The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero Read online

  Thus the aspects of this narrative that are foreign to the modern genre of history writing—those that are more biblical than historical—all work toward the same ends: to denigrate Nabal and to raise up David. This can hardly be coincidence—especially when, as we will see, this pattern holds for the entirety of the David story in the two books of Samuel. Nor should it be surprising, since David is the unparalleled hero of the Hebrew Bible. He is the king against whom the Bible measures all subsequent kings and who stands unsurpassed by any who followed him. He is, as we have seen, the symbol of Israel’s incipient messianic hopes. We should not be surprised that the biblical version of his life is weighted in his favor.

  To realize that the biblical narrative is pro-David, however, is also to realize that it cannot be read at face value if we want to know the real history of David’s life. But recovering the historical David is not, unfortunately, as simple as merely reading and remembering the often overlooked biblical account of his life, as if a deeper reverence for the scriptures would lead to historical truth. Quite the contrary: the Bible is a necessary source of information, but it is neither sufficient nor particularly trustworthy. For much of the past three thousand years, and for many people still today, such a statement is impossible to accept. For some, the biblical narrative is considered to be unimpeachably true, as the Bible bears the stamp of God. If it was written by God or with divine inspiration, there is no reason to doubt it—although, it may be noted, the books of Samuel and Kings with which we are concerned here make no claims for divine origin or inspiration, and indeed no one considered them to have such qualities for several hundred years after they were written. The unassailability of the biblical text is a faith commitment, not a historical fact. The attempt to recover historical fact means relinquishing, at least for this purpose, the faith commitments that preclude any challenge to the received tradition.

  This means recognizing that the Bible is a product of human minds, and that, like all literature, it is subject to the biases and agendas, both conscious and unconscious, of its authors. The critical study of the Bible entails pressing against those biases, peeling back those agendas. Scholars of literature call this reading with a “hermeneutic of suspicion”—being aware that the conclusions to which a piece of writing leads us are those to which its author wants us to be led, and stepping back to ask how and why such efforts were made. We must first remove the nonhistorical pro-David elements from the story, to expose the basic events underneath. When we do this, it is harder to maintain the overwhelmingly positive picture of David we get from the Bible. In the case of the David and Nabal story, for instance, we are left with the stark sequence of events as presented at the beginning of this introduction—and, when we attempt to understand those events from an objective historical perspective, we are left with the strong possibility that David may in fact have been running a protection racket, may in fact have killed Nabal, and may in fact have covered up his acquisition of Nabal’s property by marrying Abigail. Given this potentially damning depiction of David, it is no wonder that the biblical author went to such lengths to render the story in pro-David terms. To use a modern analogy, the biblical narrative may be considered the ancient equivalent of political spin: it is a retelling, even a reinterpretation, of events, the goal of which is to absolve David of any potential guilt and to show him in a positive light.

  As spin, it has been remarkably effective, in no small part for the simple reason that it is from the Bible. The revelation of private thoughts, conversations, and events; the characterizations of the participants; the divine intervention—all of these, and with them the decidedly pro-David interpretation of the events, have been taken as representing the historical truth, or at the very least the moral truth. The Jewish historian Josephus, retelling the story in the first century CE, plays up Nabal’s wickedness and David’s innocence: “Nabal had died through his own wickedness and had given [David] revenge, while [David] himself still had clean hands . . . the wicked are pursued by God, who overlooks no act of man but repays the good in kind, while he inflicts swift punishment upon the wicked.”3 The ancient rabbis, perhaps realizing that the biblical account did not sufficiently justify Nabal’s death, devised a number of rationales not found in the text, from greed to pride to idolatry.4 Matthew Henry’s commentary on this chapter, from the early eighteenth century, portrays David as exceedingly humble in his request and emphasizes his need: “David, it seems, was in such distress that he would be glad to be beholden to him [Nabal], and did in effect come a begging to his door. What little reason have we to value the wealth of this world when so great a churl as Nabal abounds and so great a saint as David suffers want!”5

  Ironically, while postbiblical readers and commentators bought into the pro-David spin in Samuel, other biblical authors writing about David were made uncomfortable by it. The author of Chronicles, one of the latest books of the Hebrew Bible, seems to have recognized that even when interpreted in favor of David, the events described in Samuel are still rather unpleasant stories to be telling about Israel’s glorious king. Thus in Chronicles we find no trace of the David and Nabal story—in fact, David’s entire time in the wilderness, which occupies twelve chapters in Samuel, is reduced to the list of warriors who went to the wilderness to support David as king. It is noteworthy that these men are described as warriors—this is the Chronicler’s revision of Samuel’s description of David’s band as “every man who was bitter of spirit.” Any potentially negative aspect of David’s life and actions to be found in Samuel, down to the smallest detail, is fully expunged in Chronicles. The David of Chronicles is unimpeachable—which seems to be precisely what the Chronicler had in mind when he rewrote the narrative of Samuel.

  Our modern cultural memory of David, then, stands in a long line of increasing idealization and reconstruction. From the spin of Samuel to the cleansing of David’s image in Chronicles to the messianic connection in the New Testament to the present, the historical David has been successively and successfully diminished, replaced by the legend we are now familiar with.

