'Tell me again, please,' my son requests, poised to write.
'Look it up in your tablets,' I reply curtly.
'I've got too many tablets to look anything up in them. '
'Who the hell tells you to make them? Answer me truthfully. You really don't know what guiltless means?'
'How should I know what guiltless means? '
'Without guilt, Solomon. Solomon, can't a bright boy like you grasp something like that?'
'Of course I can, once I have it explained to me.' He nods briskly. 'Now I understand. You do want me to let his hoar head go down in peace to the grave, don't you? Should I or should I not?'
'You should.'
His face shows disappointment. 'I'll have to redo this whole tablet.'
'Just scratch out the word not.'
'That does the trick!' He executes the correction with alacrity. 'Now, about hoar head?'
'That's not important now,' I tell him. 'Just remember Abiathar. That's all you have to work on today. Can you remember a simple thing like his name?'
'Of course I can,' says Solomon. 'Whose?'
'Abishag!'
She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, my exquisite Shunammite, and again shows my son Solomon the door. At my request, she brings in Benaiah, of the broad shoulders, deep chest, and strong arms, to whom I reiterate my deathbed bequest of benevolence for Abiathar. Benaiah has kept himself alive, despite the murderous animosity of Joab, of whose lethal jealousy I shrewdly apprised him when I named him to command my palace guard.
'Perhaps you should instruct Nathan as well,' Benaiah suggests.
'Nathan,' I remark sourly, 'is as wise as Solomon.'
Benaiah of the broad shoulders, deep chest, and strong arms misses my sarcasm, and another deplorable saying is coined.
I swear I often feel I was much better off in the days when I was struggling to endure and be king than I've been since I became one. Succeeding is more satisfying than success. Believe it or not, God always seemed to reply whenever I talked to Him. I asked a question, He gave me a civil answer, invariably supplying the one I wanted to receive. Our talks went smoothly. He never thundered at me as He did at Moses. He didn't even ask me to take off my shoes. If I wanted to know, I asked. And the first time I asked was before the expedition to Keilah.
A number of my men were balky at that prospect, contending that our survival in Judah was risky enough without revealing ourselves to both Saul and the Philistines in a fashion so provocative to both. The Philistines were making war against the small walled city, and they were not many; the plan to attack them was mine. But I had to be sure, for a failure at the start would mean my immediate finish. I decided to have a crack at talking directly with God. I'd never put much faith in divination by smoke.
'I think I want to mull it over,' I made known to those with whom I was in council, and moved off alone to a tree-shaded clearing in the woods. What could I lose? The worst He could do was not say anything. I came right out with it. 'Shall I go and smite these Philistines?' I put it to Him bluntly. I was not certain in which direction to look.
And the Lord came through for me. 'Go and smite the Philistines,' He said unto me at once. 'Arise, go down to save Keilah.'
'Behold, we are much afraid here in Judah,' I informed Him.
'I will deliver the Philistines into thine hand.'
I could hardly believe my ears. In a delicious state of elation, I rushed back to the others and proclaimed: 'The Lord hath said He will deliver the Philistines into our hand!'
'You talked to God?' They gaped with awe.
'He guarantees it.'
So off I went with my men to Keilah and fought with the Philistines, and hocked and shlugged them and aggravated them too, until their heads were aching and their bones were breaking and they could not stand it anymore, and we brought away their cattle, and smote them with a great slaughter, saving the inhabitants of Keilah from further oppression and atrocity. We felt like heroes. My men relaxed and celebrated. City life was intoxicating. They smiled incessantly and wanted to stay.
'It's so much better than in the woods,' Joab recommended. I was shaking my head. 'What's wrong?'
'Saul. How long do you think it will take him to come down after us once he learns we have camped inside a city with walls and gates?'
Joab disagreed. 'We can close the gates and lock him out,' he argued. 'Why not?'
'Fineberg's law.'
'Fineberg?'
