The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (28 page)

Ziba, Saul’s former steward whom David had given control of Meribbaal’s royal estate, also appeared before the king. He had more personally at stake in David’s kingship than most, as he controlled his property (Meribbaal’s property) entirely by David’s word. A new king would have no reason to uphold David’s agreement with Ziba. A show of respect and heartfelt welcome was therefore appropriate. But along with Ziba came Meribbaal himself, who had more to account for. For Meribbaal had not gone into exile with David alongside the rest of the royal court, choosing instead to stay in Jerusalem and await the arrival of Absalom (2 Sam. 16:3). Meribbaal’s decision may be chalked up to his infirmity—it would have been physically difficult, if not impossible, for him to have made the trek through the wilderness and across the Jordan. But Ziba explained it to David differently: Meribbaal, he said, stayed in Jerusalem hoping that, somehow, he might attain the northern kingship that was rightfully his. Meribbaal declares Ziba to be a liar, but of course he has every reason to say that. It is possible that Meribbaal hoped Absalom might really return things to the way they were before David, including the restoration of an independent northern kingdom of Israel. Absalom would rule in Judah, where his rebellion was centered, and Meribbaal, naturally, would rule in the north. As Absalom hardly ruled long enough to effect any changes at all, we will never know what his intentions were—though it is hard to believe that he willingly would have relinquished the command of the north won by his father.
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In any case, Meribbaal had to explain his stay in Jerusalem, and thus his apparent support for Absalom. All he could do was beg for mercy. David, upon learning that Meribbaal would not accompany him, had formally transferred all of Meribbaal’s estate to Ziba (2 Sam. 16:4). Now that Meribbaal was before him asking for forgiveness, David, so the story goes, declared that Meribbaal and Ziba would split the royal estate equally between them. This decision seems almost Solomonic, and perhaps it is too neat to be true. The authors want to show David as gracious, but at the same time they must have known that he did not in fact divide Saul’s estate but gave it in its entirety to Ziba. Thus they have Meribbaal responding to David’s division of the property by formally renouncing his claim to it: “Let him take it all, since my lord the king has come home safe” (2 Sam. 19:31).
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In other words, David did the gracious thing—and if Saul’s estate ended up entirely in Ziba’s hands, it was Meribbaal’s own decision. But Meribbaal would be allowed to live, for the same reason that Shimei was pardoned. Any Saulide death was politically impossible.

The last person to present himself to the king was Barzillai the Gileadite, who had provided David with supplies during the stay at Mahanaim. He was not obligated to David in any way, nor did he need David’s forgiveness. He accompanied him merely as a show of respect, made all the more remarkable by his advanced age. David requested that Barzillai spend his final years in Jerusalem as David’s honored guest, but Barzillai refused. Instead, he offered Chimham—most likely Barzillai’s son—as one whom David could honor in that way. This was effectively an international treaty between David and Gilead, and one that reaffirmed that it was the Transjordanians who were vassals to David, and not the other way around.

With the formalities out of the way, David and his men continued across the Jordan and back into Israel. At this point the Bible describes a remarkable debate. All the men of Israel, we are told, came to David and complained that Judah had been given the right to invite the king back. The men of Judah replied that David was their kinsman, and they had every right to be the ones to welcome him home. The Israelites responded that, as they had ten tribes, they had ten shares in the kingship, and they claimed that they were the first to suggest that David return at all. In the end, we are told, “the men of Judah spoke more powerfully than the men of Israel” (2 Sam. 19:44). This episode is faintly ridiculous. A dialogue between “the men of Israel” and “the men of Judah” can hardly be taken at face value. The presentation of the north and south bickering over who had more right to honor David has no historical veracity. It serves, rather, to suggest that Israel and Judah were each desperate to bring David back, a notion at odds with the reality: that Israel had no other options and that Judah was, once again, coerced into accepting David as king.

