King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (49 page)

10.
Absalom was actually the third-born son of David. The second-born, Chileab, disappears from the Bible after the report of his birth (2 Sam. 3:3), and he played no reported role in the struggle among David's sons to succeed their father on the throne of Israel. So inconsequential was the second son of David that the biblical authors were even confused about his name—he is sometimes called Chileab (2 Sam. 3:3), sometimes Daniel. (1 Chron. 3:1)

11.
Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
, 141, 143.

12.
O. Eissfeldt,
The Old Testament
, trans. P. R. Ackroyd (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 12.

13.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

14.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

15.
Adapted from JPS.

16.
Alter,
Art of Biblical Narrative
, 102.

17.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

18.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

19.
Adapted from JPS.

20.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

21.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 372.

22.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

23.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

24.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

25.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

26.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

27.
Adapted from AB.

28.
Bright,
History of Israel
, 207.

1.
Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.

2.
Adapted from NEB and JPS.

3.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

4.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

5.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

6.
Thanks to the free-associative narrative style of the Bible, the incident is meant to remind readers of earlier passages that faintly prefigure various events in the life story of David. Two spies from the conquering army of Israel were similarly sheltered from a king's patrol by a heroic Canaanite woman named Rahab, according to a passage in the Book of Joshua. As a reward for her heroism, Rahab was spared during the invasion of Canaan, and she identified herself to the Israelites by hanging a red thread from her window. (Josh. 2:1–19) Still earlier in the biblical narrative, a red thread figures in the tale of Tamar, who was impregnated with twin sons by her father-in-law and used a red thread to identify which of the two babies was born first. (Gen. 38:28) And the heroism of Rahab in lowering the Israelite spies to safety is reprised in Michal's rescue of David from assassins sent by King Saul! All of these dreamy linkages were meant to suggest the operation of divine will at every moment in the events of history.

7.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

8.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

9.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 406, citing Josephus (Ant. 7.239) and the Talmud (Sotah 9b).

10.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

11.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

12.
The word conventionally translated as “darts” may, in fact, refer to sharpened sticks of wood that Joab used to strike Absalom.

13.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

14.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

15.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

16.
Adapted from NEB.

17.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

18.
D. M. Gunn, “Narrative Patterns and Oral Tradition in Judges and Samuel,”
Vetus Testamentum
24, no. 3 (July 1974), 296.

1.
Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.

2.
The biblical text suggests that Joab tipped the scabbard that he wore at his hip and caused the sword to fall to the ground as if by accident. Then he bent down, picked up the sword, but neglected to replace it in the scabbard. Thus did Joab “conceal his treachery,” as the New English Bible renders the difficult text, and the sword remained in his hand when he embraced Amasa. (2 Sam. 20:9)

3.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 1984, 430.

4.
Chapter 21 of the Second Book of Samuel records several incidents that
apparently occurred much earlier in David's reign, including the slaughter of seven sons of King Saul by the Gibeonites and a series of skirmishes with the Philistines. Here, for example, the Bible reports that it was a man named Elhanan, rather than young David, who “slew Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam.” (2 Sam. 21:19) Scholarship suggests that these passages were among “a miscellany of unrelated items” collected by one of the biblical editors and deposited in this chapter. “Attempts to determine the reason for its present position,” observes P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “will probably not succeed.” McCarter,
II Samuel
, 451.

5.
Dahood,
Psalms I, 1–50
, 104. McCarter concedes the “high antiquity” of the passage, portions of which may date back to the supposed lifetime of David in the tenth century
B.C.E.
, but he cautions against claims of “Davidic authorship” of the psalm itself. McCarter,
II Samuel
, 473, 475.

6.
Bloom and Rosenberg,
Book of J
, 38.

7.
Artur Weiser,
The Psalms: A Commentary
, trans. H. Hartwell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 187.

8.
Robert Alter,
The David Story
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 336.

9.
David M. Howard, Jr., “David (Person),” in
Anchor Bible Dictionary
, vol. 2, 44.

10.
Bible scholarship no longer takes these or any other biblical head counts very seriously. If the Hebrew word conventionally translated as “thousands” is understood to be a military unit numbering 5 to 14 men, as one scholar has proposed, the number of draft-age men would be no greater than 18,220 men and as few as 6,500.

11.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 511, citing (and criticizing) W. Fuss, H. Schmid, and K. Rupprecht.