'If we can lock him out,' I elucidated, 'he can lock us in. And the men of Keilah?' I went on. 'What do you think they are going to do when they hear that Saul seeketh to come to Keilah, to destroy the city for my sake?'
'The men of Keilah?' Joab did not hesitate a moment. 'We risked our lives to deliver these people. The men of Keilah are grateful and will be loyal to us.'
'Don't bet on it.'
'They will stand by us to the end.'
'I think I want to mull that one over,' I said, and walked off by myself to be alone in the woods again. I could easily picture Saul concluding with glee that God had delivered me into his hand because I had shut myself inside a town that had gates and bars. 'Saul,' I said to God, coming straight to the point again. I did not want to take up too much of His time. 'Will Saul come down to Keilah after me as Thy servant believes?'
'You bet your ass,' said the Lord.
'And will the men of Keilah deliver us into the hand of Saul?'
'It's funny you should ask.'
'They will?'
'They will deliver thee up.'
'Then we'd better get away, right?'
'You don't have to go to college,' said the Lord, 'to figure that one out for yourself.'
Again I went hurrying back with my revelations. 'As God is my witness,' I announced with urgency, 'we must arise and depart from here quickly, for Saul will call his people together for war and come down to Keilah to besiege us here.'
So we arose out of Keilah and went whithersoever we could go, and Saul sought us every day. By this time my men had increased to about six hundred. Saul never had less than three thousand. We abode for a while in strongholds in a mountain in the wilderness of Ziph. We moved as well through the wilderness of Maon and the wilderness of Engedi. All are regions of the wilderness of Judah, and it is sometimes difficult for outsiders to tell the individual wildernesses apart. Ziph is near Ziph, Engedi is near Engedi, and the wilderness of Maon surrounds Carmel, where I found Abigail married to Nabal and took my first real woman as my first true wife right after her unmannered pig of a husband died. I did not wait long to propose after I heard she was widowed. Maybe a minute.
It was in a wood in the wilderness of Ziph that Jonathan sought me out to assure me forthrightly of his faith that his father would not find me because I was favored by God and that he saw too now that I would surely be king over Israel in due time.
'From your mouth,' I responded with a piety equaling his own, 'to God's ears.'
He was talking more from feeling than demonstrable fact, but I was glad to hear him anyway, and was not put off by his choked voice and the density of emotions he was manifesting. Neither one of us could know that this was fated to be our last meeting: he would be killed at Gilboa, with me almost on the opposite side, and never enjoy seeing his prophecy fulfilled.
'And I shall serve thee and be next unto thee,' he continued solemnly in a vow that events rendered moot, his eyes staring downward with a kind of demoralized humility. 'Fear not the hand of my father, for thou shalt be king, and that also my father knoweth. It's the reason he's so confused and unhappy. He doesn't like me, David. He's never really liked me. He would have had me killed after I did so well at the battle of Michmash. Just because I ate the honey, he said, but I believe it was because he was jealous. The people rose up as one to save me. But then, my father has never really liked any of his children. You were the one he seemed to love briefly as the only person who would never disappoint him and never fail at anything.
Maybe that's the reason he fears you now' and wants to kill you.'
'According to him, I'm supposed to want to kill him.'
'He isn't sane, David. At Michmash, he wanted to fight them head-on. He still wants to fight them head-on. I think my father never wants anyone to succeed him, and hopes to take all the rest of us to death along with him. At Michmash, I felt I had to do something to stop him. That's why I stole away at night with my armor bearer to try my luck up that twisting path in the mountains to the Philistine outpost. It was a stony, steep trail,' he went on, 'and I couldn't mount it quickly. I found myself between a sharp rock on the one side and a sharp rock on the other.'
He gambled on making known his presence to the enemy sentries, representing himself as a local Israelite who'd hidden in a cave and who now begged permission to return to his own poor house in the wilderness.
'If they allow us to go up,' he had whispered to his armor bearer, 'we will go up. I will take my spear and hope that the Lord hath delivered them into our hand. If they don't, they don't. We'll go back to the camp. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.'
