God Knows

  'I can't believe that.'

  'Ask your sister.'

  'Michal exaggerates. The moon will be new.'

  'Does he think I'd come back to have dinner with him just because the moon is new?'

  'You know how crazy he is,' Jonathan tried to explain. 'He forgives and forgets.'

  'And then he forgets he's forgiven,' I replied. 'As the Lord liveth, Jonathan, and as thy soul liveth, there is but a step between me and death. I feel it in my bones.'

  Jonathan looked horrified and said unto me, 'God forbid--thou shalt not die. Whatsoever thy soul desireth, I will even do it for thee.'

  'Then let me go,' I suggested, 'that I may hide myself in the field at least unto the third evening and the morning after. You watch and see if thy father at all misses me. If he does, then say that I asked leave of thee to rim to my city of Bethlehem for the yearly sacrifice there for all my family. If he says that it is well and that I shall have peace, I will return to him that same day. But if he be very wroth, then we can be sure that evil is determined by him. Who shall tell me if thy father answer thee roughly?'

  'Would not I tell thee?' earnestly responded Jonathan, who'd been bobbing his head with assent all the while I'd been talking. 'Do not I love thee as I do my own soul?' I had no doubt Jonathan did love me as he did his own soul, although I wasn't sure what that meant. And I did believe he would do everything feasible to insure my safety. 'Tomorrow is a new moon,' he began rapidly, outlining a plan of his own, 'and thou shalt be missed, we know, because thy seat will be empty. Don't come to my house. Don't even come into the city.'

  'A lion is in the streets?'

  'For you, it may indeed turn out that a lion is in the streets. Abide thou three days in the field in one place or the other. Then thou shalt go down quickly every morning and come to the place where thou didst hide thyself when the business was in hand, and shalt remain by the stone Ezel until the morning I shalt have word for thee and appear.'

  'Ezel?'

  'Yes. Ezel is the one to the south of stone Rogellen. And I will shoot three arrows on the side thereof, as though I shot at a mark. And behold, I will send a lad, saying, "Go find out the arrows." Now, if I expressly say unto the lad, "Behold, the arrows are on this side of thee, take them," then come thou, for there is peace in thee, and no hurt, as the Lord liveth. But if I say thus unto the young man, "Behold, the arrows are beyond thee," go thy way, for the Lord hath sent thee away.'

  'Say that all again?' I requested, my mind starting to reel.

  'Please do it my way,' Jonathan asked. He was still struggling for breath and I did not have the heart to oppose him. 'Behold, if there be good toward David when I have sounded my father and I then not send unto thee, the Lord do so and much more to Jonathan. But if it please my father to do thee evil, then I will show it thee and send thee away, that thou mayest go in peace.'

  'I'm not sure I have that one straight either.'

  'Let's just see what happens with my father at dinner the first night and the second night and the third. I | worry so about him when the moon is new.'

  Jonathan came on the last day at the appointed time. For the third morning in succession, I arose stiffly from another night of fitful sleep, with dead insects drying on my mouth and the rustle of a small animal scratching on fallen leaves nearby. I concealed myself as bidden near the stone Ezel, after I had relieved myself in a patch of stubby brown weeds deep inside the stand of green laurel in which I had cleared my lonely nocturnal burrow. A little lad was with Jonathan. I held my breath to hear better. And Jonathan said unto his lad, in a voice meant to carry, 'Run, find out now the arrows which I shoot.' And as I peeked out in suspense, I saw the lad run, and I saw Jonathan shoot an arrow far over his head, and I heard Jonathan cry after the lad, and say, 'Is not the arrow beyond thee?' I felt my strength fail with the long trajectory of the arrow. Jonathan was one of the very few among us then who had learned how to use a bow. The look of leaden sorrow on his countenance confirmed my grim conviction that my fate had now been sealed beyond any chance of reprieve. I wanted to cry. Jonathan shot two more. A weird and awkward interval occurred after Jonathan's lad had gathered up the arrows and come back to his master. Jonathan looked about in all directions confusedly. We had both forgotten the remainder of the code. Everything came to a clumsy standstill. Giving up, Jonathan handed all his artillery unto his lad and instructed him, 'Go carry them into the city.' And Jonathan cried after the lad, 'Make speed, haste, stay not.'