  RECOGNITION THAT EVEN THE Bible presents an idealized David—and that the Bible is the only written source of information we have about David’s life—has led some scholars in the past few decades to claim that David never existed at all. They argue that the biblical David is not the idealization of a real historical figure, but is rather an invention out of whole cloth, a projection into the past by later kings who wanted to legitimate their lineage and status and who created a legendary founding figure against whom to compare themselves. Yet this is akin to claiming that England’s Henry V never existed if we had no source of information other than Shakespeare’s idealized good king. To a certain extent, these scholars have bought the spin of the Bible just as fully as those who, like Matthew Henry, call David a saint.

  It is, in fact, the very existence of the biblical spin that argues in favor of David’s existence. There is no need to spin a story that has no basis in reality. If the fundamental aim of spin is to say “it may seem that the event happened one way, but it really happened another way,” then there has to have been an actual event in the first place. And who, given the chance to create a legendary figure from the past to serve as an ancestor and model, would invent a story such as that of David and Nabal? When the stories in the two books of Samuel are understood as pro-David spin, the question of David’s existence is rendered moot: he must have existed for the text to look like this. Moreover, the stories about David must have been written relatively soon after the events they describe, for they are grounded in the assumption that their audience knew something about those events.6

  The task, then, is to find the middle ground between accepting the biblical narratives at face value and rejecting them altogether. This entails digging beneath the pro-David spin of the two books of Samuel—removing, as we did with the David and Nabal story, those elements of the narrative that we recognize as generically nonhistorical—in order to access the fundamental
events of the past, and then trying to reconstruct the more likely story of what really happened.

  In doing this, it is important to remember that the historical David was part of a very different place and time, the ancient Near East. The political conventions of the ancient Near East, and the cultural history of early Israel, provide a crucial lens through which we must view and evaluate David’s actions as he seeks to attain and retain the throne. Similarly, understanding the literary conventions of the ancient Near East will reveal that the literary techniques used in the retelling and interpretation of David’s life—the spin—were not uncommon, especially in stories about and by kings. David as a person and David as a literary figure participate equally in their ancient context and are illuminated by that context.

  Such is the aim of this book: to bring the historical David to life by reaching back through the accumulated legend, beyond the pro-David agenda of the biblical text, into the ancient world in which David roamed. This process is revealing: the flesh-and-blood man is far more interesting than the mythical king. The legendary David is more a marble statue than a living personality, more a symbol than a man. The historical David, by contrast, is ambitious and clever, persuasive and threatening, not always in power but almost always in control. He is not someone we might want to emulate, but he is someone that we might recognize.

  The process of uncovering this long-lost man also means revealing something about the biblical authors: why they wrote, what they wanted, and how they accomplished their goal of transforming David into the legendary figure we know today. They did their job remarkably well: the biblical depiction of David has held sway for thousands of years. These human authors are part of the story of David, almost as much as David himself. They are equally a part of David’s world, and neither the king nor his hagiographers can be understood in isolation from each other.

  WE ARE CULTURALLY INVESTED in a particular view of David as a central figure in the founding of both a nation and a religion. David the man is not easily dissociated from David the legend. And his legend has been of lasting importance to Jews and Christians alike. Those who consider themselves part of the nation of Israel, either literally or metaphorically, look to David as their founding figure. Both Judaism and Christianity recognize him as the origin of much practice and belief. The religious cult that he inaugurated in Jerusalem would become the temple, where Israel would worship almost uninterrupted for a thousand years and the sacrificial offerings of which would serve into the present as the basis for Jewish prayer and ritual. The psalms that David is said to have written have entered every Jewish and Christian liturgy and are held up throughout Judeo-Christian faith as models of prayer and piety. The messiah—the one who has already come in Christianity, and who is yet to come in Judaism—is believed to be a descendant of David, the original “man after God’s own heart.”

  Past, present, and future are all tied back to David. Every culture values its founding myths, the stories of how it came to be. They provide definition; they explain why a culture exists and why it is different from other cultures. George Washington is venerated in the United States because he embodied the sort of steely resolve and steady leadership that this country aspires to demonstrate to the world. The legend of Washington and the cherry tree speaks to the value of honesty. We set aside aspects of Washington’s life, such as the fact that he was an extraordinarily wealthy slave-owner, that do not comport with our vision of him. For Judeo-Christian tradition, David serves the same purpose. God singled David out despite his humble beginnings, just as he singled out Israel. David actively demonstrated his faith in God, both in action and in words, just as Jews and Christians seek to do. Because David is seen as the model, it is natural that his failings should be excised from his legend. They undermine the purpose of having the legend in the first place.

