THE UNITED KINGDOM OF ISRAEL
Noted are the approximate areas of settlement of the Twelve Tribes, as well as the border between the ten tribes of Israel and the two tribes of Judah.
To Jerusalem he brings his three wives, Michal having been restored to him, and many sons are born to him in his new home, where David, adding to the harem already established by Saul, acquires wives and concubines at a steady rate. To his new capital, David, ever the astute pol, also brings the ark of the covenant in a great procession from the south, thus confirming his control over Israel by physical proximity to its God, who was believed to dwell above the ark. “David and the whole House of Israel danced before YHWH with all their might, singing to the accompaniment of harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums, and cymbals.… David danced whirling round before YHWH with all his might, wearing a loincloth.” The music would have included a Davidic psalm, one of the popular poems that were becoming part of the young conqueror’s escalating reputation:
O clap your hands, all ye people;
Shout unto God with the voice of triumph!
For YHWH most high is terrible;
he is a great King over all the earth.
He shall subdue the people under us,
and the nations under our feet.
He shall choose our inheritance for us,
the excellency of Yaakov whom he loved.
God is gone up with a shout,
YHWH with the sound of a trumpet!
Sing praises to God, sing praises;
sing praises unto our King, sing praises!
For God is the King of all the earth:
sing ye praises with understanding.
God reigneth over the heathen:
God sitteth upon the throne of his holiness.
The princes of the people are gathered together,
even the people of the God of Avraham;
for the shields of the earth belong unto God:
he is greatly exalted!
The new king, at the acme of his vigor and enjoying his triumph to the hilt, must have presented a thrilling sight to his people. But not to Michal, the twice-traded wife, herself the daughter of a king but now just an elder member of the expanding harem. “When she saw King David leaping and whirling round before YHWH, the sight of him filled her with contempt. They brought the ark of YHWH in and put it in position, inside the tent which David had erected for it; and David presented burnt offerings and communion sacrificesin YHWH’S presence. And when David had finished presenting burnt offerings, he blessed the people in the name of YHWH Sabaoth. To all the people, to the whole multitude of Israelites, men and women, he then distributed to each a loaf of bread, a portion of meat and a raisin cake.”
As David returns to bless his own household, Michal steps forward:
“Much honor the king of Israel has won today, making an exhibition of himself under the eyes of his servant-maids, making an exhibition of himself like a buffoon!”
“I was dancing for YHWH, not for them. As YHWH lives, who chose me in preference to your father and his whole family to make me leader of Israel, YHWH’S people, I shall dance before YHWH and lower myself even further than that. In your eyes I may be base, but by the maids you speak of, by them, I shall be held in honor.”
This sour exchange is full of the resonance of real life. David’s endless vitality and enthusiasm are the very qualities that have endeared him to the common people. He knows it, basks in their love, and returns their ardor. Though he is quite happy with himself, he is humble in his way, crediting God with everything. But a man who loves a crowd is seldom as effective in intimate relationships as he is in the midst of the throng. The histories of politics, sports, and entertainment are replete with such figures, triumphant in public, tragic in private.
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David will dote on his sons, spoiled brats brought up in uncommon luxury, not the stuff of which warrior-kings are made. One of them, his beloved Absalom, will try to usurp the kingship, wooing the northern nobles to his cause and to a bloody battle in the Forest of Ephraim between David’s immense personal guard and an easily routed army of northerners. Absalom’s undignified demise in the course of battle leaves David a broken man, beset by political dissensions that threaten the future of the United Kingdom. David’s inconsolable grief for this unworthy son is one of the most touching scenes in the whole of the Bible, as the king wanders from room to room, repeating over and over, “Oh, my son Absalom! My son! My son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you! Oh, Absalom my son, my son!”
But long before this happens, David engages in another sortie that can hardly have made for domestic peace. It was spring, the chronicler tells us, “the time when kings go campaigning.” Something, however, has kept the king in Jerusalem—business, weariness, complacency?—while his soldiers have gone off on the proper business of massacring Ammonites. The restless monarch is pacing back and forth on the palace roof when he sees a woman bathing, and “the woman was very beautiful.” He makes inquiries and learns that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a member of the king’s guard, just now off campaigning against the Ammonites. David sends for Bathsheba. Then, in terse recital, the chronicler tells us: “She came to him, and he lay with her, just after she had purified herself from her period. She then went home again. The woman conceived and sent word to David, ‘I am pregnant.’ ” In short order, David arranges to have Uriah sent to the front lines of the battle and the rest of the men fall back, so that Uriah is killed. The moment Bath-sheba’s mourning is over, David sends for her: “She became his wife and bore him a son. But what David had done displeased YHWH.”
Enter the prophet Nathan to tell the king a story:
“In the same town were two men,
one rich, the other poor.
The rich man had flocks and herds
in great abundance;
the poor man had nothing but a ewe lamb,
only a single little one which he had bought.
He fostered it and it grew up with him and his children,
eating his bread, drinking from his cup,
sleeping in his arms; it was like a daughter to him.
When a traveler came to stay, the rich man
would not take anything from his own flock or herd
to provide for the wayfarer who had come to him.
Instead, he stole the poor man’s lamb
and prepared that for his guest.”
Hearing this, David flew into “a great rage,” demanding to know who the man was who did this “thing without pity.”
“You are the man. YHWH, God of Israel, says this, ‘I anointed you king of Israel, I saved you from Saul’s clutches, I gave you your master’s household and your master’s wives into your arms, I gave you the House of Israel and the House of Judah; and, if this is too little, I shall give you other things as well. Why did you show contempt for YHWH, by doing what displeases him?”
One can only cringe before the accusation, which is exactly what David does. “I have sinned against YHWH,” he admits immediately. Even at his worst, David’s spontaneous honesty makes him lovable. One of life’s recurring sufferings surely derives from the chronic inability of human beings to own up to what they have done, but David’s grief for his sins is as genuine as any in the long history of contrition:
“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
“For I acknowledge my transgressions:
and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
and done this evil in thy sight:
“that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest,
and be clear when thou judgest.
Behold, I was shapen in iniquity;
and in sin did my mother conceive me.”2
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“Behold thou desirest truth in the inward parts:
and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean:
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
“Make me to hear joy and gladness;
that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins,
and blot out all mine iniquities.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God;
and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence;
and take not thy holy spirit from me.
“Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation;
and uphold me with thy free spirit.
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O Lord, open thou my lips;
and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.
“For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it:
thou delightest not in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:
a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
David is no visionary. When he “consults” YHWH, 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 YHWH 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 YHWH 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 YHWH’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 YHWH’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 YHWH 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:
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
for ever.
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 YHWH” 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—
Holy Zion’s help forever,
And her confidence alone.
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
BABYLON