The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (32 page)

Memories of independence have long lives. In our time, we have witnessed what appears to be the disintegration of well-established nations—the USSR and Czechoslovakia, for example—not to mention the regular cries of those peoples unable to reassert their independence. This is not really disintegration, however; it is a return to older territorial and ethnic boundaries. David may have brought the north and south together, but this was a unification neither side ever asked for. And within two generations, when the force of David’s personality had faded, one would become two again.
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Nevertheless, it was this united monarchy that David bequeathed to Solomon. David had struggled all his life to create and maintain his kingdom. He had little time or energy to do much more with it—as noted earlier, David’s kingship looked very much like Saul’s. Solomon, however, faced no challenges to his rule at any point, and fought no wars. He had the freedom to take what David had started and turn Israel into a real state, with centralized rule extending to all corners of the kingdom. David transformed Israel from a loose collection of tribes into a legitimate, if incipient, ancient Near Eastern nation. Solomon transformed the kingship from a glorified tribal chiefdom into a true Near Eastern monarchy.

On multiple levels Solomon built on foundations laid by David. David made some forays into international relations, including some minor conquests and some tentative diplomatic ties. But he spent most of his energy securing Israel’s new borders. His efforts resulted in a state that, during Solomon’s reign, became more of a player on the international stage. Solomon married an Egyptian princess—thereby becoming the first Israelite king to establish diplomatic connections with the superpower on the Nile. He developed commercial dealings across the Near East that brought new wealth into Israel, largely using the trade routes to the south that David had secured. And with that wealth Solomon followed the standard model of Near Eastern kings: he kept it for himself, using it to decorate his palace, build an elaborate ivory throne, and purchase horses for the royal stables. It is unclear whether the majority of Israel reaped any benefit from Solomon’s riches. It is telling that even the Bible does not suggest that anyone but Solomon grew wealthy during his reign.

David had founded a new cult in Jerusalem, centered on the ancient icon of the ark of the covenant and the altar that accompanied it. Solomon, famously, built a new house for the ark, a magnificent temple. But Solomon’s temple was not like other Israelite sanctuaries. He didn’t want to have just another local cultic site. He wanted his temple to be grand on an internationally recognized scale. Archaeology has uncovered palaces from ancient Turkey to Syria that have architectural designs remarkably close to those of the temple described in the Bible.
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This makes sense, as the Bible tells us that Solomon had the temple built by foreigners: the Phoenicians from Tyre. We saw that David probably envisioned the Jerusalem cult as a confirmation of God’s approval of his kingship. Solomon would make the divine-royal link explicit by building not only the temple, but a new palace just beside it, in a single complex on the Temple Mount. Like David, Solomon offered sacrifices before his new cultic site, though Solomon’s were a bit more grandiose: 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep, according to the Bible. Like David, Solomon acted as priest, confirming that this great temple was a royal temple, the cult a royal cult. Solomon built the temple to be the religious center of the nation—but, as king, he was inextricably linked to it. Church and state were anything but separate.

One of the most significant results of David’s reign was the end of Israel’s own old-fashioned ad hoc tribal armies, which had served Israel for generations. They may not have been the best fighting forces, but they kept the Israelites grounded in their long-established kinship groups and reinforced a communal model of mutual self-defense. The victory of David’s royal militia during Absalom’s revolt demonstrated the weakness of the old system and inaugurated a new era of the centralized royal military.
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Solomon, again adopting the practices of Israel’s more powerful neighbors, instituted a policy of military conscription, thereby taking advantage of the sheer manpower afforded by the populace and combining it with the rigor of a formal centralized army.
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The Israelites could not have been very pleased with this development. Even as it enhanced national security, it came at a severe cost to the traditional way of life. This popular displeasure is reflected in the prophet Samuel’s pessimistic prediction of what it would mean for Israel to have a king: “He will take your sons and appoint them as his charioteers and horsemen, and to run before his chariots” (1 Sam. 8:11).

Saul, as we saw, had only the most insignificant of royal courts, consisting of a few relatives who helped him command the army. David largely maintained this pattern, though he introduced a few more figures: a scribe, a recorder, priests. Solomon, however, exploded the traditional forms of government. He too had generals, a scribe, a recorder, and priests. But whereas Saul’s and David’s governments were essentially local, tied to the person of the king, Solomon created a true national administration. He divided Israel into twelve districts, each governed by a prefect. Crucially, these districts did not correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel. Solomon redrew the map of Israel, breaking up long-standing affiliations and creating new administrative regions that crossed traditional boundaries. The purpose of this redistricting was to dissolve the tribal system entirely. Tribes had their own leaders, their own cultures, their own priorities. In theory, a tribe could try to secede, to return to its original independent status. Solomon would have none of this.
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Moreover, these new administrative districts were created mainly for the purpose of taxation. Each district was responsible for providing Solomon’s court—and Solomon’s horses—with provisions for one month of the year, in rotation. Israel had no experience with national taxation; neither Saul nor David had taxed his subjects. This was a new imposition, and another predicted by Samuel: “He will take a tenth part of your grain and vintage and give it to his eunuchs and courtiers . . . he will take a tenth part of your flocks, and you shall become his servants” (1 Sam. 8:15, 17). Although military conscription was unwelcome, at least it served a clear national purpose. Solomon’s royal taxation, however, served nothing other than Solomon.

