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David's Secret Demons

Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King

Copyright © 2004 Baruch Halpern
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780802827975

Chapter One

The Surprising David

The Gregorian calendar calls the year A.D. 2000 the 2000th Year of the Lord (annus domini) or the 2000th year C.E. (of the Common Era), depending on one's sensibilities. Thousands of celebrants planned travel for the year well in advance, many of them learning only later that 2000 C.E. was the end of the 2nd millennium of the Gregorian calendar, not the start of the 3rd. In Gregorian reckoning, there was no Year 0. Hence the year 1000 was the 1000th year in the calendar, the last year of the 1st millennium. January 1, 2001 marked the start of the new millennium.

    The Year 1 in this calendar is defined as that of the birth of Jesus, thought by Christians to be the Messiah, the anointed son of God. But the claim that Jesus is the Messiah, the claim that he is the son of the Jewish God, depends on his linear descent from David. There is no direct juxtaposition of Jesus with Moses, and no implication in the Jewish or Christian traditions that Moses's descendants would somehow redeem humanity. Likewise, no gospel text stresses Jesus's connections with the patriarchs of Genesis, such as Abraham. Instead, the emphasis is on the connection to David,because the messianic hopes of the Jews, near the turn of the era (1 C.E., not 0), focused principally on figures of Davidic ancestry. (There are other messianic figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but these do not figure in mainstream Jewish tradition.)

    In biblical and later Jewish tradition, David is not a lawgiver. Though a great king, though a conqueror, he is far from being a saint, or even demonstratively pious. Yet his is the line that is elected by Yahweh, Israel's God. In a nonconfessional view, this means that the kings of David's dynasty, who ruled the state of Judah after the division of the kingdom in 932 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), claimed that their God had promised them eternal kingship. The truth of this claim cannot be evaluated by historians. Its longevity, however; its acceptance in Judaism, in Christianity; its survival in the West are remarkable phenomena. The idea of a messiah, of a Millennium with a capital M, revolves around David.

    For this longevity, whatever the claims of the dynasty, we must accord credit to the picture of David himself. Some of this picture comes from later reflections on that king, including the idea that he composed a large number of biblical psalms. Some of it, such as the report on David's combat with Goliath, or on his relations with Saul, is of indeterminate age, though it is older than the pietistic view of David propagated in Chronicles, for example, or in the usual interpretation of Psalms. But a great deal of what the books of Samuel and the first chapters of 1 Kings have to say about David is contemporary, or very nearly contemporary, with that king, in the 10th century B.C.E.

     Strangely, it is not in the texts in which he is most saintly that David's image captivates readers and even worshippers. The historical David appears in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, and dies in the 2nd chapter of 1 Kings. He is, the text tells us, promised eternal kingship in Israel. He is, the text tells us, Yahweh's elect, the fulfillment of all Yahweh's promises to the patriarchs about Israel's land and nationhood. These properties exalt him, make him crucial to Jesus's genealogy. But even if we were to regard these claims as somehow independent of his dynasty, as true, they would not account for David's appeal in the history of Western literature and culture.

    Moses, to be sure, is portrayed in art, film, and novels. Jesus has been endlessly portrayed. But the novelists, artists, and filmmakers are almost uniform in presenting the Moses that a confessional audience expects, the Jesus that redeems the world. There are exceptions, including film satires — Monty Python's amusingly adolescent Life of Brian, Luis Bunuel's superbly sardonic The Milky Way. And in novels, excellent, earthy explorations of Jesus as a person are not uncommon, as Nikos Kazantzakis's Last Temptation of Christ and Robert Graves's King Jesus. Still, the imagining even of Jesus is almost always devotional, however it may humanize him.

    David is another story. He is, like Moses or Jesus, the subject of "Classic Comics" portrayals. In these, the story of his fight with Goliath is fore-grounded, and misrepresented, as it is in the tradition: David is the underdog, relying on faith. This is probably the only time that David exhibits the transcendent devotion that marks him as a man (or, rather, boy) of faith.

    But David is far from being a redemptive figure even in the tradition. True, Moses can be represented as a man tortured by doubt about his own endurance and greatness, as a punishingly resentful man of flashing anger. David, however, is presented differently. His story invites more earthy, steamy treatments. Even in unembarrassedly partisan hagiographies, movies such as Gregory Peck's David and Bathsheba or Richard Gere's King David mix in human violence, murder, warfare, sex, and court politics in a more realistic way than any film about Jesus or Moses has ever done. Absalom and Ahitophel reflects on David emotionally in such a way as to concretize a suicidal agony unknown even in Moses's deepest despair.

    Novels about David sometimes present him with the reverence accorded other iconic biblical characters. In a work like Disraeli's David Alroy ("David the King"), his persona is even combined with that of Joshua in an intricate celebration of military imperialism. Absalom, Absalom evokes him as an evil parental archetype, manipulative, cruel, yet almost as a counterpart of Job, suffering, however guilty, pulsations of unmerited pain.

    Both the promise of David's youth and the flaws of his maturity imprint themselves on the imagination of writers. No novel about the Bible is so accomplished in the historical art as Stefan Heym's brilliant The King David Report: in a profound comment both on ancient Israel and on life behind the Iron Curtain, Heym shows how a state in control of reporting on itself, in control of the media for propagating history, twists, airbrushes, and sanitizes the seamy aspects of its past. Like Heym's exposé, satires also tend to deconstruct the text, to penetrate to a reality behind the veil of representation, and to present David in a less favorable or less saintly light. This is clear from the disappointing satirical theodicy of Joseph Heller, God Knows, in which David reports discovering after experimenting with various techniques that it was easiest to collect foreskins from the Philistines, as a bride-price for Saul's daughter, "if you killed them first." Heller too attacks the image of David that has become his icon, and inspired Michelangelo's iconic statue: the warranty of his divine election, the fight against Goliath. The poor oaf "didn't stand a chance."

