The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (48 page)

Significantly, the influence of the Deuteronomist can be detected in several other books of the Bible: Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, and First and Second Kings, all of which are known among scholars as the Dueteronomistic History. And the Deuteronomist displays a none-too-subtle agenda throughout these several books of the Bible: he too seeks to validate the royal house of David as the legitimate rulers of Israel, but he also seeks to explain the unhappy destiny of Israel by blaming various of David’s descendants for committing “abominations” in violation of God’s law. One king after another “did that which was evil in the eyes of the Lord,” the Deuteronomist insists, and that is why God withdrew his blessing from his Chosen People.

The sorry and squalid history of the descendants of King David gives the Deuteronomist much to complain about. David is not faultless, as we have seen, and Solomon commits the ultimate sin of worshipping pagan gods and goddesses. All but one of David’s descendants
are found wanting by the Deuteronomist in one way or another. Only a single Davidic monarch is singled out for unqualified praise
³¹
—King Josiah, a white-hot religious reformer who transformed the religious practices of ancient Israel in the early seventh century
B.C.E
. Until Josiah came along, and the Book of Deuteronomy was discovered, the religious practices of ancient Israel encompassed the worship of Baal and Asherah, the adoration of the sun and the moon and the stars, even the sacrifice of children to the god known as Moloch (2 Kings 23). To the joy of the Deuteronomist, Josiah vows to purge the nation of Israel of all but the strictest form of worship.

Josiah has been characterized by some contemporary critics as
Davidus redivivus
³²
—a resurrected David—and the otherwise obscure king is praised even more lavishly than David by the biblical authors because of his efforts to purify the faith of ancient Israel. King Josiah is credited with purging the Temple of paraphernalia for the worship of Baal and Asherah, pulling down “the houses of the sodomites” where women were put to work at making such paraphernalia, suppressing the worship of pagan gods and goddesses at the altars and “high places” in Jerusalem and elsewhere around ancient Israel, slaying the renegade priests who presided over such ceremonies, and burying the sites of pagan worship under “the bones of men” (2 Kings 23:4–20). For his efforts, King Josiah is described with a fervor that the Deuteronomist reserves for only one other man in all of the Bible—the prophet and lawgiver, Moses.

“And like unto him was there no king before him,” the biblical author writes of Josiah, echoing the very words and phrases that are used to describe Moses, “that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him” (2 Kings 23:25).

Because Josiah alone enjoys such unreserved adulation, contemporary biblical scholarship suggests that the bocks of the Bible known as the Deuteronomistic History were first composed while Josiah sat upon the throne. Indeed, the Book of Deuteronomy itself has been called a “pious fraud” because the book is presented as one of the Five Books of Moses—“These are the words which Moses spoke unto all Israel beyond the Jordan” (Deut. 1:1)—when Deuteronomy was obviously composed by a different (and later) author than the ones who composed the other four books.
³³
The authors of the Deuteronomistic History lionized King
Josiah, the otherwise obscure monarch under whom they lived and worked, because they endorsed his policy of centralizing and standardizing the worship of Yahweh to the exclusion of the other gods and goddesses that the Israelites seemed to find so alluring.

So the Bible, as we know it, preserves a snapshot of the court politics and the theological priorities at a single moment in the long history of ancient Israel. But the doing of “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord” by the Israelites and the monarchs who ruled them does not end with Josiah. The kings that come after Josiah are no better than the ones that came before him, according to the author of the Book of Kings, and the Davidic line comes to a final and sorrowful end with the Babylonian Conquest and the destruction of the Temple. As it turns out, no descendant of David will take the throne again. So the biblical authors find themselves with an awkward question to answer: If God has promised King David that his descendants will sit on the throne of Judah “for ever,” when and how will God’s promise be kept?