  The lad knew not anything. And as soon as he was gone, I arose out of my place toward the south, feeling terrible, just terrible, and I fell on my face to the ground when I reached Jonathan and bowed three times. I knew it was the end, that all hope of effecting the longed-for reunion with his father was over. Jonathan's eyes too were filling with tears when he helped me up, and I could read in his forlorn and agitated look the unmistakable message of my failure and doom. It was then, and only then, that we fell into each other's arms and hugged, that we kissed one another and wept one with the other, until I exceeded him in weeping, and that was the only time. And that's all that we did. Show me proof there was ever more.

  Jonathan was voluble with details as he sounded my death knell. On the first day of the new moon, which was the first day of the month by our calendar then, the king sat upon his seat; as at other times, Abner sat by his side, and my place was empty. Saul's glance fixed itself continually upon my empty place that first evening as though he were staring at some baleful omen, but he raised not a question to anyone about my absence. Instead, he murmured aloud that something surely must have befallen me to account for my empty place; perhaps I was unclean, surely that was it, I was not clean. Perhaps I had even lain with my wife. It was a different story on the following day when he saw my place empty again. This time he inquired point-blank of Jonathan why I had not come to meat neither that day nor the day previous. His anger was kindled against Jonathan when he heard the reply I had devised, that I had sought Jonathan out for leave to go to my family to sacrifice in Bethlehem and that Jonathan had given it. And Saul flew into a fury at the knowledge that Jonathan and I had met and that Jonathan had offered nothing about me until asked. What followed was somewhat chaotic. He commanded Jonathan to fetch me unto him forthwith to be slain, cast a javelin at him when Jonathan spoke up in my defense, and then excoriated him in a rambling, incoherent diatribe denouncing his allegiance, his intelligence, and even, incongruously, his maternal parenthood, whereby Jonathan at last knew that it was determined of his father to slay me.

  'There was more, David, much more,' Jonathan went on, with his stricken look. 'He called me an imbecile too, practically. Then he told me I was the son of a perverse, rebellious woman, and that I had chosen to side with you to my own confusion. Half the time I did not know what he was talking about. He added something else that makes no sense to me at all. David, you're smart, maybe you can figure it out. He told me also--this is not easy to say--that I was a confusion to my mother's nakedness.'

  'A confusion to your mother's nakedness?'

  'Do you know what that means?'

  'A confusion to your mother's nakedness?' I repeated a second time, to make sure I had heard him aright.

  'That's exactly it,' Jonathan affirmed. 'He told me I had chosen you to my own confusion and unto the confusion of my mother's nakedness. It kept me awake all night.'

  'What did he mean by that?'

  'I asked you.'

  'It's Greek to me,' I was forced to confess. 'Jonathan, there's something more that's troubling you. I can tell it by your eyes.'

  'He also said,' Jonathan revealed with great difficulty, glancing away, 'that neither I nor my kingdom would be established as long as the son of Jesse was allowed to remain alive on the ground.'

  In the silence that followed, our eyes met. 'That's me.'

  'I know.'

  'Do you believe him?'

  He was truthful. 'I don't know.'

  I had no weapon. My death had been sanc
tioned. He could again be a hero. He wore his short sword in a scabbard and a knife in his girdle. He was older than I and much the larger and stronger, and I knew he could have seized me by the hair in his grip and stabbed or slashed me or run me through, as he desired. And I also knew by the look of him that if I had asked him for his sword and his knife, he would have lain both in my hand without question.

