God Is Disappointed In You (7 page)

The Philistines ran away, terrified by what the sandwich boy had just done to their best soldier.

Everybody loved David. He slew giants, won battles, and he was a terrific dancer. All this attention to David left Saul feeling like old cheese. When David asked to marry the princess, Michal, Saul tried to get rid of him by demanding the unhygienic dowry of two hundred Philistine foreskins. But this just added to his legend. David killed two hundred Philistines, and cut off their foreskins, without even getting a rash. 

Tired of subtlety, Saul simply sent a platoon of soldiers to go kill David in his sleep. But David’s fast-thinking wife stuffed a mannequin into his bed to fool the assassins while David escaped, which is, quite literally, the oldest trick in the book.

Now on the lam, David went to the town of Nob, where some sympathetic priests gave him a few loaves of holy bread which was reserved for men who weren’t sexually active. They also gave him Goliath’s sword, which was being kept as a museum piece. When Saul heard about this, he was so peeved that he had everyone in the town of Nob put to death, including the priests. 

Armed with Goliath’s sword and his abstinence bread, David rallied together six hundred drinking buddies, whom he called his “Mighty Men.” Saul and his army pursued David and the Mighty Men all over Israel. He was so hot on their trail that he almost stumbled upon them by accident at the Crag of Wild Goats. Saul walked into a cave to take a piss, unaware that David and his men were hiding inside. The Mighty Men kept chuckling and nudging David, daring him to chop Saul’s head off while he was peeing. Instead, David quietly cut off a small sliver of the king’s robe. When Saul returned to his camp, David emerged from the cave and called out to him. The king turned to see David holding a piece of his robe, proving that he could have killed Saul if he’d wanted to.

This act of mercy filled Saul with shame, but not enough shame to stop him from his quest to kill David. Unable to live safely in Israel, David and his friends went to live with the Philistines. They spent their days drinking and robbing nearby towns. Whenever the king of the Philistines asked David to go raiding for them, he would. Only instead of attacking a town in Israel, he’d attack a Philistine town.
He’d kill every man, woman and child, so no one could tattle on him. The king got his plunder and he got to kill Philistines. It was a win-win situation.

“I guess this is my life now,” David said, resigning himself to the fate of an armed burglar. But then, one day after coming back from work, David found the Philistines celebrating. They had just won a huge battle against Israel.
Saul had committed suicide to avoid capture. True to his word, God had cleared the way to make David the new king of Israel.

A deal is a deal.

After a bit of persuading, most of which consisted of stabbing people in the gut, David was named King of Israel. David realized that there was more to becoming king than stabbing people in the gut, though. You’re never really king until people think of you as king. But ruling your kingdom from a goat farm doesn’t convince people. That’s what conspicuous consumption is for. David realized that he needed a capital city, a palace, and a harem. The hallmarks of a legitimate ruler.

There was a city named Jebus on the border of Israel, which would make a perfectly nice capital city. So as his first official act in office, David conquered the city and killed off the locals. After mopping up all the blood and burning the corpses, David named his new capital Jerusalem, meaning “City of Peace.”
 

Then David built himself a palace. Once he felt cozy in his new throne, David ordered the Ark of the Covenant to be brought to Jerusalem, where it would be welcomed with a big parade. Samuel had long since died, but luckily, the prophet Nathan was on hand to arrange the rituals and make sure that the parade went off okay and the Ark didn’t kill anybody.

Now, there are basically two kinds of people in the world: those who hate parades and morons. On this particular day, David was one of the latter. He got so into the parade that he stood up inside the royal box and started dancing.
As the crowd cheered, his dancing got wilder and wilder. He threw his legs into the air. He flailed around so hard that he accidentally flashed his dick to the nation, which really upset his wife Michal.
 

“Nice, David, really nice,” Michal said, scolding him. “It’s bad enough that you did that God-awful dance, but then to expose yourself? To the slaves and everyone?”

David mumbled defensively.
 

“What did you say?” Michal growled.

“I said it was just a tip slip.”
 

“It was a humiliation, is what it was! What, were you raised by farm animals?”

“Sort of.”

David did not like being reminded of his redneck past. He went to bed without even giving Michal a goodnight kiss. Apparently God apparently took David’s side, because he cursed Michal with infertility, which may or may not be a nice way of saying that David stopped sleeping with her. 

Though he had soured on Michal, David was still hot into women. He soon began collecting wives and concubines like they were matchbox cars.
 

When David heard that the king of the neighboring Ammonites had died, David sent ambassadors to extend his condolences, one king to another. But the new king thought David’s ambassadors to be spies, so he thought it would be funny to square off the ends of their beards and cut their robes so short that they barely covered their testicles. Then he forced them to walk all the way back to Israel in this hilarious get-up.
 

“They don’t respect me, do they?” David asked. The ambassadors in their mini-skirts shook their heads. “They don’t think of me as a real king. So I need to respond the way a real king should.” While the ambassadors changed their clothes, David declared war.

Needing to take a break from planning the war, David walked out onto his balcony, where he saw a woman named Bathsheba bathing outside his palace. He immediately became infatuated with her. When he found out that she was married, he sent her husband, a soldier named Uriah, on a suicide mission against the Ammonites. Once he was out of the way, David married Bathsheba and she soon became his favorite wife.