There seemed to be little to prevent David from finally making his way to Jerusalem to resume his reign. One man, however, was displeased by David’s return. Before David could even reach his capital, a man named Sheba from the tribe of Benjamin declared Israel’s independence: “We have no portion in David, no share in the son of Jesse—every man to his tent, O Israel!” (2 Sam. 20:1). Sheba pointedly used the terminology of kin-based landholding: “portion” and “share.” This language is cleverly doubled-edged. It states that the northern tribes do not consider David’s kingship to be an authentic part of their patrimony; at the same time, it reminds the Israelites that David is originally from Judah and is their problem to deal with. The final phrase—“every man to his tent”—has military overtones and signals the dispersal of the army and the return to traditional tribal life.
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The Bible presents Sheba as a significant threat to David’s kingship in the north. In reality, Sheba was always a lone revolutionary, and in the end a rather pathetic one. Even if he had been able to rouse Israel to rebellion, David had just defeated Israel’s army at Mahanaim with only his private royal army. Now that Israel’s troops had returned to their homes, they would have to be mustered again to face David’s same victorious warriors—but this time without Judah, which had returned its allegiance to David. Sheba’s revolt never would have had any chance of success. In the end it hardly mattered, since the rest of Israel had no idea that Sheba had declared a rebellion on their behalf. Thus when David sought to quash the uprising, he needed to do no more than simply hunt down Sheba. Even this, however, is an indication of how insecure David must have felt his kingship to be. At the height of his power, he would have had nothing to fear from a nobody like Sheba. But his control was so tenuous now that he needed to commit his weary troops to ensure that Sheba’s call would go unheeded.

Along with Sheba, David still had one outstanding issue to deal with: Amasa, who, David had promised, would take over for his cousin Joab. If we remember the story of Abner, we can predict how this story will turn out. Amasa may have been family, but he had sided with Absalom against David. Having survived the battle at Mahanaim, he still could be of some momentary use—but once Judah had accepted David as king, Amasa had no further value.

During the pursuit of Sheba, David, we are told, gave Amasa instructions to muster the troops of Judah. This seems a rather bizarre decision. The troops had just returned home; being immediately called up again, this time to fight not against David, but for him, would have been cause for significant resentment.
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Moreover, David was pursuing a single individual, Sheba—he hardly needed an entire tribal army to chase down one man. To compound matters, David is said to have given Amasa only three days to muster Judah’s forces, an impossible task even under the best of conditions. When Amasa was unable to gather his assigned forces in time, according to the narrative, David sent Joab and Abishai with the Cherethites and Pelethites to find Sheba. The two forces, the Judahites under Amasa and David’s warriors under Joab, are said to have converged in Gibeon—an inauspicious location for an enemy of David. It was there that Amasa would meet his end. The manner of his death, according to the Bible, was predictable. As in the case of Abner, Joab approached Amasa, ostensibly for private conversation, and stabbed him through the abdomen. The story then tells us that the Judahite army stopped short upon seeing Amasa’s corpse in the road, which was quickly moved into a field and covered. At this point Judah’s army, in a declaration of allegiance to David, continued to follow Joab after Sheba.

There is much about this story that doesn’t ring true. It seems impossible for David to have mustered Judah’s troops, even under Amasa. There would be no need to do so in any case. The three days Amasa is given has a distinctly literary ring to it, as we have seen elsewhere. David hardly needed an excuse to send his private army after Sheba—it would have been the obvious choice from the beginning, with its smaller numbers, greater mobility, and experience. It is equally unlikely that Amasa’s troops ever would have caught up to Joab’s, since the tribal army would have moved far more slowly than David’s militia. The siting of the meeting at Gibeon is so inauspicious as to be suspicious. And the death scene is all too familiar. Finally, the denouement of the episode, Judah’s declaration of allegiance to Joab, appears to be a transparent attempt to have the people ratify Amasa’s death and David’s kingship.

There is no question that Amasa died, but everything else in the story is open to doubt. It is almost certain that David never sent Amasa after Sheba, but rather sent only Joab and Abishai and their men. Whether Joab killed Amasa, wherever and whenever the death took place, is impossible to know. Joab is constantly made out to be the murderous one in the Bible for the sake of preserving David’s reputation—as in this case—but it is possible that he really was willing to act as David’s personal hit man. However it may have happened, Amasa’s death would have been David’s decision. No one who had commanded a rebel army against David could be permitted to survive.

Joab and Abishai eventually caught Sheba at the far northern city of Abel in the land of Maacah. To get there, David’s men had to pass through the entire northern territory of Israel; that they were able to do so without any difficulty suggests both that Sheba’s rebellion had no broader effect and that the north had officially returned to David’s side. As for the city of Abel itself, it stood outside Israelite territory, at the source of one of the major tributaries of the Jordan. We have already noted the kind of treatment that a city housing a rebel would expect to face, and this case was no different, even if the city was in a foreign land. Joab besieged Abel and began battering its wall, intent on killing Sheba even if it meant also destroying the city. But the residents of Abel had nothing at stake in this conflict. They didn’t care about Sheba or his revolt. They were, in fact, perfectly happy to hand Sheba over—and they even did the dirty work for Joab, since all they handed over was Sheba’s head, unceremoniously tossing it over the wall. With Sheba’s death, his revolt ended, for he was its only member.

