God Knows

  Nathan rambled on with so much Delphic obscurity that even had I been concentrating, I probably would have missed in his prognostication any glimpse of Absalom as the principal agent of its fulfillment. God was canny in selecting an addlepate like Nathan. He knew I'd be listening with one deaf ear; otherwise I might have averted it all. I would know the means, find the safeguards. I am David, not Oedipus, and I would have drawn thunder from the sky. But God, that sneak, didn't want me to know. It was one of the few times He has been able .to outsmart me.

  In time it all came true, didn't it, even part three in that obscure bundle of punishments, although they were concubines rather than wives who were violated after I abandoned the city. But I never thought of my son as a neighbor or of any of my concubines as my wives. To tell you the truth, I never even thought of most of my wives as wives. Michal, Abigail, and26 Bathsheba were women of special importance to me at different stages of my life, as is Abishag now. This black-haired girl is phenomenally beautiful naked, particularly at the black-haired juncture of her thighs--even Bathsheba says so--and I am thinking of making her my wife if we go on seeing each other much longer on my deathbed. But that's neither here nor there. I remember how grateful I felt for a moment when Nathan surprisingly injected into his monologue a cheery note that seemed to presage a satisfactory finish.

  'Don't worry, don't worry,' he assured me with a consoling shrug. 'The Lord hath lifted the sin from thee.' That was good. 'No harm will come to you.' That was even better. And then came the zinger. 'But the child,' said Nathan, 'shall surely die.'

  Trust in the Lord for a twist like that.

  I lost my God and my infant in the same instant.

  Until he lifted my sin from me and placed it on my baby, God and I were as friendly as anyone could imagine. I inquired for guidance whenever I wished to. He could always be counted on to respond. Our talks were sociable and precise. No words were wasted.

  'Should I go down in Keilah and save the city?' I asked while still a fugitive in Judah.

  'Go down to Keilah and save the city,' He answered helpfully.

  'Should I go up into Hebron in Judah and allow the elders to crown me king?' I asked after receiving news of Saul's death and completing my famous elegy.

  'Why not?' God obliged me in reply.

  Without fail, the answers I received from Him were those I wanted most to hear; and it often seemed I was talking just to myself. I suffered none of that volcanic bullying with which the life of Moses was blighted from the day God entered it, or even one second of agony from that profound and bleak unbroken silence that drove Saul at length to the forbidden witch of Endor to commune in desperation with the spirit of Samuel, the man more responsible than any other human for the deteriorated condition ,of his mind. When Samuel broke with Saul and cast him adrift in our harrowing world with just his own flimsy resources to rely upon, he took all hope of God away from Saul permanently. There was never again a word or signal for Saul that anyone above was watching or that anyone cared. Burnt offerings could just as well have been used for chopped meat.

  Propelled by his miserable need, Saul went to the witch of Endor to learn from the ghost of Samuel the outcome of the battle of Gilboa, which the armies of the Philistines and the Hebrews were preparing to fight the following day. And Samuel let him have it, right between the eyes: Saul would also die, and the Israelites would be routed thoroughly and scattered from their houses and their tents.

  Saul needed that knowledge like a hole in the head. His morale was low enough. A larger nature than Samuel's might have pressed good counsel upon him. What would it have hurt Samuel to tell Saul, don't fight? Let them move through the valley of Jezreel. How far can they go? Hammer them from the hills. Harass and skirmish, procrastinate and postpone. Slash them from the rear, smite them on the flanks. Aggravate them, aggravate them. How long can they last?

  But Saul's day was drawing to a close, and mine was destined to dawn. Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.

  And now my day is drawing to a close, while Adonijah and Solomon jockey for position and Bathsheba, lobbying for her son, visits me with devious and transparent intent, coached in the background by Nathan, who rightly presumes himself on very tenuous ground. If I die tomorrow, Nathan will not outlive me by much. And God seems to be keeping out of things these days. Miracles are past.

  For Bathsheba, all show of interest in the well-being of other people is an effort of the will that she is able to exert for about a minute and a half. Inhibition is not natural to her, tact is foreign. She shows me her newest underwear; she still designs those things on occasion to keep busy. If Abishag is ministering to me, she will watch dully and make critical suggestions casually, like a retired veteran giving pointers from the sidelines.