David was an able general and a successful king. He routed the Ammonites and destroyed the Philistines. He had single-handedly taken Israel from a failed state to a world power. But his home life was a mess. His wives were constantly scheming against each other and their kids were constantly at each other’s throats.
 

Most of the real trouble started when his daughter Tamar was raped by her half-brother, Amnon.
The law was unclear on this matter. On the one hand, having raped Tamar, the law now required Amnon to marry her. On the other hand, the law forbade brothers and sisters from marrying. It was a loophole Moses had failed to foresee.

David’s solution to the dilemma was to forget the whole thing happened. So Tamar’s older brother, Absalom, took justice into his own hands and killed her rapist.
 
Absalom, who was mostly known for his long, luxuriant hair, went on the run. Just as his father had done decades before, he gathered his friends and supporters and declared himself king. Then he rode into Jerusalem, stabbing anyone who disagreed. Not wanting to get stabbed, David left town and hid in the countryside. While David was raising an army to take back his throne, Absalom made himself at home in his father’s palace.
 

Just like his father, Absalom wondered what he could do to convince people that he was the real king. The answer he came up with was to have sex with David’s concubines on the roof, so that everyone could see him. 

Leading an army, with the throne of Israel on the line, David returned in force, and creamed Absalom’s army. While fleeing the battle, Absalom got his long, beautiful hair caught on a tree branch which pulled him off his horse and left him dangling helplessly from a tree. When his pursuers found him hanging there like a piñata, they couldn’t help but whack at him with their swords and spears. Unfortunately, no candy came pouring out of Absalom, just blood and organs. 

Despite the fact that he had stolen his throne and had sex with his girlfriends, David was torn by grief when he heard that Absalom was dead.
 

David’s reign was a big success, but he was losing sons and daughters left and right. The palace, the capital city, all his war trophies, they did nothing for him now. He was a heartbroken and haunted man.

“Haven’t I done everything God has asked of me?” David wondered. “Didn’t I kill all the right foreigners? Why would God do this to me?”

The Prophet Nathan had an answer to this riddle. He told David about a rich farmer who lived nearby. This farmer was so rich he was practically shitting sheep and goats. His neighbor, on the other hand, was a poor man who had only one sheep and that little animal was all he owned in the world. Despite having so much, the rich farmer killed the poor man, took his one little sheep and pushed into his flock, where it promptly disappeared becoming just one more sheep. 

“Your majesty, what do you think we should do with this farmer?” he asked. 

King David responded immediately, “What do you mean? Bring him here. I’ll kill him right now.” Nathan then revealed that David was the farmer. The farmer’s crime was what he himself had done to poor Uriah. “If you would have a man executed for doing what you have done, then how can you expect anything less from God? God might want you to be king. But just because God put you in a position to pull shit like that,” Nathan said, “that doesn’t mean he has to let you get away with it.”

King David had gotten old. He was so cold and frail that the court appointed a young woman to snuggle with him in his bed. No, they didn’t have sex. Though the court did make a point of hiring someone beautiful, just to put a little sizzle in his chicken.

The presence of a human hot water bottle notwithstanding, David was dying. His wife Bathsheba was afraid that once he died, her son Solomon would be killed by his older brothers.

So Bathsheba tricked David into passing over the crown prince Adonijah and naming Solomon as his successor, even though Solomon was his youngest son. In what would later become a common tactic in scams against the elderly, she told David that he had already promised to do it, but had simply forgotten. 

David died, making Solomon King of Israel. When Adonijah stopped by the palace for a rather awkward family visit, Bathsheba met him at the door.
 

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Look, I just wanted to say that you have nothing to worry about from me. Solomon’s king now and I’m totally cool with that,” he said. “Things don’t always work out the way they should—I’ve come to accept that. Anyway, I’m not here to cause you any trouble. All I want to ask from you is one tiny favor.”

“Like what?”

“I want to marry the human hot water bottle.”

“Really? That’s it? I thought you were going to ask for half the kingdom or something.”

“I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic!” he shrugged.

Bathsheba went to Solomon and told him about Adonijah’s request.

“A pretty reasonable request under the circumstances,” she added.
 

“Woman, please! If I approve this marriage, I might as well have my brother fitted for the crown. My claim to the throne is shaky, at best. Suppose they get married and the human hot water bottle then concocts a story about how you or I poisoned dad? Or that we smothered him in his sleep? How would that look for us?
Plus, she has friends like all over the palace. Who’s to say one of them wouldn’t slip a little arsenic in my soup in exchange for being promoted to ‘Taster of Meats?’ Geez, I can’t believe you fell for that. Way to go, MOM!”

Solomon now knew that his brother was planning a coup d'état and he reacted to the crisis with all the subtlety and aplomb of his father, which is to say, he paid a guy to club Adonijah in the skull. Solomon then went on a spree, clubbing in the heads of Saul’s relatives and David’s old generals. This royal game of whack-a-mole didn’t end until Solomon felt that he had removed everyone who was a threat to his rule.