Once David had returned to power in Jerusalem, he had to deal with only the matter of his concubines, with whom Absalom had slept in the standard pronouncement of a coup. Had Absalom survived, no doubt they would have been sent away with him, just as Ahinoam had been sent away with David. But with Absalom dead, the concubines were of no use to anyone. They were merely a living reminder of Absalom’s rebellion. David imprisoned them within the palace for the rest of their lives.

A
BSALOM’S REBELLION REVEALED MUCH
about David’s power in Israel. In victory, David had proved, once again, that he had the military prowess to maintain his authority. Even against the tribal armies of all Israel, David and his personal, professional militia were dominant. The basis for his rule remained the same as it had when he first took power: David still ruled as a conqueror. At the same time, the fact of a popular uprising demonstrated that despite anything he had accomplished during his years on the throne, David remained deeply disliked. Over the generations, Israel would come to venerate David as the ideal king, but in his own time, he was never loved.

David would never again reach the heights of power that he had attained before Absalom’s revolt—perhaps because of the strain of trying to maintain power in the face of subjects whom he now knew despised him; perhaps because of the realization that with Absalom’s rebellion and death, his legacy was in question; perhaps simply because of the fatigue of decades of hard fighting to gain and keep the throne in Israel. Perhaps all of these factors contributed to the fact that the rest of David’s reign—what little of it remained—witnessed a king in inexorable decline. The man who had once controlled everyone and everything around him would find himself being the one controlled. And, most humiliating for David, who had always used his wives as mere pawns—Ahinoam, Abigail, and Michal—his final fall from power would be at the hands of a woman. Her name was Bathsheba.

Chapter 7
David in Decline
W
HAT
G
OES
A
ROUND
C
OMES
A
ROUND

T
HE ROOTS OF
D
AVID’S FINAL
fall from grace can be traced back to much earlier in his reign, to a time when he was at the height of his considerable power and it seemed that nothing could stand in his way. David hardly could have foreseen the long-term consequences of his actions, but the end of his kingship over Israel began when he decided to take Bathsheba as his wife.

David’s affair with Bathsheba is one of the most famous parts of the David story. His lust for her, his murder of her husband Uriah, his condemnation by Nathan the prophet, his realization of his guilt—the episode humanizes David in a way seldom seen elsewhere in the biblical narrative of his life. The story is a model of the biblical doctrine that sin must be followed by punishment and repentance. Even the great David made mistakes—and suffered the consequences. Everyone can relate to this, which is why the story has had such an effect on readers over the centuries.
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But as we saw in the case of the legendary battle against Goliath, sometimes the most famous stories are the most open to doubt.

David and Bathsheba

T
HROUGHOUT THE
D
AVID STORY,
we have seen that when the biblical authors go to great lengths to emphasize that something must be the case, we have reason to suspect exactly the opposite. We saw this sort of emphasis in the claims that David was completely loyal to Saul and that David had no hand in the deaths of Nabal, or of Saul and Jonathan, or of Abner, or Amnon, or Absalom, or Amasa. The literary clue in all of these instances is the attempt to establish the Bible’s case from as many angles as possible. In all of Saul’s confrontations with David, we are told repeatedly that David is innocent and Saul’s wrath is unjustified. For every death, not only is someone else to blame—Joab, an unnamed Amalekite, even God himself—but David is always somewhere else when the death occurs. The biblical authors want to leave nothing to chance, to allow no room for misunderstanding. Ironically, it is their very insistence that, for the suspicious reader, undermines their case. And we find this same insistence at work in the story of David’s affair with Bathsheba.

In the Bathsheba story, the point to which the biblical authors want to lead us—and they do successfully, as is evident by how universally accepted the story has been over the millennia—is that Solomon was David’s son. To get us to this point, they tell the story of David seeing Bathsheba, lying with her, and impregnating her. He arranges for her husband Uriah to be killed in battle, and then he marries her. A child is born, but dies a few days later. Bathsheba becomes pregnant again, and this time she gives birth to David’s son Solomon.