Solomon’s most significant administrative action was instituting a policy of forced labor—not on conquered peoples, as David had done with Ammon, but on Israel itself, and specifically on the northern kingdom. Solomon undertook major building projects—not only the temple and palace, but new fortifications of major cities throughout Israel. At three sites in particular, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, archaeological excavation has revealed what some believe to be the remains of Solomon’s construction.
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The massive walls and gates that were built under Solomon are on a scale far beyond anything Israel had known before. These sites, and others, were built as royal outposts—as the Bible puts it, “garrison towns, chariot towns, and cavalry towns”—intended not to empower their local regions, but to assert Solomon’s royal power throughout his territory.
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In the end, it was these administrative impositions of taxation and forced labor that would undo all of David’s and Solomon’s achievements. After Solomon’s death, the leaders of the northern tribes came to his son, Rehoboam, and demanded that Solomon’s policies be reversed: “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now lighten the harsh labor of your father and the heavy yoke that he laid on us, and we will serve you” (1 Kings 12:4). Rehoboam refused, and Israel seceded, returning to the independence it had known before David. Solomon’s descendants would continue to rule Judah from David’s capital in Jerusalem. But the two kingdoms would never be unified again.

D
AVID CREATED SOMETHING NEW
in Israel: a legitimate state, with secure borders and increasing international recognition. Solomon took David’s emerging nation and tried to bring it up to the standards of the great powers of the region. From where Solomon sat—on the throne—this meant enhancing the status of the kingship so that it no longer resembled a tribal chiefdom. This meant having a magnificent temple and palace. This meant military conscription. This meant taxation. This meant royally sponsored building projects, even if they had to be built on the backs of the people. Israel was not ready for such changes. It had survived and, in its provincial way, thrived under its traditional tribal system. The Israelites saw the new style of monarchy as an imposition, forcing them into unfamiliar cultural patterns, for ends that seemed to not benefit them. David and especially Solomon were ahead of their time. The cost of their innovations was the disintegration of the nation David had worked so hard to create.
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CONCLUSION

T
HE PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTING
D
AVID’S
legacy began even before his death, with the composition of the pro-David apology with which we have primarily been concerned here. As we saw in the previous chapter, the narrative of David’s decline and death in the first chapters of 1 Kings is intrinsically connected with the story of Solomon’s rise to power. It presents a David who is confused and easily taken advantage of, which hardly seems to serve an apologetic purpose with regard to David. Instead, this story is needed to establish Solomon’s credential to rule. Rather than defend David against any charges, it uses David to defend Solomon, to show that he gained the throne with David’s blessing and that Solomon’s retributive actions against his political opponents were undertaken on David’s instructions. The story of David’s last days belongs not to David’s apology, but to Solomon’s.
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David’s apology thus properly ends before his death, shortly after he has resumed power in the wake of Absalom’s rebellion. And this is probably when we should date the composition of the apology as well. It should be no surprise that the apology was written even while David was still on the throne. Although the narrative does glorify David, its main purpose is to exculpate him, to defend him against accusations leveled by his contemporaries: that he was a murderer and most important a usurper. The apology defends David’s right to sit on the throne; after his death, the arguments on both sides would be moot. It is also likely that it was Absalom’s revolt that occasioned the composition of the apology. When David first became king, although he was a usurper, his power was undeniable. His military strength and political savvy forced Judah and Israel to accept him as their ruler. In such a circumstance an apology would hardly be warranted—even if David was an illegitimate king, the people had no means to do anything about it. After Absalom’s rebellion, however, when David’s power was at its weakest, even the Bible acknowledges that many people in both Judah and Israel were reluctant to return to David. It was during Absalom’s revolt that the explicit accusation of murdering Saul and his family was hurled at David. This was the moment that required a full accounting of why David had the right to be king, that required a detailed denial of all the charges of illegitimacy and criminality that had been latent for years but had raced to the surface when David’s power was finally challenged.
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This view of the story of David, the recognition that it is an apology, has ramifications for how we understand the Bible as a whole. We have been taught by generations of religious authorities that the history in the Bible is literally true. Even when we have agreed to discard the mythical (the creation, the flood, the splitting of the sea) or even the semimythical (the patriarchs, Moses), when we read the so-called historical books, especially the books of Samuel and Kings, we tend to read them as just that: historical. But no writing comes without an agenda, especially in the ancient world, before the idea of “objective” history entered human consciousness. And the biblical story of David preserved in the books of Samuel is no exception. It is, in fact, the very opposite of objective history. It is apologetic revision, its agenda evident at nearly every turn.