  'He never liked that,' she might tell the willing servant girl, with her drowsy face resting on her hand and her lids half lowered in boredom. 'That way used to be better with him. Why don't you moisten your fingertips with something slippery, dear? Honey is good. Olive oil is the best. Good olive oil.'

  'You do it,' I've suggested.

  Now that she is the mother of a grown man--one, as she repeats, fit to be king--the very idea of sexual contact with me is abhorrent. She did not used to find it abhorrent.

  She is terribly perturbed because the rival Adonijah, advised by Joab, has come to me with a request to be allowed to give a public luncheon, at which he will function as both host and heir apparent. Adonijah is the heir apparent. He believes he will succeed me, and I have done nothing to discourage his assumptions. Adonijah is more gullible than diplomatic and not deeply intelligent. I would hate to have to be the one to do him in. On the other hand, I perversely treasure the possibility of seeing anyone on either side commit an irreversible blunder. Adonijah is already coming close. But so are Bathsheba and Solomon.

  If I allow Adonijah his feast, he would be honored to have me attend. Why shouldn't he be? Bathsheba tries to beguile me with a counteroffer.

  'Solomon would like to have a small dinner for you right here in the palace instead. That would be easier for you and much less extravagant. Solomon hates extravagance. Let me bring him in to tell you about it.'

  'Don't bring him in!' I warn sharply. 'If I see him I'll hate him, and I'll leave him nothing. Abishag! Abishag!'

  Abishag the Shunammite soothed me with touches and sweet kisses after she had shown Bathsheba the door and we were again alone. Bathsheba forgets I have pride and a temper. Remember: it was I who stopped talking to God, not He to me. It was I who broke up that friendship. God was never displeased with me in direct discourse, never brusque or enraged, as He tended to be with Moses. Cross words and criticism from Him came to me only through my prophets, and I always took them with a grain of salt. I cannot help wondering what would happen if I tried speaking directly to God once more. Would He hear me? Will He reply? I have a notion He might if I promised to forgive Him. I'm afraid that He won't.

  Unlike me, poor muddled Moses felt the full brunt of God's furious ill humor within moments of hearing from the voice in the burning bush of the astounding mission for which he had just been tapped.

  'W-w-w-why me?' was the sensible question posed by this simple and unprepossessing man in the Midian desert to the voice in the bush declaring itself to be the God of his father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 'I st-st-st-stammer.'

  The anger of God was kindled against Moses right then and there by the implication that He perhaps had erred and gotten the wrong party and that the force that could lay the foundations of the earth and draw out leviathan with a hook might be deterred by something so trivial as a minor speech impediment. He would give Moses a brother named Aaron into whose mouth words could be put. Moses was stunned by the swiftness and intransigence of these tyrannical prescriptions. There was not much room for compromise. Now the man Moses was very meek, and he could
raise only pitiful objections to the summary treatment he was encountering.

  'Whoever said I was supposed to be nice?' challenged God.

  'Where is it written that I have to be kind?'

  'Aren't You a good God?'

  'Where does it say that I have to be good? Isn't it enough that I'm God? Don't waste your time day dreaming, Moses. I ordered Abraham to be circumcised when he was already a grown man. Was that the act of someone who's kind?'

  'I'm not c-c-c-circumcised,' Moses suddenly recalled, shaking.

  'Just wait,' said the Lord, laughing.

  In practically no time at all, Zipporah, his Midianite wife, was upon him with a sharp stone, haranguing him fiercely for the life of their child. He let her do it. I would never have allowed any one of my wives to draw that near to my privates with a knife, not even Abigail, and especially not Michal. Zipporah cut off his foreskin and cast it at his feet. It's doubtful he could have comprehended much in the tirade of condemnation with which she followed up this action.

  'Surely a bloody husband art thou to me,' she let our Moses know. 'A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.'

  'It h-h-hurts,' whimpered Moses.