The biblical account begins with the notice that David witnessed Bathsheba bathing. This is not merely a voyeuristic element in the narrative. We are told that “she had just purified herself after her period” (2 Sam. 11:4). Thus she was not merely bathing; she was undergoing the ritual bath to cleanse herself after menstruation, a common ancient Near Eastern practice, the details of which are found in the Bible in Leviticus 15.
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The key to understanding the import of this notice is that such purification took place approximately seven days after a woman’s period had ended—in other words, when she would be at her most fertile. This, in turn, makes inevitable the result of David’s sleeping with Bathsheba: “the woman conceived, and she sent word to David: ‘I am pregnant’ ” (11:5). We may wonder, however, at how the biblical authors would have known this detail about Bathsheba’s most private life. Women did not bathe only for the purpose of postmenstrual purification. And how would the authors know in the first place that David saw her when she was bathing? These details are unverifiable, but they are necessary for establishing Bathsheba’s fertility at precisely the moment that David slept with her.

The Bible then tells us that David actually tried to extricate himself from this potentially embarrassing situation. He had Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah—one of David’s army officers—sent back from the battle against Ammon, where Joab and the military were besieging the Ammonite capital, Rabbah. When Uriah arrived, David encouraged him to go spend some time at home, to “bathe his feet”—a euphemism for sex. But Uriah, despite David’s repeated urgings, refused to go anywhere but to the military encampment near the palace. This episode too suffers from an excess of seemingly private information. David’s instructions to Uriah to go sleep with his wife—as well as Uriah’s refusals—should, in theory, have been known only to David and Uriah. But these details are needed for the reader to appreciate the point of the story. David wanted Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba so that Uriah would think himself to be the father of the child that Bathsheba was carrying. Thus the Bible presents David as trying to preserve Uriah’s honor, but failing. The biblical story tells us that Uriah did not go home. Instead, he spent his time in a very public place, among the other military officers in front of the palace. In this way the authors announce that there were plenty of witnesses who could testify to the fact that Uriah never went home. The child could not be his.

Here, as elsewhere, the biblical authors are trying to put a particular spin on an event for which the basic facts are not in dispute. In this case, the facts are that Bathsheba was once Uriah’s wife, was now David’s wife, and that she bore a son, who (though no one knew it yet) would one day become David’s successor on the throne. This is the essence of the biblical narrative, but it has been overlaid with details that betray their nonhistorical origins. As with other episodes from David’s life, the aspects invented by the biblical authors are identifiable by both the insistence on a particular interpretation and the introduction of unverifiable private moments. These two features are present in almost every verse of the story we have examined so far. Whatever the underlying truth may be—and we will get to that shortly—the biblical story appears to be a literary creation.
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As the story continues, Uriah returned to the battlefront and David took the pregnant Bathsheba into his harem. This meant that when Uriah came home from battle, he would find that his wife suddenly belonged to another man. David knew only one solution to most of life’s problems, and it was the obvious choice here as well: Uriah had to die. The Bible presents David’s decision to have Uriah killed as the result of Uriah’s refusal to sleep with Bathsheba, and as if it were the only option David had left. Yet the two do not logically follow. The authors had already established beyond a doubt that Bathsheba’s baby was David’s child—what difference did it make now if Uriah lived or died? The child would still be David’s, and Uriah, who had not slept with Bathsheba, would know that something was amiss. Uriah’s death has nothing to do with paternity and everything to do with marriage. We understand this from the prophet Nathan’s famous encounter with David. Nathan approaches him and recounts the parable of the rich man who takes the poor man’s only lamb, even though the rich man has so many of his own. David, when he hears the story, is angry, because the rich man has committed a great wrong. Nathan then retorts with the dramatic accusation: “You are the man!” (2 Sam. 12:7). David’s crime is spelled out for him: “You have put Uriah the Hittite to the sword; you took his wife and made her your wife” (12:9). There is nothing here about the baby in Bathsheba’s womb.

