King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (9 page)

“And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the wadi, and put them in the shepherd's pouch,” the Bible records, “and his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine.” (1 Sam. 17:40)
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The sight of David—“this handsome lad,” the biblical author
pauses to note once again, “with his ruddy cheeks and bright eyes” (1 Sam. 17:42) (NEB)—moved Goliath to scornful laughter.

“Am I a dog, that you come to me with a stick?” Goliath taunted. “Come on, and I will give your flesh to the birds and the beasts.” (1 Sam. 17:44) (NEB)

Once again, David is given an ornate sermon to deliver to Goliath.

“You come to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have taunted,” David retorted, invoking Yahweh by his formal title as a god of war—a reference to years of wandering in the wilderness and the conquest of Canaan. “This day will Yahweh deliver you into my hand, and I will smite you, and take your head off, and I will give the carcasses of the hosts of the Philistines this day to the birds and the beasts, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.” (1 Sam. 17:45–46)
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The Philistine, enraged by the bold words of the boy who stood before him, lurched forward with an upraised spear. If Goliath thought that the foolish lad would scamper away at his approach, he was wrong. David ran forward and stopped short of the towering warrior. The next moment is perhaps the single most iconic in all of the Bible, a scene that can be seen today in both the art of the high Renaissance and thirty-second television spots for fast-food chains.

David ran up to the fallen warrior, seized his sword, and delivered a coup de grâce, neatly separating Goliath from his head. At
the sight of their champion's decapitation, the Philistines broke and ran, and the Israelites rose to pursue them.

Today the phrase “David and Goliath” refers to any struggle of unequal adversaries in which the underdog comes out on top. But the tale carried a specifically theological meaning for the original readers of the Bible. The shepherd who finds favor in the eyes of God and prevails over kings and armies is one of the most persistent, and most poignant, images in the Hebrew Bible. The Patriarchs were restless nomads who followed their herds and flocks throughout the ancient Near East. Moses was tending his father-in-law's sheep in the wilderness of Midian when he was called by God to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and deliver them to the Promised Land. So the image of the shepherd takes on exalted meanings throughout the Bible: the good shepherd becomes a metaphor for a king and a redeemer. Indeed, the notion of a god or a king as a shepherd and the people as his flock can be found not only in the towering figures of Judeo-Christian tradition— Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus—but throughout the pagan faiths of the ancient Near East.
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“That man alone can be a perfect king who is well skilled in the art of the shepherd,” wrote Philo, a Jewish chronicler who, like Josephus, explained the theology of the Hebrew Bible to the Roman Empire, “for the business of a shepherd is a preparation for the office of a king to any one who is destined to preside over that most manageable of all flocks, mankind.”
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As familiar as the story of David and Goliath may be, a careful reading of the biblical text reveals that it is riddled with flaws and inconsistencies that are “in contradiction both with what goes before,” as the founder of modern Bible scholarship, Julius Wellhausen, put it, “and with what follows.”
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Between the theological flourishes and the “folkloric embellishments,” the hard facts of
David's life seem to disappear in the passages that are best known to Bible readers.

Thus, although the Book of Samuel first introduces David as “a mighty man of valor, a man of war” who has been summoned by Saul from the household of Jesse and recruited for a lifetime of royal service as a weapons bearer and court musician (1 Sam. 16:18), David makes his second appearance as a country bumpkin and a total stranger to King Saul. “Whose son is this lad?” asks the bewildered Saul when he encounters David on the battlefield, and his general, Abner, replies with equal bafflement: “As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell.” (1 Sam. 17:55)
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Then Saul is shown to recruit David a second time for royal service: “And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father's house.” (1 Sam. 18:2)

Another example of the confusion in the biblical text involves what actually happened to the severed head of Goliath, a large and rather unwieldy relic of David's miraculous victory. David is described as bringing the head as a prize of war to Jerusalem (1 Sam. 17:54)—but at this point in the biblical narrative Jerusalem still belonged to the native-dwelling tribe called the Jebusites, and the day when David would conquer Jerusalem by force of arms was still many years off. (2 Sam. 5:6–9) By then, Goliath's head seems to have disappeared; only his sword is preserved in a shrine of Yahweh as a war trophy. (1 Sam. 21:10)

Finally, the biblical account of David's single most famous exploit is undermined by a troubling line of biblical verse in the Second Book of Samuel, where a man called Elhanan is credited with the slaying of Goliath in a campaign against the Philistines that took place when Saul was long dead and David was king of Israel. As if to confirm the identity of the Philistine warrior who was slain by Elhanan, the biblical author assures us that he is, in fact, referring to Goliath, “the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam.” (2 Sam. 21:19)