  We wept again, bursting into tears at the same instant, parting for what we believed to be forever, although we did meet as friends one more time before his death, when he sought me out in my hiding place in the wilderness of Ziph to confide that he too now was sure I would be king over Israel soon and to pledge that he would sit next to me loyally. We made a covenant on that before the Lord, and Jonathan stole back to his house. In my mind during that conversation, and left unmentioned, was the underlying knowledge that his oath, though earnest, was more sentimental than practical, for Jonathan would certainly have to be dead before my accession to kingship could come about. We shook hands on it anyway. We made covenant after covenant also at the tearful leave-taking in the field earlier, pledging eternal amity between him and me, and between his seed and my seed forever, for all that was worth. I know I did look after his only son, who was lamed on both his feet after a panicking nurse dropped him while trying to flee after hearing the news of the great Philistine victory at Gilboa and of the death of Saul and Jonathan both. And again when we wept, Jonathan and I, I exceeded him. I'll admit I exceeded him. Why wouldn't I exceed him? God only knows what he was weeping about. I was crying because I had lost everything and was shit out of luck.

  A poor man, you may find it written, is better than a liar. Don't you believe it. I've been both. I've even been both at the same time, and it's much better to lie than to be poor. Ask anyone rich, if you don't believe that. After we separated, Jonathan could, as he did when he arose and departed, go back into the city to his house. But what about me? The foxes have their holes, and the birds of the air have their nests, but this son of man, of Jesse the Bethlehemite, had nowhere to lay his head. I could not go home again. Bethlehem in Judah would be the first place Saul would look; and as sure as the night follows day, he would soon have his messengers out scouring the whole country for word of my whereabouts now that he was more convinced than ever that the Lord loved me and that I would succeed him as king if I were permitted to live. His wrath was cruel and his anger outrageous; but who was able to stand before his envy?

  I could not depend much on the kindness of strangers, and certainly not of friends and relations. A rich man beginning to fall is held up by his friends, but a poor man being down is thrust away quickly by everyone, by his friends also. Wealth makes many friends, of course, but the poor is separated from his neighbor, and if all the brethren of the poor do hate him, how much more do his friends go far from him? Besides, what friends could I go to? Joab? Abishai? Who can number the sand of the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of eternity? All of this, though commonplace now and wryly humorous, I found out directly through rigorous personal experience in the months that followed. Not until I was thrown out of Gath by the Philistines and came to rest at last in my hiding place in the cave of Adullam did I find some surcease from sorrow. From gross and gluttonous Nabal in Carmel I got the slap in the face demonstrating that as the proud hate humility, so do the rich abhor the poor. No wonder I grew wise so soon. I was striding with my band to avenge with blood Nabal's demeaning rebuff when Abigail intercepted us with her string of asses bearing the provisions I politely had solicited, and she made humble apology for the arrogant rudeness of her fat husband. Nabal died with relief when he heard how narrowly he had escaped being slain, and I wound up with his wife and a good-sized share of his transportable belongings.

  But in between, I could scarcely draw a peaceful breath or enjoy a good night's sleep. I was anathema to anyone who knew me, an outcast hated by the brutal king, a danger to anyone I approached, an accursed stranger in a strange land who could not without mortal risk to everyone in the vicinity walk up to anyone I beheld with the simple plea 'Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink, for I am thirsty.' Anyone aiding me even innocently in my solitary struggle to survive would be putting his own life in peril. Look what happened to Ahimelech and the other priests from Nob, and to their families.

  So it was to foil expectations and evade capture that, instead of returning south into Judah, I hastened in the opposite direction to the city of Nob for my sword and my breads, told my lies, and left such barbarous and unimaginable destruction in my wake. Noting Doeg the Edomite in Nob brought home to me the desperate seriousness of my plight: my time of free travel in Israel was going to be short. 1 pretended not to recognize him, but arose as soon as I had rested and I fled that same day for fear of Saul. Any kind of deal we might have struck in those circumstances would have been of little value, for the heart is deceitful in all things. Don't I know that from my own bouts of self-examination? The unexamined life is not worth living, I know. The examined life is? There's just no escaping our original sins, for without committing a single one of the acts for which Saul held me at fault, I was nonetheless guilty of all. In Saul's fevered imagination I wanted his kingdom and his life. Whereas all I really aimed for most days now was a basin of clean water in which to wash my feet and a hot bowl of lentil soup. Many's the time I would have traded my birthright for a mess of pottage.