Contemptuously, derisively, they allowed him to come up, prepared to hector him as he passed through and perhaps pull his beard. 'Behold, the Hebrews come forth out of the holes where they had hid themselves,' they called to each other. 'Come up, come up to us, and we will show you a thing or two.'
Better for them they should have bitten off their tongues. About twenty of them in a half acre Jonathan slew before they began to comprehend his ruse. Fleeing survivors, believing him the vanguard of a large encirclement, spread chaos in the main camp with their exaggerated reports. Rumor was rampant and pandemonium reigned. By dawn's early light the watchmen of the Israelites beheld the Philistines beating down one another and the multitude melting away in headlong retreat. Saul took advantage of the opportunity with an order to charge, then loused things up with a senseless pledge to God that appeared to be aimed vindictively at Jonathan.
'Cursed be the man that eateth any food until evening,' was the harebrained order of the day Saul decreed, having called the roll by then and learned full well that it could be only Jonathan who had started the ball rolling, and that Jonathan, who had not yet returned, would be uninformed of the ban.
Faint from fasting, the Israelites had to leave off pursuing their enemies before the day was ended. They flew upon the spoils of sheep, oxen, and calves, slew them to the ground, and ate them with the blood. Saul disapproved of that. Jonathan returned with his eyes enlightened by the taste of honey he had taken in the wood. He was critical of Saul's prohibition against eating food when he saw how it had interfered with the much greater slaughter among the Philistines that could easily have ensued. Grimly and methodically, Saul embarked on his merciless course of revenge against him. He cast lots in a process of elimination. The tribe was narrowed down to Benjamin, the family to his own, the culprit then to Jonathan.
'I did but taste a little wild honey with the end of my rod,' Jonathan admitted affectingly, 'and lo, for this I must die?'
'For this,' Saul answered with a shrug, as though washing his hands of responsibility, 'thou shalt surely die, Jonathan.'
But the people knew that it was Jonathan who had wrought this great salvation in Israel that day, and they would not allow one hair of his head to fall to the ground. They rescued him that he died not, and they kept him safe until the resentment of his father had subsided.
'He was envious of me,' Jonathan confided. 'He was envious of me for the part I had played. He never really trusted or liked me after that. It was his way of getting rid of me. We could see his temper blazing in his eyes. When I understood he really meant to kill me, I realized something. My father the king was mad. And then I realized something worse. The Lord my God was also mad. And when I realized that, I began to weep. My heart was broken, and I did not care.'
I gave thanks to God that Jonathan did not weep then. Jonathan did love me, I know now, and I did not love him. And I know that doesn't feel good.
I know because I love Bathsheba and she does not love me. I loved my son Absalom, and he would have killed me if he could, and would have been able to had he set right out to overtake me instead of procrastinating complacently after listening to the counsel of the secret agent I left behind to flatter and mislead him. Yet I could not kill Saul when I had the chance. It takes all kinds to make a world, doesn't it? Looking back, I find myself contrite that I was not more open-hearted in my remarks to Jonathan at what proved to be our final meeting. I was rather cold, imperious. How could I know he was going to die? Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.
I had those two good chances for killing Saul. My first in the cave of Engedi, amid the sheepcotes upon the rocks of the wild goats, when Saul came in to relieve himself where we were hiding and stretched out on the ground to cover his feet. I could have killed him just for shitting there. Instead, my heart was wrung by a nauseating mixture of pity and dread when I found the opportunity to obtain his death so close at hand, and I let him go.
'The Lord delivered him right into your hand,' charged Abishai after Saul had gone. 'Why would you not let me smite him with my spear even to the earth at once? I would not have had to smite him a second time.'
I responded simply. 'I thought he reminded me of my father as he slept.'
'Grandpa Jesse doesn't look like Saul at all,' Abishai argued sullenly.
