King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (3 page)

Let's entertain the idea, as many scholars do, that the biography of King David as we find it in the Book of Samuel was first composed during the reign of David himself (circa 1005–965
B.C.E.
)
^*
or perhaps during the Solomonic Enlightenment, as the reign of his son and successor, King Solomon, is sometimes called. And let's call the principal author of the royal biography “the Court Historian,” even if we cannot know his (or her) name or the circumstances under which he (or she) lived and worked.

We know from what we find in the Bible that the Court Historian was an artful and watchful biographer of the royal household he served and celebrated. In stark contrast to what passed for history and biography elsewhere in the ancient Near East— king lists and battle lists, inventories of plunder and tribute, praise-songs and epic poetry—the biblical text shows that the Court Historian was as interested in the intimate private life of David and his highly dysfunctional family as in official dynastic history.

At roughly the same time, some scholars propose, another biblical author was at work on a companion volume to accompany the Court History, a “primal history” of ancient Israel that would explain how the Israelites had come to the land of Canaan. The author is known as the Yahwist (or “J”)
†
because he (or she) preferred to call God by his personal name, Yahweh.
‡
Drawing on the legend and lore that had been preserved in the rich oral traditions of the twelve tribes of Israel, and various texts that are now lost to history, the Yahwist wove a vast narrative tapestry, an
epic that begins with the very moment of creation and explains in rich detail how a people who were descended from a single restless nomad ended up as the conquerors and rulers of the land of Canaan.

Threads of the biblical narrative that are conventionally attributed to J can readily be traced through the so-called Five Books of Moses,
^*
especially Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, and portions of Joshua and Judges. And the work of J can be seen as the “back-story” to the Court Historian's biography of David that begins in the Book of Samuel. When read as a continuous narrative—as the Bible invites us to read them—the two works both point to a single crucial and inevitable figure, King David. Indeed, Richard Elliott Friedman makes a convincing argument in
The Hidden Book in the Bible
that the Yahwist and the Court Historian were actually one and the same person,
¹⁶
and Harold Bloom in
The Book of J
imagines that the two sources were contemporaries and colleagues in the court of the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem.

David is not mentioned in the Bible until the Book of Samuel, but we can begin to hear the strains of the “undersong” that Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad detected in the earliest passages of the Yahwist's primal history. In fact, the Five Books of Moses are seeded with clues that anticipate the coming of King David long before we actually encounter him. And these clues suggest that the Bible was first and always intended by its original authors to be a celebration of King David and the line of Davidic kings who sat on the throne of Israel and Judah during a reign that spanned five centuries, the longest-reigning dynasty in the ancient Near East and one of the longest-reigning in world history.

An intriguing and illuminating game can be played with the characters and stories that we find in the Bible. It is no mere parlor game, but rather a way to crack a kind of code that is deeply embedded in the Bible. Cracking the
real
Bible code is not a matter of teasing out prophesies and predictions of the far distant future by crunching randomly selected Hebrew letters into words and phrases. The original biblical authors salted the text with clues that were meant to stoke our anticipation for the coming of King David and our appreciation of his achievements as a man and a monarch; they seem to invite readers to search out the linkages between King David and the other figures and events in the earlier books of the Bible.

For example, the Bible opens with a famous scene of seduction, Adam lured by Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit. Much later in the biblical narrative, there is another apparent seduction at the outset of the scandalous love affair between David and Bathsheba. Was the tale of Adam and Eve, as some scholars propose, meant by the biblical author to prepare us for the fateful sexual encounter between David and Bathsheba?

The same kind of foreshadowing can be detected in dozens of other biblical scenes. The rape of Dinah, daughter of the patriarch Jacob, by a prince called Shechem anticipates the rape of Tamar, daughter of King David, by her half brother, a prince called Amnon. The murder of Abel by his brother Cain anticipates the murder of Amnon by his half brother, Absalom, who sought to avenge the rape of Tamar. And when the Bible depicts the matriarch Rebekah conspiring with her son Jacob to steal the birthright of her firstborn son, Esau, by persuading the patriarch Isaac to give the blessing of the firstborn to the younger son, perhaps we are intended to see Bathsheba in conspiracy with Solomon to persuade the aging David to designate his younger son as king of Israel in place of Solomon's older brother.

Such linkages are not merely fanciful. Rather, they reflect the peculiar logic of biblical narrative, a dreamy and sometimes even
phantasmagorical quality in which one scene may hark back or look forward to another scene at any given point in the text. Thus the Book of Genesis includes an odd and unexplained incident in which Reuben, firstborn son of the patriarch Jacob, crawls into bed with Jacob's concubine, Bilhah. The Bible does not pause to explain the cause or significance of the episode, but perhaps we are meant to think of Reuben when, much later, we come upon Absalom, son of King David, conducting a public orgy with David's concubines on the roof of the palace in Jerusalem.