  The fool walks in darkness, but what choice did I have? I reversed my course and headed south. As much as I could, I traveled by night, knowing it was a far, far better thing I was doing skirting the familiar resting places of my native Judah and fleeing downward into the land of the Philistines than I had ever done before. I snatched sleep in wadis for an hour at a time when the weather was dry. In storms I took refuge in limestone caves, listening to the rain lashing down outside in windswept gusts and cropping away like deadly locusts at the soft sides of the natural portals into which I had crawled. One day after the next, glowworms and gecko lizards were the most agreeable of my companions. There was hail, and fire mingled with the hail. Take it from me, the king's wrath is as the roaring of a lion, and Saul's wrath had transmogrified me into a fugitive and a vagabond and had caused me to stink among the inhabitants. You think I was used to living that way? The whole thing was a desolation and an astonishment to me, as though suddenly the earth was again without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I avoided the company of humans. How I remembered and missed the voice of mirth, the sound of the millstones, the light of the candle. I traveled invisibly through tangled thickets of brier on high ground when I did move by day, and crept along paths at night through villages and small towns only when the streets were empty. I stole food, gathered wine and summer fruits from the cellars and orchards of others. Downward and seaward I proceeded doggedly through stony hills, until Judah had been left behind me and the land of the Philistines lay before me like a sanctuary. I felt I had triumphed, although I had only lasted. I was still far from the coast, but I had made it to Gath.

  Twice in my long and rather eventful life, I fled to the city of King Achish of Gath for protection. The first time, he threw me out. The next, he welcomed me and my small army of six hundred with open arms, so to speak, and allocated to me his southern territory of Ziklag to oversee, police, and plunder. This was the first time. Believe me, when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. It never rains but it pours.

  I was spotted within minutes of walking into the first inn I saw after passing through the gates of the city. I don't know why I was identified so quickly--we're not allowed to make pictures of each other and never did. And it wasn't because I looked Jewish. I've never looked that Jewish, and the patrons in the spacious rooms already included a colorful sprinkling of other Hebrews from various places, as well as some Hittites, Midianites, Canaanites, and other Semites. I was famous, I guess, and probably had been pointed out in the past to some of the Philistine fighting men present. I was, I will h
ave to grant, already something of a legend in my own time.

  The last thing I wanted was more trouble, especially in Gath. What I needed most was a bath and a good meal. The catch of the day at the Philistine inn was water snake and baby eel. I had a beer and ordered some baked whitefish with prawns and kasha varnishkas, and a pork chop with potato pancakes to start. Before any of it could come, I began to grow uncomfortably aware of a stir of recognition developing beneath the normal hubbub of the place. I could see I was the cynosure of conjecture by different small groups of Philistine soldiers, who pressed closer together and in upon me with a hunger for information. Was this not David, they wished to know, first from each other and then from me. Which David? David who? The David of whom they did used to sing one to another of him in dances, saying Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands? Was this not that David? Like a schmuck, I said yes.

  Say what you will about the coarse aesthetic insensibilities of the Philistines; they are of husky physique, and in no time at all they had me rolled up in a rug and delivered like a bolt of woollen cloth to the room in which King Achish of Gath sat in a monstrous oak chair he called a" throne. Even as they were unrolling me from the filthy rug in which I had been bound, they began to reminisce, and horrible visions of Samson eyeless in Gaza began dancing in my brain as I listened.224 They talked of blinding me and then of cutting off my thumbs and my big toes. I laid up these words in my heart and was sore afraid. I was not in a good bargaining position, and could see that in one way or another I would have to change my behavior. So on the spot I decided to put on an antic disposition and stake everything on the effect. Where do you think Shakespeare really got the idea for Hamlet?

  I began with a song. 'When there are gray skies, I don't mind the gray skies, you make them blue, sonny boy,' I sang out without warning in the loudest, most melodramatic voice I could produce, riveting everyone in that great timbered hall with amazement.