Solomon is an unlikely figure to succeed David to the kingship of the united monarchy of Judah and Israel. After all, he is the offspring of a marriage that was brokered through adultery and assassination, and he stands no closer than tenth in the line of succession. The Succession Narrative is intended to show how war and politics, intrigue and conspiracy, bloodshed and betrayal combined to bring him to the throne of Israel. Yahweh, reduced once again to the role of “a god of convenience,”
³⁴
is rarely seen or heard, and the Court Historian allows us to see David and his contemporaries as “men who no longer walk by faith in the cultic religious symbols of the past,” as one scholar puts it, “but contend for temporal power and freedom of self-expression in the mundane world.”
³⁵

Still, as it turns out, the mundane world was not kind to the House of David or the united monarchy that he founded, and ancient Israel was soon reduced to civil war, conquest, occupation, and exile. Confronted with the harsh realities of their history, the Israelites began to reinterpret the divine promise to David in new and momentous ways. Since the throne of David was empty and no descendant was at hand,
the next king in the Davidic line came to be understood as someone who would appear at some unknowable moment in the future and usher in an era of perfect peace and harmony—a rescuer, a redeemer, a savior. The “anointed one”—the Messiah—was slowly and subtly transformed from yet another flesh-and-blood monarch into a mysterious and miraculous figure who would fulfill God’s original promise to King David.

“For a child is born unto us,” the prophet Isaiah declares in a familiar biblical passage that fairly burns with the messianic yearnings of an oppressed people. “A son is given unto us; and the government is upon his shoulder.”

Here we come to the fork in the road where Judaism and Christianity move off in different directions, so fatefully and with such bloody consequences. Jewish tradition regards the Messiah as a divinely anointed but thoroughly human figure who will “execute justice and righteousness in the land” (Jer. 23:5)—and, crucially, the Jewish faith holds that we are
still
awaiting the arrival of the Messiah. Christian tradition regards the Messiah as the Son of God and the source of heavenly salvation—and the Christian faith interprets the words of Isaiah and other prophets of the Hebrew Bible to identify Jesus of Nazareth as
the
Messiah, a word that is translated into Greek as
Christos
and is rendered in English as “Christ.” From this fundamental difference of opinion about the identity of the final heir of David, more than two thousand years of hatred, oppression, suffering, and death have flowed, and no end is yet in sight.

More than one bitter irony is at work in these crucial biblical texts. David is regarded as “a man after God’s heart,” and yet God is not much in evidence in the Book of Samuel and, especially, in the rape of Tamar. Her ordeal, one of the most harrowingly realistic accounts in the Bible, is used by the biblical narrator to foreshadow the realpolitik of the court of King David, a place that fairly sizzled with Machiavellian intrigue and cynical power politics. The fact that David is an inadvertent
accomplice to her rape—and, more troubling still, the fact that he does nothing to vindicate her or punish her rapist—is entirely overlooked by the Almighty.

But, then, the Book of Samuel allows us to understand that God does not much care about the high crimes and sexual misadventures of King David. When the Almighty first resolves to punish David for his adultery with Bathsheba and his role in the foul murder of her husband, it is an innocent baby who bears the brunt of divine wrath! As for David’s brutality in politics and war—his path to the throne is littered with the dead bodies of his rivals and adversaries—the only punishment from on high is that Solomon, rather than David, will have the honor of building the Temple at Jerusalem. “Thou shalt not build a house for My name,” God says, “because thou art a man of war, and thou hast shed blood” (1 Chron. 28:3). All is forgotten, all is forgiven, by the time God bestows his eternal blessing on David and decrees that his dynasty will ultimately bring forth the Prince of Peace, the Messiah.

“The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness,” boasts David. “According to the cleanness of my hands hath He recompensed me” (2 Sam. 22:21).

The greatest (and crudest) irony of all is the fact that so much blood has been spilled over so many centuries precisely because we cannot agree on what the Bible says and means about the coming of the Messiah. Both Christians and Jews share a common belief, however, that the Messiah will be (or is) a descendant of David—“a shoot out of the stock of Jesse,” as Isaiah puts it, referring to the father of David (Isa. 11:1). And so we must pray, Christian and Jew alike, that
all
of the words of prophecy will be realized in a time and place where deadly enemies make peace, where children are no longer at risk, a world where Tamar need not fear Amnon, and Amnon need not fear Absalom, and Absalom need not fear David.

To which
all
readers of the Bible, Christian or Jew or Muslim, agnostic or atheist, ought to be able to say: Amen.

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