At other moments, the encoded messages in the biblical text are straightforward and precise. The boundaries of the Promised Land, for example, are specified in several passages of the Bible, and in several different ways, but the very first description is found in the opening chapters of Genesis, where God is shown to promise the land of Canaan as a homeland to Abraham and his descendants. “Unto thy seed have I given this land,” says God to Abraham, “from the river of Egypt
^*
unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” (Gen. 15:18) Not until the reign of David, however, does the Bible report that the kingdom of Israel actually approached these imperial dimensions—and the dynasty's sovereignty began to recede from that high-water mark on the death of his son Solomon. Some scholars see the passage in Genesis as the handiwork of a biblical source who has been characterized as “David's theologian,”
¹⁷
a royal apologist who sought to justify and celebrate the conquests of King David by backdating them to the earliest passages of the Bible

Thus, as the Bible is decoded, a stunning possibility emerges: perhaps the Bible exists today only because the Court Historian sat down to write the biography of King David in the royal palace at Jerusalem in the tenth century
B.C.E.
And perhaps another author of genius was inspired by the Court Historian's example to write a kind of prequel, collecting the myth and legend of tribal Israel and working the oldest traditions into a companion volume
to the Court History. Later generations of biblical authors and editors added to these core works, decorating them with fairy tales and folktales, putting a theological spin on even the earthiest incidents of David's life. David was slowly transformed in their hands: the ruthless bandit and the rude tribal chieftain was turned into a king, then an emperor, and finally a messiah.

The Bible, of course, bulked up over the centuries as new books were added to the ones that had crystalized around the life story of David. But even some of the later books were linked to David and the monarchy that he founded; the Book of Psalms, for example, is traditionally thought of as authored by David, and the Book of Proverbs by his son Solomon. That is why David can be regarded as the axial figure of the Bible—some of the biblical authors look back into primal history, some look forward to the end times, but all of them seem to be standing in the court of King David.

So David shines out across the centuries and millennia, and he still exerts a powerful allure for real men and women who struggle to make sense of their own stressful and messy lives. While it may come as a rude shock to the Bible-thumpers who rely on Holy Writ to condemn what they call humanism, the fact is that humanism begins with the biblical David and is still defined by his example. Indeed, the life story of David as we find it in the Book of Samuel offers the earliest and the longest-enduring definition of what it means to be a human being.

“How men and women imagine their lives today begins with the mature David,” insists poet and Bible translator David Rosenberg. “To be able to hold in mind—side by side—laughter and tears, objectivity and fear, affords a fullness. And this quality, so original in David, allows us to be fulfilled when the ambiguous loyalties in others and in ourselves threaten to tear us in two.”
¹⁸

Nowadays the stresses and strains of human life—the hard tug
between our best and worst impulses—are explored and explained in the language of psychology and genetics rather than the exalted words and phrases of the Bible. But the biographers of David seem to have penetrated the innermost secrets of the human heart and mind several thousand years ahead of Freud. For them—and for us—the figure of King David is both thrilling and unsettling, both comforting and troubling; it is larger than life and at the same time an enduring example of a life lived on a human scale. And perhaps that is why, as we shall come to see, David “lives and endures to this day.”

A
n intriguing idea about David is offered by a few bold practitioners of modern Bible scholarship: King David was still alive on the day, some three thousand years ago, when the biblical author known as the Court Historian first picked up a goose-quill pen and started setting down on parchment the earliest account of his remarkable life. If so, David's original biographer was writing about a flesh-and-blood figure who could be seen striding down the corridors of the royal palace, whose voice could be heard in the throne room or at the banquet table, and whose exploits, some heroic and some scandalous, were gossiped about in Jerusalem.

Not every Bible scholar is convinced that David still reigned when his life story was first recorded. Some suggest that the oldest passages of the Book of Samuel were composed during the reign of Solomon, shortly after David's death. Others argue that David had already passed from history into legend by the time the biblical author wrote what is now the core of Samuel. A few revisionists
even insist that the biblical David
never
existed; they regard the man we encounter in the pages of the Bible as purely mythic.

Of one thing, however, we can be absolutely sure. If David still lived and still reigned when the Court Historian set to work on his life story, the king did not resemble the iconic figure whom we find in illuminated Bibles of the Middle Ages, in the high art of the Renaissance, or in the TV advertisements of our own era. David was no longer—and may never have been—the boy who bested Goliath in single combat with only a slingshot. David was, instead, someone far more potent. David as the Court Historian may have known him is careworn and perhaps a bit thickset, but still charming, still handsome, still alluring to the men and women who seek his favor in the royal court at Jerusalem. At the same time, he still enjoys a reputation for ruthlessness in the pursuit of power. Those—including his own sons—who dare to conspire against him warn themselves against underestimating the old king who has shed so much blood in making his way from the sheepcote to the throne.