    What is it about David? Why does he, of all the figures in the Bible, attract such treatment — treatment that is at once irreverent and serious, treatment that punctures his apparent holiness, heroism, and honesty? The answer is that the text itself invites such an approach. 1 and 2 Samuel furnish a circumstantial character history whose complexity makes even the most sophisticated ancient biography seem like a cartoon in comparison. Samuel takes its reader through the protagonist's evolution from shepherd, to courtier, to therapon — Patrocles to the Achilles of King Saul's son, Jonathan. He flees into exile, is transformed into a bandit, then mercenary, statesman, leader, king, victor, conqueror, and ruler. The author of 2 Samuel traces the growth of an independence of the law, a personal lust, born in David's days as an exile in the wilderness, but cultivated in power, that results in adultery and murder. He documents the disintegration of the royal family, internecine intrigue and revolt, and imputes to David's lawlessness a Lear-like status in his dotage. At the end, he is a weak, yet still violent and vengeful old man, unable to hold his own either in politics or in bed.

    David, in a word, is human, fully, four-dimensionally, recognizably human. He grows, he learns, he travails, he triumphs, and he suffers immeasurable tragedy and loss. He is the first human being in world literature.

    There is more. David is almost, or perhaps more than, a Shakespearean character. Even at the height of his career, he is not a religious symbol, but the embodiment of worldly success. At the nadir of his fortunes, he embodies the fragility of achievement, the importance of the right life rather than a high station. But at almost all times, he is a secular icon — a character so extraordinary and yet so very human, so realistically fallible, that the innocent reader almost inevitably empathizes with him. His deeds are divorced from miracle, his relationships are with other people, whether friend or foe, rather than with his God. Heller erred in imagining David reviewing his life in dialogue with his God, rather than humans. The reasons for David's behavior and even the consequences of his behavior remain always on a purely human, and often unconventional, level.

    In basing his relationships on personal and political foundations, in banishing supernatural intervention and sometimes even instruction from the arena of social activity, David is a consummate revolutionary. Subtly but repeatedly, he sets traditional assumptions and practices on their ear. The great genius of his portrayal is not merely that it is convincing: it is that his nature, his individuality, drives his behavior at every crucial juncture in the story. David is not just the first human in literature, he is the first true individual, the first modern human.

    Nowhere is this principle better exemplified than in the story of David's combat with Goliath (1 Sam. 17), and nowhere is it clearer how the imposition of our own cultural values in interpretation can veil the text's real meaning.

    Two problems with the story should be mentioned. First, the oldest translation of the text, the "Old Greek" version of the Septuagint, probably from the 3rd century B.C.E., lacks much of the text present in the Hebrew. Some scholars believe that the Hebrew text is a combination of two stories, one of which was incorporated only after the 3rd century. But this is probably incorrect. In 1 Samuel, David has already been attached to Saul's court when the Goliath story begins. But several verses in the story presume that David and Saul are strangers (when Saul asks, 'Who is that boy?' for example, and Abner does not respond, 'I don't know, but he's always around when we need him'). The omissions in the Greek contain all of the verses suggesting that David was unknown to Saul when the confrontation with Goliath took place. So it looks as though the Greek text was harmonizing apparent contradictions. In any case, the omissions do not materially affect the shape of the story.

    Second, there is still another tradition about Goliath's death. Materials appended at the end of 2 Samuel describe the achievements of David's heroes. Among them is the verse, 2 Sam. 21:19:

There was another battle in Gob with the Philistines, and Elhanan son of Yaare Orgim from Bethlehem smote Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam.

The name of Elhanan's father has been garbled — Orgim means "weavers" and has been mistakenly copied from the description of Goliath's weaponry. The parallel text in Chronicles and the Old Greek translation recognize the word as a scribal error and suppress it. The only other Elhanan and the only other Bethlehemite in the lists of David's heroes is "Elhanan ben-Dodo from Bethlehem" (2 Sam. 23:24). He was probably originally listed as Goliath's killer.

    Two texts reconcile the entry about Elhanan with the narrative of Goliath's death in 1 Samuel. The Targum, the translation of the Bible into Aramaic, identifies Elhanan as David, seeing as both are from Bethlehem (Targ. to 2 Sam. 21:19). But why then list Elhanan among David's heroes? And why, as the medieval commentator David Kimhi asks, do the killings occur in different places? Elhanan kills Goliath at Gob, whereas David in 1 Samuel kills him at Socho or Ephes Dammim.

    A second text, in Chronicles, says that Elhanan slew Lahmi, Goliath's brother (1 Chr. 20:5). But Goliath's brother's name reflects a misreading of Lahmi ('et lahmî) for (Elhanan) "the Bethlehemite" (bet hallahmî) in Samuel. Chronicles has either emended the text or seized opportunistically on a scribal error to produce a brother of Goliath and resolve the conflicting claims. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing late in the 1st century C.E. (Ant. 7.302), simply omits the name of Goliath in connection with Elhanan, whom he identifies as David's relative (as both are from Bethlehem). We could also resort to a fourth harmonization, namely that there were two "Goliaths from Gath, the shafts of whose spears were like weavers' beams." With that eminent biblical scholar, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, then, we might suggest that David did not kill Goliath, but another man of the same name.

Continues...

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Excerpted from David's Secret Demons by Baruch Halpern Copyright © 2004 by Baruch Halpern. Excerpted by permission.
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