  At the same time that founding figures are understood as models, they are also mirrors for the values of later generations. This can be seen already in the biblical texts about David: the two books of Kings, written at the close of the monarchic era (mid–sixth century BCE), elevate David to the perfect king; the two books of Chronicles, written when the temple dominated Israelite society (ca. 400 BCE), value David as a religious leader. And so it is in every generation. The rabbis of the Talmud discussed David’s prayer practices because that was central to their worldview.7 John Calvin in the sixteenth century focused on David as a model of piety.8 When Israel became a state in 1948, it adopted as its flag the symbol known as the Star of David, an ancient Jewish emblem traditionally believed to have been emblazoned on David’s shield when he went to war. The symbolism of recalling David’s military glory in the moment of Israeli independence is hard to miss.

  What we say and think about David, both as a model and as a mirror, is directly and deeply connected with what we say and think about ourselves as modern Jews and Christians. What would it mean if we discovered that the historical David was in fact quite different from what we imagine or desire? For almost three millennia we have had only increasingly good things to say about him. We have basked in the reflected glory of Israel’s great king—his deeds, his words, his faith. To challenge David’s legend is thus to open to debate what it means to be a descendant of David, be it nationally, ethnically, or religiously.

  It is because the idealized David is important to us now that the historical David has any significance at all. To rediscover the historical David is to realize that behind the accumulated legend there was a living, breathing man, in a distant place and time, whose deeds, and the telling of them, were responsible for much of who we are today. It is this link across the millennia that makes the search for the historical David both risky and necessary. It is surely easier to rest content with the pleasant image of David preserved in tradition. But in doing this, we allow tradition to eclipse the past in which it is rooted. Some parts of the past—the Exodus from Egypt, for example—might never be recovered, and tradition is all we have. But when the history is there to be rediscovered, we ignore it at our peril. We are defined by the distance between what happened and how we tell the story. It is therefore necessary to know what happened, what didn’t happen, and how to tell the two apart.

  Chapter 1

  David’s Youth

  THE MYTHICAL ORIGINS OF THE PSALMIST AND GIANT-SLAYER

  VERY OFTEN IN THE BIBLE a character’s birth story anticipates and identifies his or her significance. Isaac is the miraculous child of Abraham and Sarah’s old age, the very embodiment of God’s promise to make Abraham into a great nation. Jacob emerges from the womb clutching Esau’s heel, foreshadowing his life of trickery and usurpation. The infant Moses is saved from death by being hidden in a basket among the reeds of the Nile, just as years later he would save the Israelites from destruction at the Sea of Reeds. Samson’s birth is announced to his mother by an angel, because Samson, the angel reveals, will be the one to defeat the Philistines. Samuel, the great prophet and judge, is born in accordance with Hannah’s faithful prayer. And, of course, Jesus is marked even from before his birth as conceived by the Holy Spirit and destined to redeem Israel from its sins.

  Given the litany of biblical heroes who are provided with birth narratives, it is somewhat surprising that of David’s birth—indeed of his entire childhood—we know absolutely nothing. The Bible gives us only the barest facts: David’s hometown is Bethlehem. The name of his father is Jesse. He has seven older brothers, only the first three of whom are named.1 The family profession is shepherding. In short, David is a nobody. He is from a minor village in the (then) unimportant region of Judah, the youngest son of a man with no claim to wealth or fame, a mere shepherd. His conception and birth go unnoticed by any divine being, and even by the Bible itself.

  At the same time, everyone loves an underdog, and David fits the bill perfectly. If someone with a background like David’s could eventually become the great king of Israel, then, it would seem, there is hope for all of us. The Bible relates two stories of how the t
eenage David rose from his humble origins to prominence in Saul’s kingdom: as Saul’s lyre-player and as the slayer of Goliath.2 These stories, from 1 Samuel 16 and 17, respectively, are the most famous episodes from David’s life, though they resonate in different ways.

  The first image of David to appear in the Bible is as a musician: he is the youth brought to Saul’s court to play the lyre and ease the king’s troubled mind with his sweet music. This is also the story with the longest afterlife, as David’s youthful skill with the lyre is intimately connected in the popular imagination with his lifelong status as the author of the psalms. David is the quintessential lyricist, and he is perhaps just as famous for the songs he wrote as for anything else he may have done. After his death, David’s authorship of the psalms quickly became the defining act of his life.

  David’s connection to the psalms was recognized and valued already in very ancient times. At the end of his life he recites a song to the Lord, recorded in 2 Samuel 22, and this song is none other than what we know as Psalm 18. According to Chronicles, David was the first to institute the regular singing of songs to the Lord in the temple (1 Chron. 16:7). Most notably, a full 73 of the 150 psalms in the Hebrew Bible have David’s name in their superscriptions. Even before the turn of the common era the psalms had become so thoroughly associated with David that they could be referred to simply by his name: in the Dead Sea Scrolls we find references to “the book of Moses and the books of the prophets and David.”3 The same is true of the New Testament: only in Acts 1:20 is a quotation from Psalms introduced as such: “For it is written in the book of Psalms . . .” Most often, the words of the Psalter are introduced with reference to David: “For David himself says in the book of Psalms” (Luke 20:42), or, far more frequently, simply “David said . . . ,” or “David declared. . . .”4 David has become synonymous with the book of Psalms, just like Moses with the laws of the Torah and Solomon with the wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The rabbis of the Talmud stated this outright: “David wrote the book of the Psalms.”5