Like cunnilingus, tending sheep is dark and lonely work; but someone has to do it. Away from home with my flocks for weeks at a time, I would spend hours on end with a blade of grass between my teeth or a dandelion green on my tongue, practicing on my lyre, composing songs, and slinging stones at broken clay flasks placed atop a wooden fence as standing targets, or at rusty tin cans. I would even sling stones at other stones. Apart from gathering back errant sheep, with which our goats, more intelligent than sheep, were instinctively helpful, there's really little more to shepherding than driving away wild beasts and dividing the sheep and the goats into their separate folds at nightfall before eating a cold dinner and bedding down on the ground in a cloak near a brush fire. It was from this endofday activity, incidentally, that I drew my widely quoted 'separating the sheep from the goats, and the men from the boys,' which stands out so prominently in one of my lesser-known psalms, I think, or perhaps in one of those proverbs of mine for which authorship is often credited to Solomon or someone else. I know beyond doubt that my 'separating the sheep from the goats' is used in more than one of the works by that overrated hack William Shakespeare of England, whose chief genius lay in looting the best thoughts and lines from the works of Kit Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Plutarch, Raphael Holinshed, and me. The idea for King Lear, of course, he got from me and Absalom. Are you going to tell me no? Who else but me was every inch a king? Do you think the unscrupulous plagiarist could have written Macbeth had he never heard of Saul?
For sheer popularity in coinage, though, nothing in the world by anyone else can hold a candle to my The Lord is my shepherd,' a fortuitous turn of phrase, I can confess now, that was haphazardly tossed off by my Bathsheba in that abbreviated period after she had tired of macrame and crewelwork and before she threw herself wholeheartedly into inventing bloomers. She actually thought she could write better lyrics than I did!
Who can tell why the work endures?
For the Lord, of course, is not a shepherd, not mine or anyone else's. And naming Him one is what I describe as a figure of speech. Anyone luckless enough to have worked as a shepherd would know that calling the Lord a shepherd is not a tribute but a blasphemy. Why would the Lord be a shepherd? Half the day you're walking in sheep shit. Sheepshearing is dismal toil, filthy, soaking drudgery, and it's no wonder that there's such a huge party afterward. It was to just such a celebration that my son Absalom lured my other son Amnon to kill him. If God is indeed a shepherd, I'm sure He suffers even more intensely from the monotony than I did and is probably as good a shot with the sling. Tending sheep is not a vocation for an active mind. I myself preferred the corrupting life of the town to the bucolic diversions of the pasture. At night you were cold, in the daytime you sought shelter from the scorching sun. Where could you go for a good time? What was there in common between me and the other shepherds? They had little or no interest in music and frequently would throw garbage at me when I tried to sing to them.
Is it any wonder I was unhappy? I would spend whole mornings and afternoons practicing with my sling in order to help the time go faster. I knew I was good. I knew I was brash. I was brave. And with Goliath that day, I knew that if I could get within twenty-five paces of the big son of a bitch, I could sling a stone the size of a pig's knuckle down his throat with enough velocity to penetrate the back of his neck and kill him, and I also knew something else: I knew if I was wrong about that, I could turn and run like a motherfucker and dodge my way back up the hill to safety without much risk from anyone chasing me in all that armor.
It took a good deal of intriguing on my part to get that far that morning once I had decided to make my move. I left my carriage in the hands of the keeper and went back into the emplacement of the Judeans, bursting right in and speaking out boldly in a way to command the attention of everyone there instantly. I knew the impression I hoped to make, the kind of comment I wanted to incite. I wanted to startle, gall, and taunt, and to set people buzzing about me all the way down the line until reports of my presence could not fail to be brought to Saul. 'What will the king do,' I advertised in a trumpeting voice that I hoped would carry even to90 people in the post abutting, *for the man who fights and kills this Philistine and takes away his reproach from Israel?'
'Don't ask,' said my brother Shammah, looking ill.
'I told you yesterday to go back home,' my brother Eliab answered me angrily.
