King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (5 page)

But the carnage is not over yet. Demanding retribution, the outraged Levite hacks the woman's battered body into twelve pieces and sends the bloody chunks to the other tribes of Israel as a call to arms against the Benjaminites. All of Israel unites in a punitive war against the Benjaminites—men, women, and children alike—and the tribe is very nearly exterminated. At the last moment, the rest of the Israelites, suddenly remorseful at the prospect of genocide, spare the last six hundred Benjaminite men. But since none of the women has survived the slaughter, the Benjaminite men are sent by their fellow Israelites to Shiloh with instructions to seize the young virgins of the town and use them to repopulate the tribe of Benjamin. Thus the rape and murder of a single woman prompt the rape and abduction of six hundred more
women, and only by these desperate and ugly means is the tribe of Benjamin preserved from extermination.

At this point in the Bible, however, we are reading the work of a biblical author who offers a political rather than a theological rationale for the ghastly state of affairs in ancient Israel. He is a covert propagandist who blames all the failings of the Chosen People on the simple fact that they were not yet ruled by a king. To the royal apologist, neither fidelity to God nor submission to priests and prophets was sufficient to break the cycle of apostasy and catastrophe that afflicted the Israelites. Indeed, the Book of Judges can be regarded as a parade of horribles intended to persuade the original readers of the Bible that only a king would be capable of putting an end to the chaos and imposing moral law and order on the unruly Israelites.

“In those days there was no king in Israel,” writes the royal apologist by way of explaining the atrocities that are collected in the Book of Judges, “and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” (Judg. 21:25)

Two contending factions in the politics of ancient Israel can be glimpsed in these troubling passages of Judges. One faction preferred an old-fashioned theocracy—that is, the leadership of devout men and women who felt called upon by God to “judge” the people of Israel, as the Bible puts it. The other faction favored the newfangled institution of monarchy, and its members agitated for a king like the ones who reigned in the superpowers of the ancient world, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Remarkably, the Bible preserves the arguments for and against kingship as they were presented to its original readers, and we are able to see for ourselves how deeply they divided the people of ancient Israel. Indeed, the rivalry between theocracy and monarchy in ancient Israel was bitter enough to break God's heart.

Theocracy prevailed among the Israelites in the early period of the conquest. Deborah, the fiery prophetess who led the armies of Israel into battle against the Canaanites, was one of the first judges (Judg. 4–5), and Samson, who was famously seduced by a Philistine woman named Delilah and who then martyred himself by bringing down the walls of a pagan temple, was among the last. (Judg. 16–17) But the judges never succeeded in imposing divine law and moral order on the Israelites for very long. Again and again, the Israelites “hearkened not unto their judges, for they went astray after other gods, and worshipped them.” (Judg. 2:17)

Even Samuel, the very last of the judges, failed in his efforts to save the Israelites from their own excesses—and his failure was a peculiarly intimate one. Under Samuel's leadership, the dreaded Philistines were defeated on the field of battle
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and the corrupt priesthood of Israel was brought down. But Samuel was an ineffectual father whose sons rejected his pious ways, “turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted justice.” (1 Sam. 8:3) So he forfeited the confidence of the elders of Israel, who fretted over what would happen when Samuel was gone and only his corrupt sons remained. At last the elders trekked out to confront Samuel at his home in Ramah, and they made a bold demand.

“Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways,” the elders declared. “Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” (1 Sam. 8:5)

Their demand struck Samuel as unwholesome and even unholy—Israel was supposed to be a theocracy, not a monarchy. When they were still a mob of runaway slaves in the wilderness, Moses had revealed to the Israelites that they had been chosen to be “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation,” and their one and only sovereign was to be the invisible deity called Yahweh. “If you will hearken to my voice, and keep my covenant,” God vowed, “then ye shall be mine own treasure from among all peoples.” (Exod. 19:5, 6)
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The rule of kings, according to the fundamental theology of the Five Books of Moses, was strictly for the goyim.
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Confounded by the sudden demand for a king, which he found so heartbreaking precisely because it was so ordinary and
thus so unworthy of the Chosen People, Samuel sought guidance in prayer. And God, who had last addressed him when he was only a child, spoke again to Samuel. But now it was God who seemed childlike—Yahweh, so famously described in the Bible as a jealous god, seemed to regard the desire of the Israelites for a king as a personal insult. When he spoke to Samuel, his tone was resentful, petulant, even a bit whiny.

“Hearken unto the voice of the people,” God instructed Samuel, “for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7)

God, like the frustrated father of a stubborn and greedy child, was always ready to punish the Chosen People by the simple expedient of giving them exactly what they thought they wanted. During the years of wandering in the wilderness, for example, God fed the Israelites on the miraculous gift of manna, but when they tired of the monotonous diet of “bread from heaven” and yearned instead for roasted flesh, God provided them with quail in such abundance that the Israelites would be tempted to eat the stuff “until it comes out at your nostrils.” (Exod. 16:4, Num. 11:19–20) Now God took a similar stance: if the people of Israel preferred a mortal king to the King of the Universe, God allowed, he would give them one—but they would live to regret it.

At God's direction, Samuel delivered an oration to the people of Israel that fairly sizzled with contempt for the idea of monarchy. It was an indictment of kings that still reads like a revolutionary manifesto rather than pious prophecy. “This,” warns Samuel, “will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you.”