Much ingenuity has been brought to bear in solving the mystery of who killed Goliath, and the effort begins within the pages of the Bible. The author of Chronicles, whose self-appointed mission
was to clean up the ancient text of Samuel several centuries after it was composed, insisted that the Philistine warrior whom Elhanan fought and killed was the
brother
of the famous Goliath, “the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam,” and not Goliath himself. (1 Chron. 20:5) The ancient rabbis proposed a neat solution to the problem by suggesting that Elhanan and David were one and the same man: “The two names belong to the same person: David was called Elhanan, ‘he to whom God was gracious.’ ”
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Some modern scholars have sided with the pious commentators in suggesting that David and Elhanan were the same man, although their reasoning is slightly different—perhaps, they suggest, “David” is the throne name adopted by the man called Elhanan when he ascended to kingship, just as a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church will take a new and honorific name when he is raised to the papacy.
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Others are willing to entertain the idea that Elhanan
did
slay Goliath, and “the deed of a lesser warrior has been transferred to David” by some royal biographer who sought to glorify the king.
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A very simple and compelling solution is available. Here again, the various biblical sources—or was it the imagination of the bards and chroniclers who came long before the biblical authors?—may have decorated the life story of King David with fairy tales and folktales, if only to fill in the blanks in an otherwise rich biographical record. The human imagination abhors a vacuum, after all, and seeks to fill in the blanks in a life or a history. The same impulse appears to be at work, for example, in the biblical life story of Moses, whose miraculous survival in a little boat of reeds may have been borrowed intact from a far more ancient tale told about an Akkadian king of the third millennium
B.C.E
. All of these tales— the ones told about Moses and David and much else besides—were preserved and embellished by the authors and editors who compiled the law, legend, and lore of ancient Israel into the patchwork that we have learned to call
the
Bible.

This simple notion of how the Bible was composed, which encapsulates the consensus of the last hundred years or so of biblical scholarship, helps us to resolve the other flaws and contradictions
in the story of David and Goliath. One of the traditional tales of ancient Israel suggested that Saul and David first encountered each other on the day the young man arrived at the royal household to serve as court musician. Another tale suggested that their first meeting took place on the field of battle on the day when David fought Goliath. And the biblical source who compiled the various tales of ancient Israel chose to include
both
versions in the sacred history of Israel.

Intriguingly, the very fact that the Bible preserves multiple and contradictory versions of the same incident has been cited by scholars as evidence that the Bible accurately and reliably preserves the oldest folk traditions of ancient Israel—the priests and scribes who compiled and edited the sacred texts of ancient Israel felt obliged to include
all
of the oldest traditions even when they conflicted with one another. Even more intriguing, however, is the suggestion that the inclusion of two inconsistent versions of the same story is really a wink and a nod from the biblical author, a way of signaling the reader that
both
versions may be purely fanciful. The biblical author generally provides a single version of an incident when he is confident that it happened just that way, or so goes one theory of the function of doublets in the biblical text. When two or three versions of the same incident are included, the author means to signal us that he is not quite sure how it happened or whether it happened at all.

With the defeat of Goliath, David is poised to emerge from the mists of myth and legend and step into the full light of history. The fairy-tale prince will shortly be revealed as the flesh-and-blood figure who is a fugitive, an outlaw, a soldier of fortune, a traitor, and much else besides. But the romantic glow that surrounds young David in the opening passages of his biblical life story lingers for a few more moments. The biblical author pauses to describe a series of passionate encounters between David and
two of the adult children of Saul—first Jonathan, the king's eldest son, and later Michal, the king's daughter. Each one, like Saul himself, falls suddenly and deeply in love with David. Indeed, the love of Michal for David is “the only instance in all biblical narrative in which we are explicitly told that a woman loves a man.”
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The name David has been interpreted by some scholars to mean “darling” or “beloved” in biblical Hebrew,
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and love at first sight is exactly what David seems to inspire in everyone who encounters him. King Saul has already fallen under his thrall. “And David came to Saul,” the Bible says of their first encounter, “and he loved him greatly.” (1 Sam. 16:21) Once David had distinguished himself in battle, he endeared himself to the rest of Saul's family—Jonathan and Michal, too, “loved David.” (1 Sam. 18:20) The charismatic David inspired the same passion in the general populace, not only his own tribe but the whole of the twelve tribes: “All Israel and Judah loved David.” (1 Sam. 18:16) But it is the love between David and Jonathan that is the most intriguing of all.

Jonathan was a man wholly governed by his appetites and passions. He took it upon himself to assassinate the Philistine governor of Gibeah, as we have already seen, and he risked his life in a nearly suicidal commando attack on a Philistine fortress. On yet another occasion, Jonathan impulsively gorged himself on honey on the very day when Saul had ordered the army of Israel to fast, and his impulse nearly cost him his life—his father had been ready to put him to death, and he was saved only because the army rallied to his support. (1 Sam. 14:24 ff.) Now we see another and still more provocative expression of Jonathan's impulsive nature: he was smitten with love for David on the very day that David smote Goliath.

Jonathan entered into a “covenant” with David, the Bible reveals, “because he loved him as his own soul.” To seal the bond
between them, Jonathan stripped off his robe and the rest of his apparel—“even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle”— and tenderly draped them on the handsome young man. Significantly, Saul had tried to do much the same thing for David only moments earlier, but David had rejected the offer of armor and weaponry from Jonathan's father. Now, the gesture was accepted and fully reciprocated.

What's more, it was not only his armor but his more intimate garments, too, that Jonathan removed from his own body and placed upon David's. Such details have not escaped the attention of artists and writers over the centuries; D. H. Lawrence, for example, depicted David and Jonathan as stripping down to a “leather loin-strap” before tenderly exchanging their clothing. “If a man from the sheep dare love the King's son,” Lawrence's David says to Jonathan, “then I love Jonathan.”
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The nature of the love between David and Jonathan is one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the biblical life story of David.

Exactly what does the biblical author mean when he writes that “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David”? A pious reading insists that the biblical text offers “the classic description of genuine unselfish love.”
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A more worldly reading suggests that the covenant (
b'rit
) between David and Jonathan was not a love pact but a political arrangement by which Jonathan, son of the reigning king, pledged his loyalty to the man who would ultimately replace his father on the throne of Israel.
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But something more heartfelt and more carnal may have characterized the love of David and Jonathan, even if the Bible dares not speak its name.