'Sure, he told you yesterday to go back home,' said Abinadab. 'Who is tending those few poor sheep of yours in the wilderness while you are idle here?'
I affected hurt feelings. 'All I did was ask a simple question.'
'Never mind your simple questions,' chimed in my brother Shammah. 'We know all about your simple questions.'
'I'll give you simple questions,' Eliab told me, glaring. 'I knew you'd be back here, showing off. Go home, go home, thou vain and naughty boy.'
'Can't you see we've got trouble enough?' said Shammah, gesturing toward Goliath.
'Maybe I can help,' said I.
'Don't make me laugh,' retorted Eliab through gritted teeth. 'You just want to hang around and watch the battle, don't you? We know your pride and the naughtiness of your heart.'
'What pride?' I answered proudly. 'What naughtiness of heart? I've got no pride. I've got no naughtiness of heart. All I did is ask what will the king do for the man who fights and kills this Philistine and takes away this reproach from all Israel?'
'What will the king do?' responded the captain of a thousand incredulously, and at last the information I was after was given me. 'What will the king do?' the good-natured fellow exclaimed a second time as he chewed on his morning ration of fresh dates and raw onion. My mouth watered at the succulent combination. 'What won't the king do, better you should ask. Probably the king will enrich him with great riches, give him one of his daughters as a wife, and make his father's house in Israel tax free.'
Of course I was elated.
'No shit?' I asked.
'No shit,' he assured me.
'Then how is it,' I inquired in a carefree and flamboyant manner, 'that none will go down to meet him, for who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?'
At this, Eliab, Abinadab, and Shammah spun toward me with clenched fists and demanded I quit the battle scene at once for my house in Bethlehem.
It was then that I gave them the finger and was off like a bouncing ray of light on my mischievous business in other emplacements, shooting my mouth off almost without stop. How confusing I found it, I professed with the same pink-cheeked, lighthearted gallantry to one group of fighting men after another, that none in the Israelite army had sufficient faith in the prowess of the living God to assay his strength and cunning against this uncircumcised enemy, invincible though he appeared. What was an unworldly young man from the country like me to believe? Oh, I was irritating and provocative, I aroused curiosity. I moved down our battle line like a spirit of the air. Those were the days when every one of us young could go leaping over the mountains and come skipping over the hills with an agility incredible to the heavyset, slow-footed Philistines, who bullied their way up into our villages to spoil our tender grapes and then strove in vain to fend us off. In one place after the next, I spoke in the same manner. The men of Manasseh conducted me into the camp of the men of Ephraim, who led me in turn to the men of Benjamin to a captain of a hundred, who was in command of twenty-four.
'What shall be done by the king,' was again my question, of which by now I myself was beginning to grow tired, 'to the man that killeth this Philistine and taketh away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?'
'Who the fuck are you?' was the response I received from the surly men of Benjamin, who, by reputation, would as soon rape a person, man or woman, as kill one, and on occasion did both.
My answer was discreet. 'I am the son of the king's servant Jesse the Ephrathite of Bethlehem in Judah.'
'J
udah,' they snickered.
'It's the reason I'm asking,' I responded, pouting. 'And why I'm having so much trouble figuring things out. You know how dull-witted we are in Judah. What will the king do for the one who kills this man, and how is it that none will go forth against this Philistine and take away this reproach to Israel?'
'Can't you see how big he is?' asked their captain. 'Would you go down to fight a man like that?'
'Why not?' I answered. 'He hath defied the armies of the living God, hasn't he?'
'Bring the kid to Saul.'
'Let no man's heart fail because of me,' I called back over my shoulder. Privately, I was already congratulating myself on having attained even that much.
Saul gave no sign of ever having seen me before. And tactfully I betrayed no memory of any earlier meeting. He had aged very badly in the two years since I'd been brought from Bethlehem to play for him. His face was deeply seamed, his curly hair and short square beard were prematurely gray. He stood with his arms crossed and contemplated me. He seemed sorry for me. He was broad and strong, and from his shoulders and upward he was higher than hawk-featured Abner and all of the other officers about him. After Goliath, he was one of the tallest men I had ever seen.
