The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (22 page)

David is no visionary. When he “consults” Y
HWH
, he does so by casting pebbles drawn from the
ephod
, using a method not unlike that of the Ouija board, or he listens to prophets like Samuel and
Nathan. For all his anointings, he is not a religious leader but a political one; and from this time on, the leadership that was once embodied in a single prophet like Moshe will be divided between prophets, acknowledged men of God, and kings, taken up with more secular concerns. Even David’s “inspiration,” poured forth in his Psalms, is of a more earthly variety than the Voice that spoke to Avraham and Moshe. For David is not the mouthpiece of Y
HWH
but a man on his knees or a devotee dancing in a public procession. One reason that he has always captivated readers of the Bible is that he is closer to our own experience than are the solitary prophets. He is the captain of the football team, the supersalesman, the engaging entertainer, the charismatic politician. We know the man.

The journey through the wilderness is being gradually transformed into a journey to the unknown recesses of the self—to “the inward parts.” This new spiritual journey will prove as eventful and unpredictable as the physical one, full of pitfalls and surprises. God forgives David; but there are consequences for the king, whose household, as Nathan prophesies, “will never be free of the sword” and whose
wives will be given “to your neighbor”—Absalom, as it turns out, who during his rebellion will need to assert his royal prerogatives—“who will lie with your wives in broad daylight.”

There is through all the biblical writings we have considered thus far an assumption that whoever obeys Y
HWH
will be rewarded with prosperity and long life, and whoever does not will be punished with suffering and death. Saul’s case is especially instructive in this regard. Because he lost the kingship, succeeding generations had to find something he did wrong, since his failure could be accounted for only by Y
HWH’S
abandonment of the king, which in turn could be accounted for only by some royal transgression. What they came up with—two ritual sins—are pretty lame excuses for Y
HWH’S
wrath. David’s sins—adulterous theft and the vindictive murder of an innocent commoner—should be far more consequential, but since David died a natural death in old age, the only important
political
consequence that could be discovered for his sins was Absalom’s rebellion. This harsh outlook, that worldly success and prosperity are certain indicators of God’s favor—long before the Calvinism with which it is usually associated—must leave both mind and heart unsatisfied and will gradually be revised as the biblical journey is transformed from a physical adventure to a spiritual one. As the Israelites look more deeply into their “hidden part,” the crudeness of this tit-for-tat morality will become more obvious to them.

But it is with David that the interior journey begins. A sense of the self is notably absent in all ancient literatures.
I
,
as we commonly use it today to mean one’s interior self, is seldom in evidence before the humanist autobiographies of the early modern period (such as
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini)
. Before these, we can count only a few instances from earlier literatures:
The Confessions
of Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century
A.D.
, some fragments from the sixth century
B.C.
attributed to
Sappho, and—oldest of all—the Psalms, which are filled with
I
’s: the
I
of repentance, the
I
of anger and vengeance, the
I
of self-pity and self-doubt, the
I
of despair, the
I
of delight, the
I
of ecstasy. The Psalms, some of which were undoubtedly written in the tenth century by David himself, are a treasure trove of personal emotions from poets acutely attuned to their inner states, from ancient harpists dramatically aware that spirit calls to Spirit—that their pain and joy can find permanent satisfaction only in the Creator of all: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; … keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.… O taste and see that Y
HWH
is good.… My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned.… My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? … For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.… As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.…” “Be still, and know that I am God.”

In this bubbling spring of self-reflection, this unparalleled resource of prayer drawn on repeatedly by Jews and Christians
over the millennia, there is no poem more cherished than the Psalm of the Good Shepherd, the world’s favorite prayer:

This song of trust, this affecting attitude of childlike confidence in God, must be the work of the great shepherd-king, who danced naked “only for Y
HWH
” and was not
ashamed to humble himself before his people. David may share some attitudes with the warrior-kings of Sumer, but they would only have been, like Michal, appalled at his willingness to play God’s fool, a king who always retained something of the playful humor of the shepherd boy who counted out the Philistine foreskins, who played the madman in Philistia, who watched the squatting monarch with twinkling amusement.

David remains always God’s little fighter, exhibiting the same scrappy confidence he showed when he stood up to the giant before all Israel. In Jerusalem today, as a pilgrim approaches the ramparts of the Old City, one can almost imagine that David still stands upon his great conquest, his citadel of Zion, easy, confident, his tight muscles rippling as he laughs, shaking his head in disbelief that the City of David, so often razed, has grown so huge. In his day it occupied one hill, its roofs could be counted from afar, and it housed scarcely more than two thousand souls. But it is still there; and its continued existence brings us back to its royal founder, the little king of the little city, and the God he served—

¹
To lean (or lay) hands on someone by embracing his head was thought to make vital power pass from one person to another In the case of a great leader, this enabled the charism of leadership to pass from the leader to his successor

²
This line is one of the sources for Augustine of Hippo’s doctrine of original sin, incurred by Adam and Eve in Eden and passed to all subsequent generations by sexual intercourse
Pace
Augustine, the line does not mean that David’s mother committed sin by conceiving him through sexual intercourse. It is just an instance of the common ancient assumption that human beings are evil. See the words of Ut-napishtim et al.,
this page
; also the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:11.

SIX
B
ABYLON
 
From Many to One

D
espite the amorous exploits recorded in the Book of Samuel, David must be considered a sexual moderate among ancient monarchs. His son and successor Solomon, installed on the throne after some behind-the-scenes string-pulling by his mother, Bathsheba, and the prophet
Nathan, quickly expanded the royal harem to seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, contributing considerably to the population boom in Jerusalem, which soon spread out over the neighboring hillside. Solomon’s appetites were hardly confined to the harem. In fact, the acquisition of new wives was principally for political, rather than sexual, gratification. Each new acquisition was made to further an alliance, none more important than the one brought about by Solomon’s acquisition of Pharaoh’s daughter, for whom he built a separate palace on the new hill to the north.

Since Solomon’s father had vanquished the Philistines, who had been the only credible threat to Israelite suzerainty over the Levant, and since the Davidic kingdom had reached almost to the borders of Egypt in the south, Syria in the north, and Mesopotamia in the east, Solomon was in the enviable position of being the middleman between fabulously wealthy societies. Israel was the necessary trade route for all caravans—and, as any businessman will tell you, if your choice is between being a producer of goods or a middleman who takes a percentage, the sure bet is to take the percentage. No startup costs, no ongoing production costs,
no overhead, no inventory, no insurance, just the expense of collecting the toll.

His treasury overflowing, Solomon embarked on a building program the likes of which the land of Canaan had never seen, an enterprise of such ambition as to rival the fabled civilizations that lay at his distant borders. Gold, silver, bronze, and iron, cloths of scarlet, crimson, and violet, scented wood from Ophir, and Lebanese trunks of cedar and juniper all poured into Jerusalem, along with architects and designers, engravers and carpenters, and skilled workers of all kinds. “All King Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold, and all the plate in the House of the Forest of Lebanon was of pure gold; silver was little thought of in Solomon’s days, since the king had a fleet of Tarshish at sea … and once every three years the fleet of Tarshish would come back laden with gold and silver, ivory, apes, and baboons. For riches and for wisdom, King Solomon surpassed all kings on earth, and the whole world consulted Solomon to hear the wisdom which God had implanted in his heart; and everyone would bring a present with him: things made of silver, things made of gold, robes, armor, spices, horses, and mules; and this went on year after year.”