12.
See, for example, Judges 6:37 and 2 Samuel 6:6.

1.
Alter,
David Story
, 363.

2.
Adapted from NEB.

3.
Alter,
David Story
, 366.

4.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

5.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

6.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

7.
A mule, rather than an ass or a horse, was apparently the preferred mount for royalty in ancient Israel, even though the Bible prohibits the crossbreeding of horse and ass that produces a mule. (Lev. 19:19) The conflict between holy law and day-to-day practice is another bit of evidence that the law codes of the Bible may have been compiled
after
the supposed lifetime of David and the authorship of his biblical life story.

8.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

9.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

10.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

11.
Adapted from JPS.

12.
Alter,
David Story
, 374.

13.
“Let not his hoar head go down to the grave in peace” is how the same phrase is rendered in the King James Version. The Hebrew word generally translated as “grave” is
sheol
, a term that is used in the Bible to refer to the place where one goes when he or she dies. In that sense,
sheol
seems to refer to the “underworld” or the “abode of the dead” rather than the grave where a corpse is buried. The word
sheol
is translated as “Hades” in the Septuagint, but
sheol
in the Hebrew Bible is not equivalent to the Christian notion of hell as the realm of the Devil or the place where sinners are punished.

14.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

15.
Adapted from JPS.

16.
Adapted from JPS (emphasis added).

17.
Angelo S. Rappoport,
Ancient Israel
(London: Senate, 1995), vol. 3, 11.

1.
JPS, 1084, f.n. e.

2.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

3.
Cross,
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
, 237.

4.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

5.
Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
, 187.

6.
Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
, 188.

7.
Quoted in Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
, 100.

8.
See John M. Berridge, “Jehoiachin (Person),” in
Anchor Bible Dictionary
, vol. 3, 662.

9.
Most versions of the Bible refer only to Zedekiah's imprisonment, but the Septuagint reports his confinement in “the house of the mill” (Jer. 52:11), where, according to Robert Althann, “he would have had to perform the degrading task of grinding with a hand-mill.” Robert Althann, “Zedekiah (Person),” in
Anchor Bible Dictionary
, vol. 6, 1070.

10.
Herod the Great was followed to the throne by his grandson and great-grandson, Agrippa I and Agrippa II, each of whom might have plausibly claimed to be king
over
the Jews. The title bestowed upon them by the Roman emperor was “Great King, Friend of Caesar, Pious and Friend of the Romans.”

11.
See Akenson,
Surpassing Wonder
, 363–364.

12.
Intriguingly, Matthew traces the lineage of Jesus through Solomon, while Luke identifies a different son of David as the forebear of Jesus, presumably to avoid linking Jesus with a king who is shown in the Bible to dabble with pagan gods and goddesses under the influence of his many foreign wives!

13.
“INRI,” an acronym that appears on the placard over the head of Jesus in depictions of the crucifixion, stands for the Latin phrase that is rendered as “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

14.
Armstrong,
Jerusalem
, 153.

15.
Akenson,
Surpassing Wonder
, 193.

16.
Weizman recalled his colorful remark during a filmed interview that appears in a 1999 documentary,
The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs
, produced by WGBH Boston and Brian Lapping Associates and distributed by PBS Home Video. But Weizman does not mention King David in his published memoir,
On Eagles' Wings
, where he quotes himself as telling Prime Minister Levi Eshkol: “The armed forces are ready and prepared
for war. If you give the order, Jewish history will remember you as a great leader. If you don't, it will never forgive you!” Ezer Weizman,
On Eagles' Wings
(New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1976), 209.

17.
Armstrong,
Jerusalem
, 408. “The minister, however, did not actually recommend this course of action, since Jewish law stated that only the messiah would be permitted to build the Third Temple.”

The purchase (2 Sam. 24:24) is described in chapter 14 of the present book.

18.
“Palestinian Archaeologists Uncover Canaanite Dwellings,”
Biblical Archaeology Review
, (November/December 1998), p. 25.

19.
Sigmund Freud,
Moses and Monotheism
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 51.

20.
Akenson,
Surpassing Wonder
, 40; 424, n. 45.

21.
Alter,
Art of Biblical Narrative
, 35.

22.
Pfeiffer,
Introduction to the Old Testament
, 357.

23.
“To regard this scandalization of the monarchy as originating in the Solomonic period,” writes John Van Seters, another leading revisionist in Bible scholarship, “is to my mind entirely incredible.” Van Seters,
Abraham in History and Tradition
, 151.