'You are just a youth,' he observed at last, 'and he has been a great man of war from his boyhood. Thou are not able to go up against this Philistine to fight with him.'
'The bigger they are,' I replied, 'the harder they fall.' That went over rather well. 'Thy servant kept his father's sheep,' I pressed my advantage, 'and there came a lion one day and a bear another and took a lamb out of the flock. Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear--I swear to God I did--and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them. The selfsame Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.'
'My lord the king, why not?' Abner suggested. 'It's certainly worth a try.'
Saul told him why not. 'The Philistine hath said that if we choose a man able to fight with him and kill him, they will all be our servants. But if he prevails against him and kills our man, then shall we be their servants and serve them.'
'My lord the king,' importuned practical Abner, drawing closer to Saul's side, 'don't be a naar. Saul, Saul, do you really believe those Philistines are going to become our slaves if we win? Or that we will be theirs if we lose? That dumb we're not. Neither are they. Let the lad go down if he chooses to. What have we got to lose but his life?'
When Saul yielded finally, his reluctance gave way to a solicitude almost embarrassingly paternal. He decked me out in his personal armor, his helmet of brass and his coat of mail, and girded me with his own sword, and after he had completed preparing me for battle in his splendid panoply, I found I couldn't move. I barely could see. Big I'm not, you know, and the rim of his helmet rested upon the bridge of my nose and hurt. I ungirded myself of his sword and handed it back. I told Saul right out that I did not want his armor or his sword because I had never tested myself with them and had no experience fighting that way. I saw no profit in adding that I had not the least intention of coming near enough to Goliath to touch him with a sword, or allowing him to come near enough to reach me with his. Only a consummate nitwit would have faced the big Philistine hand to hand with a sword, shield, and coat of mail and expect to survive. One blow of that sword by that enormous man would rip from your hands whatever weapon you were wielding; the second would separate you from your soul.
'Let me go as I am,' I requested with a perfectly straight face, stripping back down to the lovely new tunic into which I had changed, 'for the Lord saveth not with sword and spear. The battle is the Lord's, and I know He will deliver the Philistine into our hands.'
The patronizing looks of disbelief passing slyly among my hearers communicated their doubts about my sanity, which was just fine with me. Mention of sword or spear was as far as I wanted to go. I had no desire for Saul or anyone else to plumb my thoughts. Did I have to remind them that the Lord might also save with the sling? Let them believe it was a miracle.
Certainly I was already feeling very much like a king as I made ready to parade from Saul's tent and begin my deliberate and suspenseful walk down into the plain of the valley where Goliath stood waiting, with his massive legs planted apart like a colossus bestriding the earth. After all, hadn't I been anointed king by Samuel two years earlier with all that scented olive oil he had smeared on my face? I recall how credulously I listened as Samuel made known that the Lord had rent the kingdom from Saul and was giving it to a neighbor more after His own heart.
'Is that person me?' It seemed to me not in the slightest an unreasonable surmise.
And Samuel responded. 'Who else?'
And nothing more had occurred, not a blessed thing, not then or since. No trumpet sounded. No wise men brought gifts, I heard no hosannas. Bach wrote no cantatas, not even one. My brothers gloated. No wonder I felt so awfully let down there in Bethlehem; it was as though nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. The earth didn't move. There were no hallelujah choruses. All I got out of that whole day was a face full of oil.
Well, being king is not much fun if nobody knows you are one, is it, and I could see it would be useless trying to get my brothers or anyone else to bow down in subservience. How different it was years later when, with Saul dead and the army of Israelites dispersed by the Philistines, I walked triumphantly into Hebron to allow the elders of the city to acclaim me king of Judah. First, though, I dispatched the youngest of my nephews, fleet-footed Asahel, to see how my idea sat with them.
'Ask them,' I directed, 'if they would like to acclaim me king of Judah now that Saul is no more. Remind them that I have six hundred fighting men, that the army of Israelites is scattered about the hills like sheep that know no shepherd, and that there is now no other fighting force stronger than mine remaining in the country. Remind them I am thin-skinned and very easily insulted.'