Samuel's catalog of the sins of kings against their people seems strangely out of place in a book that celebrates the kingship of David. The Book of Judges, as we have already seen, can be understood as “
ex post facto
royalist propaganda,”
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a series of atrocity stories that were meant to convince the original readers of the Bible that human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves in the absence of a king. The core of both Judges and Samuel was composed by chroniclers of the Davidic kings who clearly regarded the coming of kingship as a wholly benign revolution— the Israelites were now sophisticated and sensible enough to throw off the rule of the tribal chieftains and charismatic holy men who had ruled them and to submit themselves to a national monarchy like the ones they saw all around them.

“Instead of the special theocracy [Samuel] has overseen to this point,” writes Bible scholar Jan Wojcik, “the people now want sound economics, a strong military establishment, and a secure environment.”
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But as we have seen, the Bible also preserves the fingerprints of authors who disdained the rule of kings. If David himself was capable of excessive and even outrageous conduct in both his public and private life, most of the kings who came after him were regarded with ever greater horror in the prophetic circles of ancient Israel. Indeed, the kings who succeeded David presided over a succession of political and military catastrophes that ended only with the destruction of Jerusalem in 586
B.C.E.
, when the Babylonians carried the ruling elite of the Davidic monarchy into exile. For that reason, some passages of the Book of Samuel may be regarded
an “epitaph over the corpse of Israel buried in Babylon,” as Bible scholar Robert Polzin puts it. “Kingship, despite all its glories, constituted for Israel communal suicide.”
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That is why a tirade against kingship was put into Samuel's mouth by a later biblical source who had come to distrust and even detest earthly kings, a pious naysayer who still believed in old-fashioned theocracy rather than a newfangled monarchy. Long after David was dead and gone, this writer took the liberty of slipping a manifesto against monarchy into the same pages of the Bible where David, the greatest king of all, is celebrated with such ardor.

God gave the people of Israel the king they demanded—but his name was not David.

“I will send you a man out of the land of Benjamin,” God told Samuel, “and you will anoint him to be prince over my people Israel, and he shall save my people from out of the hand of the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 9:16)
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So it was that Yahweh chose a handsome but hapless fellow named Saul to ascend the throne of Israel as its first king, or so the Bible says. Saul may have been “young and goodly,” and “a head taller than any of his fellows,” but he was star-crossed from the beginning. (1 Sam. 9:2)
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As a Benjaminite, he came from the smallest of the twelve tribes of Israel and the one responsible for the incident of gang rape and murder that nearly resulted in its extermination. Moreover, he belonged to the clan called Matri, “the humblest clan of all the tribe of Benjamin,” as Saul himself put it, thus reminding us that the identity of an Israelite was still defined in terms of tribe and clan rather than nationality. (1 Sam. 9:21) (AB)

Saul's very first exploit, as reported in the Book of Samuel, encourages us to see him as something of a dullard. Sent by his father to find some stray asses from the family herd, Saul wandered
aimlessly around the countryside until his provisions ran out. Finally Saul sought out a local seer in the desperate hope that
he
might know where to find the asses. The seer was Samuel.

“Here is the man of whom I spoke to you,” God whispered to Samuel when Saul showed up. “This man shall rule my people.” (1 Sam. 9:17) (NEB)

At dawn on the next day, Samuel roused Saul from sleep and anointed the young man who had come in search of his lost asses as the first king of Israel. The ceremony was simple and straightforward, which may seem surprising when we begin to ponder the soul-shaking and history-making implications of the word “messiah,” the familiar English rendering of
mashiach
, the Hebrew word for “the anointed one.” From a small flask, probably fashioned of fired clay,
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Samuel poured oil upon Saul's head—olive oil spiced with myrrh, cinnamon, cassia, and aromatic cane, according to a recipe for anointing oil found in the Book of Exodus (Exod. 30:22–25)
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—and then bestowed a kiss upon Saul and intoned a few short pronouncements that began with a rhetorical question.

“Has not Yahweh anointed you prince over his people Israel?” recited Samuel. “It is you who will muster the people of Yahweh! It is you who will free them from the grip of their enemies all around!” (1 Sam. 19:1) (AB)
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Although the practice of anointing kings and their vassals may have been borrowed from the court rituals of ancient Egypt, the Bible confirms that the Israelites found a great many reasons and opportunities to anoint both people and things.
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The altar of sacrifice was smeared with consecrated oil, and so were the tabernacle and the sacred paraphernalia used in ceremonies of worship. Aaron, the brother of Moses, was anointed as the first high priest of Israel, and anointment was the rite of initiation for the generations of high priests who came after him. (Exod. 40:10–12, 15) Even lepers were anointed with a “sevenfold” sprinkling of oil in a ritual of purification. (Lev. 14:15–18) Starting with Saul, however, the ancient ritual took on a new and enduring meaning for the people of Israel. Anointment became the essential and enduring symbol of kingship, a faintly magical rite in which the
strength, wisdom, and power of Yahweh were symbolically conveyed to the mortal monarch.

God may have agreed to give the Israelites the king they had demanded, but Saul turned out to be the wrong one.

God's choice of Saul remained a secret until Samuel staged a convocation with the apparent purpose of drumming up public enthusiasm for the man whom he had privately anointed as king. Samuel summoned the people of Israel to Mizpah, one of the traditional gathering places and sites of worship in ancient Israel. The old man opened the proceedings by reminding the crowd of their clamor for a king and pointing out rather irritably why he still thought it was a terrible idea.