I decided to let the matter drop. It was always casting pearls before swine to try to reason from sentiment with the three hard sons of my sister Zeruiah, or with any of the rough six hundred who were with me then. Uriah the Hittite, then unwed, was among those six hundred that far back, and was even one of my thirty mighty men. When all my civil strife was over and won, I rewarded him liberally with an extended estate in the south to cultivate for his pleasure and to safeguard as an outpost. Who asked him to choose a libidinous wife with the hots for Jerusalem? Is it my fault she took a shine to me after he succumbed to her insistence and agreed to move here? I should have warned him; I could have told him by then that it is better to dwell with a lion or a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman, for I had already reclaimed my wife Michal from Phalti and she was living with me in my palace and buzzing all about me like a hornet. As the climbing up a sandy way is to the feet of the aged, so is a wife full of words to a quiet man. What was a horny young king like me to do when a radiant treat like Bathsheba laid it all out for me to see that eveningtide from the roof of my royal residence? I did what any normal, virile tyrant would do. I saw her, I sent for her, I lay with her, and as simple as that was the imperceptible drift into the turbulent and depressing second half of my life, with its succession of tragedies for which virtually nothing I had undergone had prepared me. By the time I was sixty, I had lost my capacity for experiencing joy, and the years had drawn nigh when I could say I had no pleasure in them.
I could say that the Devil made me do it. The Devil always comes in handy that way, doesn't he?
Everything was so much easier back there with Abigail; all slipped conveniently into place with an easiness wondrous to behold as we met and came together in those footloose, carefree years of banditry and extortion in the wilds of southern Judah. The substance of me and my men grew with our reputation. We took wives. I took Abigail as soon as she was available, which was about two weeks after I met her. That worked so well that, with Abigail approving, I took Ahimoam too a little later on. A man cannot have too many wives when he is on the move a great deal and there is so much housework to be done. All of them can pitch in.
How did we live?
We lived off the land. Or rather, we lived off the landowners, which is a different thing entirely. That's how I found Abigail.
'Give us food and clothing,' I or one of my men would suggest to inhabitants of the region having the largest flocks of sheep and goats, the lushest vineyards and largest groves of olive, fig, date, and nut trees, the broadest, longest fields of wheat
and barley, of melons, lentils, flat beans, garlics, and onions, 'and we will make it our business to see that no one steals from you even one sheep.'
'Who would steal from us a sheep?' they were naive enough to ask.
'Who knows?' After a long pause I would go on. 'But I, David the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, will protect you from robbery and arson by thieves and plunderers. I and my men will be a wall unto you both day and night.'
'There are no thieves and plunderers in Judah,' they did answer at first.
'There are now.'
I would give this reply without smiling, looking grimly into the face of each landowner I addressed. It was really no mystery to me that the people of Ziph in my native Judah came up often to Gibeah to Saul, saying where my hiding places were and volunteering to deliver me into the king's hand if he came down after me. Any sense of hurt I may have expressed was synthetic.
Only from a fat slob like Nabal, the husband of my precious Abigail, did I meet with discourteous refusal and decide upon the very violent consequences that were averted narrowly by the prompt diplomacy of the stunning woman herself. Abigail was a woman of exceptional understanding and of a beautiful countenance. As Nabal's wife, she was a jewel of gold in a swine's snout. Didn't I ask him first in a very nice way? I sent ten young men to him with polite solicitations and with discreet reminders that we had not hurt any of his shearers or his shepherds, nor was there aught missing among them all the while we were in Carmel. His shepherds would vouch for the fact that the whole year through I steadfastly had protected him from us.
But the man was an utter boor, and he coarsely rejected the appeal of my messengers that he share with us a small amount of the prosperity we so earnestly wished to be able to allow him to continue to enjoy. Nabal was known by everyone as churlish and evil in his doings, as a potbellied glutton and drunkard who did not appreciate or deserve so fine a wife as the woman who rode out to greet us the following day when I and four hundred were walking with rapid stride to kill not only him but every living thing in his household.