  'Whoever said that there wouldn't be pain?' asked the Lord. 'Where is it written that there shouldn't be pain?'

  'It's a hard life You gave us.'

  'Why should it be soft?' spake the Lord.

  'And a very tough world.'

  'Why should it be easy?'

  'Why should we love and worship You?'

  'I'm God. I AM THAT I AM.'

  'Will it make things better for us if we do?'

  'Will it make things worse? Go into Egypt now and say to the children of Israel that the God of their fathers wants you to gather them around you and lead them all out.'

  Moses, ever unassuming, was pessimistic about his chances. 'Why should they believe me? Why should they follow me? What should I say to them when they ask me Your name?'

  'I AM THAT I AM.'

  'I AM THAT I AM?'

  'I AM THAT I AM.'

  'You want me to tell them You're I AM THAT I AM?'

  'I AM THAT I AM,' repeated God. 'And from the Pharaoh,' He went on, 'I charge you to get permission to journey into the wilderness for three days to make sacrifices to Me. Tell him to let your people go.'

  'Let my people go?'

  'Let my people go,' spake the Lord.

  'Will he let my people go?'

  'I will harden his heart.'

  'So he won't let my people go?'

  'Now you've got it. I want to show what I can do. I want to trot out my stuff for the children of Israel.

  'It won't work,' insisted Moses in a voice laden with gloom. 'They'll never believe me.'

  'They'll believe you, they'll believe you,' promised the Lord. 'Why shouldn't they believe you?'

  The children of Israel believed, and boy--were they sorry. To some, the petition for three days in the wilderness might have seemed a legitimate request. To the Pharaoh, it was proof that the Jews had spare time and were entertaining foolish ideas.

  'Ye are idle, ye are idle,' the Pharaoh reproved them. 'That's why you have time for sacrifice. Let more work be laid upon the men.'

  'We are worse off than before,' groaned those children of Israel beneath the increased work load and the beatings. There was menace in the sullen eyes with which they regarded Moses. 'Why did you ever start in with us?'

  Moses, in bafflement, returned to the Lord to complain. 'Why are You being so evil to the people? Is this why You sent me to them? You haven't made things any easier, and neither have they been delivered from the Pharaoh.'

  'I was hardening his heart.'

  'Again You're hardening his heart? Why must his heart be so hard?'

  'To allow Me to demonstrate powers that are greater than those of all his magicians and of all other gods. And to impress upon the world forever that you are the people I have chosen as favorites.'

  'Will that make much difference?'

  'No difference at all.'

  'Then where is the sense?'

  'Whoever said I was going to make sense?' answered God. 'Show Me where it says I have to make sense. I never promised sense. Sense, he wants yet. I'll give milk, I'll give honey. Not sense. Oh, Moses, Moses, why talk of sense? Your name is Greek and there hasn't even been a Greece yet. And you want sense. If you want to have sense, you can't have a religion.'

  'We don't have a religion.'

  'I'll give you a religion,' said God. 'I've got laws to give you that have never been heard before. I will bring you out of slavery in Egypt into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity.'

  That's what He promised and that's all that He gave us, along with a complicated set of restrictive dietary laws that have not made life easier. To the goyim He gives bacon, sweet pork, juicy sirloin, and rare prime ribs of beef. To us He gives a pastrami. In Egypt we get the fat of the land. In Leviticus He prohibits us from eating it. A perpetual statute He makes it yet, that we eat neither the fat nor the blood. The blood contained the spirit of life and therefore belonged only to Him. The fat was bad for our gall bladders.

  And so much trouble. Hardly had Moses made good the exodus from Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai than the people were murmuring against him in hunger and thirst and were ready to stone him. Moses and me-- each of us faced death by stoning from followers soon to exalt us. With God yakking away at him from one side for forty years and the people groaning and threatening on the other, it's no wonder he looks so old in that statue in Rome and went to his grave at only a hundred and twenty.