Even when the biblical authors take it upon themselves to depict events from the past, it is not what we call history today. It is, rather, ideology expressed in the historiographical genre. Not a word of the David story—and perhaps the entire Bible—is intended solely to describe things as they truly were. Much of the Bible was written so long after the events it describes that there was no possibility for its authors to access the objective past. The story of the Exodus may have some kernel of truth to it—we cannot state definitively that it is wholly fictional. But the biblical description of the Exodus uses the distant past to make a point about the present. The David story is different in that the past it describes was barely past at all. Its audience had lived through David’s reign—indeed, his reign was not yet finished when the story was composed. There was no need merely to
tell
the Israelites of David’s time their own story. What was necessary was to
reshape
their conceptions of their story.

The apology for David, a tenth-century
BCE
composition, was taken up and embedded in the more substantial seventh- or sixth-century
BCE
historical work that stretches from the beginning of the book of Joshua to the end of 2 Kings. Three hundred years after David lived and died, there was no further need to defend him. An uninterrupted succession of Judahite kings had traced their lineage back to David, the king who created the nation of Judah. He was their founder, both nationally and genealogically, and the success of their family in holding on to the crown—especially in contrast to the politically volatile northern kingdom—was evidence enough of David’s greatness and God’s favor toward him. It is from this later viewpoint that we get the explicit theologizing of David’s dynasty: “Your house and your kingship shall be secure before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7:16). These seventh- or sixth-century authors are responsible for David’s final speech to Solomon, which was heavily influenced by the contemporary book of Deuteronomy: “Yahweh will fulfill the promise that he made concerning me: ‘If your descendants are scrupulous in their conduct, walking before me faithfully, with all their heart and soul, there will never cease to be one of your descendants on the throne of Israel’ ” (2 Kings 2:4). It is these later writers who reconfigured David not only as blameless, but as actively righteous, as a model against whom all future kings were judged: “You have not been like my servant David, who kept my commandments and followed me with all his heart, doing only what was right in my sight” (1 Kings 14:8). Even the most ardently pro-David authors of the tenth-century
BCE
apology could not have said such a thing. But time heals all wounds.

In the fourth century
BCE
, after Israel had returned from the Babylonian exile and the temple was rebuilt, the need was felt for a new recounting of Israel’s history. Long past was the need to legitimate David’s kingship. The Israel that existed now was David’s Israel, and he was to be emphatically glorified as the nation’s founding hero. The new narrative of David’s life would be based on the apology from the books of Samuel, but every story that might make David look anything less than perfect was excised. In the retelling of Chronicles, therefore, no mention is made of David’s service under Saul, his flight to the wilderness, the death of Nabal, David’s time with the Philistines, his affair with Bathsheba and Uriah’s death, the death of Amnon, Absalom’s revolt, or the conflict between Solomon and Adonijah. This whitewashed David is presented as the perfect king. Moreover, since in the fourth century the institution of kingship in Israel had ended and been replaced by a temple-centered leadership, extra attention was paid to David’s role as the founder of the Jerusalem cult. Though the tradition that Solomon was the one who actually built the temple could not be overcome, the authors of Chronicles did everything possible to make David into its true founder. Thus, before his death David is depicted as not only bringing the ark to Jerusalem and setting up its altar, but also organizing the Levites and priests according to their cultic responsibilities, establishing the regular cycle of cultic music and worship, providing men to guard the temple and its treasuries, and even bringing in the raw materials to build the temple and giving Solomon an exact written blueprint of how it should be built. Though Solomon is credited with the temple’s construction, he is portrayed as no more than a glorified foreman. David is the architect.

By the end of the Old Testament period, Israel was truly David’s nation, both politically and religiously. Dreams of Israel’s future glory were pinned to the renewal of David’s kingship: at the eschaton, or the end of time, says the prophet Zechariah, “Yahweh will shield the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the feeblest of them shall be in that day like David, and the House of David like a divine being, like a messenger of Yahweh, before them” (Zech. 12:8). It is no wonder, then, that when the early followers of Jesus tried to position him as the fulfillment of God’s plan for Israel, they adopted David’s legacy. David was so fundamental that Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy leading from David to Jesus. A talmudic rabbi laid down a clear dictum: “Whoever says that David sinned is simply mistaken.”
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David’s transformation from a deeply flawed human to a perfected type was complete.

