:3)

Indeed, the Israelites found the pagan gods and goddesses whom the Canaanites worshipped with orgiastic abandon to be far more alluring than the stern and censorious God of Israel. Yahweh was a bachelor father, a loner who disdained a female consort, but the Canaanite pantheon included an array of she-deities who were both erotic and maternal, thus answering the human need for a feminine object of worship. Once in Canaan, the Israelites turned to idolatry, sacred harlotry, and other ritual practices that the pious biblical source regards as too vile to describe. “And the children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord,” reports the Book of Judges in a phrase that is repeated like a mantra, “and forgot the Lord their God.” (Judg. 3:7) Even David, as we shall see, kept a collection of idols in his own home.

So the Book of Judges seems to set up a theological rationale for the sorry fate that the Chosen People will endure. As a punishment for their faithlessness and infidelity, God now decreed
that they would be humbled in battle against the people who shared their new homeland and the nations that surrounded it on all sides: “And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and He delivered them into the hands of the spoilers that spoiled them.” (Judg. 2:14) Nor would the Israelites be capable of living in peace with one another. Although all twelve tribes claimed descent from the patriarch Jacob, a man also known as Israel, they bickered and battled with one another in a series of ruinous blood feuds that turned the Promised Land into a wasteland.

The moral decay reaches an appalling climax in a story that is preserved in the Book of Judges, a cautionary tale about a nameless woman who is gang-raped by her fellow Israelites. On a journey from Bethlehem to the hill-country of Ephraim, a man from the tribe of Levi and his concubine are forced to spend the night in a town that belongs to the tribe of Benjamin. A crowd of rowdy Benjaminites gathers around the house where they have taken shelter and demands that the guests be surrendered to them for their sexual pleasure. To spare himself, the frightened Levite pushes his concubine out the door and offers her to the mob in his place. All night long, while the Levite and his host cower inside the house, the woman is raped to death. Her body is left at the threshold.