  Keep in mind that by the day of my battle with Goliath, I had already been to see Saul once, to sing and play for him after his troubled soul was afflicted by the first of the visitations of acute and profound depression from which he was to suffer the rest of his life. By one of those extraordinary coincidences giving rise to a belief in mystical and extransensory phenomena, the evil spirit fell upon Saul in Gibeah the day Samuel appeared in my home in Bethlehem. Samuel, afraid Saul would kill him if the purpose of his coming were guessed, arrived with a red heifer on a rope, as though journeying on a mission of sacrifice. He anointed me from a horn of olive oil hanging from a long leather strap around his neck. In Gibeah at just about that same moment, Saul went into the doldrums. He would not come from his room.

  'Comfort him with apples' was the suggestion of Abner, captain of all Saul's host. 'Stay him with flagons.'

  When apples and flagons failed to work, someone in attendance suggested music as a remedy known to have charms to soothe a savage breast.

  'No shit?' said Abner, and agreed to give it a try.

  Thereupon one in the group recommended me as a youth cunning with the harp, and valiant, prudent, and comely besides, a son of the worthy family of Jesse in Bethlehem. I'd never had doubt that my skill with stringed instruments and my remarkable talent for verse would someday open doors for me.

  Yes, we did have music then, and a love for dancing, and we liked clothes also; the gaudier the colors, the livelier our delight. The tunic I wore for my fight with Goliath was of fine bleached linen with hyacinth-blue jagged vertical streaks woven down my skirt and with the same heavenly blue at all of the borders and seams. Around my waist was a vermilion girdle of dyed kidskin. As soon as the Phoenicians had perfected a mordant for gold, I put my dye factory at Dirjathsepher to work producing thread and yarn in that color for ornamental contrast in the garments of different reds and greens and blues so popular with men and women and with the murex purple from Tyre that had given the land of Canaan its name. We liked smart clothes in many colors and always had. Samson gambled for shirts, and Joseph swaggered about in his coat of many colors and nearly forfeited his life to the jealousy of his ten older half brothers. Lucky for all of us
they sold him into slavery in Egypt instead.

  We had jewelry also--rings, pendants, brooches, and bells. Women wore some too. I was thrilled with the crown and arm bracelet brought me by the wandering Amelekite who'd come upon Saul mortally wounded. And I took another crown from the king of Rabbah-Ammon when the city fell. Apart from helmets for battle, those crowns were just about the only headgear around. We had no hats in Palestine but had no problem about going into temple without them, because we had no temples either.

  I liked my women in yellow, blue, and crimson, and I loved the scarlet lipstick, azure eye shadow, and dark mascara that came into use as our economy moved us into an era of luxury, leisure, and decadence. All of my wives, thank God, were concerned with being beautiful and spent most of their hours with attire, cosmetics, combs, mirros, and hair curlers. Only Bathsheba was ambitious for more. Always an acquisitive clothes-horse--she invented bloomers, you know, as one in a number of careers to which she successively applied herself for a short while--her preferences in style ran toward the daring and unorthodox. While the rest of my wives were tinting their hair red, Bathsheba was experimenting with yellow and gold compounds and often looked like hell when the dyes did not stain or remain fast uniformly. She was the first woman I know to wear false eyelashes and fingernails and black kohl on her eyelids, and she designed the caftan and the miniskirt, along with her bloomers. Abishag the Shunammite enchants me with her lovely scarves and headbands and with her clinging robes. Each day I grow more pleased with her; I may be falling in love with Abishag. At my age too, and in my condition. But Abishag, it strikes me suddenly, must think I'm a fag because I haven't been able to get it up with her yet, and because she's probably heard all those ancient and unfounded rumors about me and Jonathan.

  First impressions die slowly, bad impressions take even longer. Most likely it was that line about Jonathan, love, and women near the end of my famous elegy that is more to blame than anything else for the malicious gossip about the two of us that lingers on in smutty repetitions by small-minded people seeking to find fault with me. Nobody ever talks about the phrase just ahead in which I assert unequivocally that I think of him merely as a brother. I was writing serious poetry, I was not abasing myself with scandalous public confessions. I am David the king, not Oscar Wilde; and I probably would use those same words today if I could not improve upon them, even with36 foreknowledge of the spate of derogatory and sniggering tales they would spawn. Vita brevis, ars longa.