We may imagine that Uriah’s death happened in a manner quite close to its biblical depiction. According to the story, David sent Joab a message, telling him to have Uriah placed in the front lines, in heavy fighting, and then have the troops around Uriah fall back to leave him standing alone, where he was sure to be killed. Joab didn’t quite follow David’s instructions to the letter, perhaps because he realized just how obvious such a ploy would be. Instead, he sent Uriah and a number of other officers to a particularly well-defended area of the besieged city, where many of them, including Uriah, were killed. David’s response to the news puts into words the low value he placed on the lives of others, even his most loyal officers: “Do not be upset about the matter; the sword consumes all equally” (2 Sam. 11:25). In other words, David is happy to sacrifice a number of his best men to ensure that he will have a clear path to taking the woman of his choice. Everything about this seems realistic enough, with one exception. The Bible tells us that the message instructing Joab to have Uriah killed was delivered by Uriah himself: “David wrote a letter to Joab, which he sent with Uriah” (11:14). This claim is necessary because the authors have just had David bring Uriah to Jerusalem to sleep with his wife. If that story was invented, so too the notion that Uriah was the one to deliver his own death warrant. The elimination of this feature does little to soften the cruelty David exhibited in this matter. A man died for David’s lust—in fact, many men died, thinking that they were fighting for their king. But they were merely dying for him.

The biblical story takes a surprising twist at the end of Nathan’s oracle. Not only will David be punished for his sins by experiencing Absalom’s revolt, as we saw in the previous chapter, but the child about to be born to him and Bathsheba will die. The story of the infant’s death is famous and moving: David fasts and prays for the seven days that the child lives, but stops once the baby has died, much to his servants’ confusion. His explanation is authentically touching: “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept because I thought ‘Who knows? Yahweh may have mercy on me, and the child may live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will never come back to me” (2 Sam. 12:22–23). It is a recognizably parental scene, one that still resonates as realistic today. But we have grown accustomed by now to David’s public displays of grief: over Saul and Jonathan, over Abner, over Absalom. And we have come to realize that an emotionally accurate scene is not necessarily historically accurate. The death of the firstborn son is followed immediately in the Bible by the birth of a second son to David and Bathsheba. This, it turns out, is Solomon.

The story of the death of David and Bathsheba’s firstborn son is, to put it gently, bizarre. First, it is odd that the child has no name. It was the custom to name a newborn immediately after birth, as we see in virtually every birth narrative in the Bible. Names held great importance in the ancient world. They defined one’s relationship to kin or to the deity, and they often reflected the manner of the child’s birth (the naming of Jacob’s sons in Gen. 29–30 offers a good example). A nameless child would be an anomaly.

Second, Nathan’s prophetic announcement of the infant’s imminent death entails a logical inconsistency. When David repents for taking Bathsheba and having Uriah killed, we are told, Nathan responds: “Yahweh has removed your punishment; you shall not die. However, since you have spurned Yahweh by this deed, the child about to be born to you shall die” (2 Sam. 12:13–14). Nathan implies that the punishment for David’s sin will be inflicted upon the child. Yet nowhere in the preceding oracle predicting Absalom’s rebellion is it ever said that David would die.

Third, and most important, the death of the firstborn child renders the lengthy preceding account of its conception moot. If the firstborn son was to die, then why go to all the bother of making it clear that it was David’s child? All of the demonstrations that David must be the father—Bathsheba’s purification and Uriah’s refusal to sleep with his wife—end up being a false lead, a blind motif. What difference does it make, in the end, if the baby is Uriah’s or David’s? The child has no effect on the larger story. Once Solomon is the second son, born long after Uriah’s death, and his paternity therefore established beyond a doubt, the first child’s paternity is a nonissue. The biblical authors do not waste words. If they wanted to make clear that David and Bathsheba’s firstborn son was really David’s child, they must have had a reason to do so. When we read the narrative, we expect that this unborn child will be of great importance, just from the amount of space the Bible devotes to the story of its conception and the proof of its paternity. Stories like these are reserved for major figures—even David himself doesn’t have a birth story like this. The sudden death of this child renders the efforts of the biblical authors for naught.

All of this has led many scholars, correctly, to the conclusion that the account of the death of David and Bathsheba’s firstborn, beginning with the last words of Nathan’s oracle, is a later insertion into the original story.
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It may be a successful representation of parental grief, but it fails on almost every other level. If it is excised, then Solomon is the first—and only—child that Bathsheba bore in David’s house. All of the arguments for David’s paternity of the firstborn then make much more sense: now they are arguments for
Solomon
being David’s son. It is clear enough why it would be important for the biblical authors to establish this fact. Solomon followed David on the throne. If he were not really David’s son, then he would not be a rightful heir, with all the natural rights that come with standard royal succession. He would be a usurper and the legitimacy of his reign thus undermined.