T
HIS BOOK HAS TRIED
to undo that transformation, to peel back the layers of literary interpretation and recover the human David. We are now in a position to think more broadly about his life—what he accomplished, and at what costs.

On a personal level, David achieved what most only dream of. He rose from the humblest of beginnings to become the most powerful man whom Israel had ever known. He proved himself to be a superior military strategist and a brilliant political tactician. Perhaps more important, David changed the face of Israel. He coalesced the scattered communities of Judah into a kingdom, one that would last for more than four hundred years, longer even than its historically dominant northern counterpart. He unified Israel and Judah under a single crown, a union that no one before had accomplished, or perhaps even considered possible. He incorporated into Israel territories that had long been independent enclaves, foremost among them Jerusalem. He turned Jerusalem into a royal capital and a major cultic center. He secured and expanded Israel’s borders. For the first time in generations, the Philistines ceased to be a threat. The Ammonites went from a menacing neighbor to a vassal state. Major trade routes to the south were opened. Diplomatic relations to the north were initiated. David left an Israel more secure, more capable of defending itself, and more important internationally than it had ever been before.

David reshaped Israel, but there was significant loss along the way. Success rarely comes without a price. The sublimation of the once-independent northern tribes into David’s unified kingdom occasioned great resentment against David and Judah. Before David, the two territories had coexisted peacefully, each recognizing the other as a nonthreatening neighbor. Once they were combined, against Israel’s will, the narrative changed: now Israel felt the need to separate itself from Judah, and thus Judah became viewed as a problem. By forcing Israel and Judah together, David polarized them. Once they were separate, Judah looked to bring Israel back into the fold, though as a vassal state rather than as equals; Israel, for its part, wanted to do the same to Judah. For much of the next two hundred years, Judah and Israel were in a near-constant state of war with each other. It is impossible to know whether these conflicts would have erupted had David not created the united kingdom. It is certain that the conflicts that did occur can be traced back to David.

David began the process of unraveling the fabric of traditional Israelite tribal society. He put an end to the long-standing tribal armies—perhaps a good for the security of the state, but a step toward the hated military conscription that would occur under Solomon. He undermined the established kinship-based system of land tenure, the inviolable rights of families, clans, and tribes to their property. He trampled on the ancient cultic traditions, seizing the venerated ark of the covenant and using it to his economic advantage. He disregarded his responsibility as an Israelite leader to ensure that justice was upheld, that the rights of the individual were maintained—a job that had once fallen to local elders but now rested on the king’s shoulders. On the whole, David ignored or disdained the needs of his subjects. Their desire simply to live as they always had was subsumed by his desire to become something new.

Amid all the national upheaval David’s kingship created, we cannot forget the human toll. As David gained power, many people died—or were murdered. Nabal, Saul, Jonathan, Abner, Ishbaal, Rechab, Baanah, Uriah, Amnon, Absalom, Amasa, Ahitophel, Sheba—and those are just the ones whose names we know. There were surely many, many others, including Saul’s remaining sons and grandsons. David and his militia must have slain hundreds if not thousands of opponents over the years—often Israelites—from David’s time in Philistia to Absalom’s revolt. Communities were destroyed: the Jebusites, the longtime inhabitants of Jerusalem, saw their entire culture wiped away so that David could have a new capital. David left a wake of death and destruction behind him as he moved mercilessly toward the throne.

We have no first-person reports of David’s life, no personal letters that might shed light on his character. We have only his actions. It is only by what he did that we can assess what kind of a man he was. He was not kind or generous. He was not loving. He was not faithful or fair. He was not honorable or trustworthy. He was not decent by almost any definition. What he was, was ambitious and willing to abandon all of these positive qualities to achieve that ambition. David was a successful monarch, but he was a vile human being.

Some may observe that David was no different from any aspiring monarch of his day, especially a usurper—that all of his actions can be seen as in line with the standards of the time, as no more than realpolitik, and that to castigate him too strongly is to ignore his cultural context. The first part of this is true enough. David was not the only person in the ancient Near East to use murder as a stepping stone to power. But to absolve him for this reason carries a faint whiff of moral relativism. Just because some people murdered to gain power in the ancient world—just as today—does not mean it was culturally acceptable. Most people were not murdering others left and right in an attempt to become king. They sacrificed potential power in exchange for the social good. And, it should be remembered, the particular society in which David lived was very clear about its intolerance for murder: “He who fatally strikes a man shall be put to death” (Exod. 21:12); “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in his image did God make man” (Gen. 9:6). Indeed, the very lengths to which the biblical authors go to absolve David of these murders—and the curses against Joab that they put into David’s mouth—demonstrate the cultural values of the ancient Israelites. David, even in his own day, was considered guilty of horrific crimes. We cannot judge him any differently.