My idea sat well with the elders of Hebron. 'They want very much to acclaim you king of Judah,' my nephew Asahel reported back.
I had just turned thirty.
I felt no less exhilarated on that day of my killing of Goliath when I finally emerged from Saul's tent and started down the hill, a harmless shepherd boy out of uniform, with my staff in my hand and my sling hung inconspicuously toward the rear of my girdle. I paused a moment on the peak of the low ridge to let everyone get a good look. I was far from uninterested in the effect I was creating. My only regret was that I could not see myself as others were seeing me.
I knew, of course, that every eye was upon me. Who among those multitudes of gawking spectators on both96 sides could have guessed what would follow as I made my way downward along the declining green slope profusely colored with violets, white daisies, and yellow cabbage flowers? No one, not in a billion years. Certainly not Goliath. We know that now. I could tell then, just by watching him. When I came to level ground, I slowed my pace and looked across the stream at him. He was squinting as he regarded me across the narrowing distance, his sword sheathed, waiting like a man very much affected by a sense of his own invincibility. His shield carrier stood deferentially a few paces behind. Goliath studied my approach with a look growing more and more quizzical. Again I wanted to laugh. The skirt of my smashing new tunic was extremely brief, affording free movement to my legs without my girding up my loins. I did not wish to disturb his complacency by coming to him with the hem of my garment tucked up into my goatskin sash. My entire aspect was no more threatening than a snail's. I wanted him to judge me someone paltry--as a messenger, perhaps, bearing words of capitulation, or as a local youth accidentally straying onto the battlefield in search of a lost lamb or kid.
If you want to believe what you've heard, I halted along the way to choose five smooth stones out of the brook. That was just for show. Any slinger worth his salt always carries his stones with him; and as I knelt with my knees in the water, I was unobtrusively removing two from the leather pou
ch at my waist, concealing them in the palm of my right hand. Two would certainly be enough; if I didn't disable the big warrior with my first shot, I probably wouldn't have time even for a second. As I rose to cross the shallow stream, I transferred my shepherd's staff to my left hand. Goliath did not appear to notice. I had to suppress a smile. With my right hand, I stealthily began unfastening the cords of my sling from my belt and clearing the loops.
Let's call him a giant. His teeth, not Bathsheba's,97 were like a flock of sheep that have been even shorn. With her it was merely flattery. But everything about Goliath was larger than life. I have to chortle even now at the violent transformations he underwent when it finally began to dawn on him why I was there. How his eyes bulged with amazement. How his massive face darkened with outrage and purpled with wrath. How he howled and roared when he finally recovered from his initial moment of shock. You'd think he'd been speared in the liver. For forty days he had asked of the Israelites that they send down a man worthy to engage a Philistine champion of his mettle in single combat. Instead, he'd been given a youthful shepherd who was ruddy and of a fair countenance. He had expected Achilles. He'd been given me. And to top it all off, I was carrying a stick.
Doubts that I could kill him continued to evaporate as he allowed me to draw closer and closer without arming himself, and I observed the sequence of responses with which he observed me. He was befuddled. He was curious. He was aghast. And then--oh, boy, was that an angry giant!
It amuses me still to recall his blackening expression of astounded disbelief when my objective in approaching him began to sink in. He gaped and he glared and he stood rooted to the spot as though paralyzed. His shield carrier hovered behind him in a state of vacillating perplexity. Goliath was not really a giant, I guess, but he was big enough. The sunlight blazed on his armor. His eyes were like coals, his beardless, mottled face was darkly stubbled. I saw his lips move as he began to mutter to himself. Not for a second was I in fear of him. It was that stick I carried that really touched him off. The veins and tendons in his muscled neck swelled vividly when he finally drew a gargantuan breath and opened wide his jaws to speak. His voice was deafening. His roaring words were aimed less at me than at the battalions of Israelites clinging in terror and suspense to the thickets, rocks, and hollows of the sides of the mountains in back of me.