by Harold Bloom
Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel.
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!
2 Samuel 1:17–27
Verse 23 is particularly beautiful:
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
We can wonder as to the nature of David’s love for Jonathan, as in verse 26:
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
There may well be homoerotic overtones, but they are crowded out by the poem’s political duplicity. It clearly overstates David’s affection for both Jonathan and Saul. David seems to have loved only two people: his tragic son, Absalom, and his wife, Bathsheba, for whom his lust was surpassing.
It has always puzzled me that David is forgiven by Hebrew tradition for his own relationship to the Philistines. When in flight from Saul, he heads a group of freebooters, and is a vassal of the Philistines. Yet he ends the Philistine menace, and for that achievement much is forgiven. Whereas the Yahwist’s saga tells the story of an entire people, the tale of David is a very different fiction. It is the first portrait of an artist who is both beloved of God and a national leader.
David is both a usurper and a true king. He is a musician and a poet, and very difficult to judge. He can be compassionate when it is useful, but also ruthless. I find in him the ultimate model for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. David and Hamlet alike could be termed a siege of contraries. They inspire love but they do not return it. Hamlet will always be the hero of Western consciousness. But David is also a religious personality, and that increases his complexity. Like Hamlet, David is an incarnate poem. He dances naked before the Ark, and he grieves for his dead son, Absalom.
In 2 Samuel 11, David seduces Bathsheba, the wife of his warrior Uriah the Hittite, then arranges for Uriah to die in battle. In chapter 12, a prophet, Nathan, tells David a parable that the King is unable to understand.
And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor.
The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds:
But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.
And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him.
And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die:
And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.
And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul;
And I gave thee thy master’s house, and thy master’s wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things.
Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.
Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife.
2 Samuel 12:1–10
The superb directness of Nathan gives us that great indictment in four words: “Thou art the man.” The phrasing was originally William Tyndale’s and is a true instance of the Hebrew sublime. Its laconic force is unmatchable:
Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.
For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.
And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.
Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die.
And Nathan departed unto his house. And the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.
David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth.
And the elders of his house arose, and went to him, to raise him up from the earth: but he would not, neither did he eat bread with them.
And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. And the servants of David feared to tell him that the child was dead: for they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him, and he would not hearken unto our voice: how will he then vex himself, if we tell him that the child is dead?
But when David saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead: therefore David said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead.
Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.
Then said his servants unto him, What thing is this that thou hast done? thou didst fast and weep for the child, while it was alive; but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread.
And he said, While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live?
But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.
2 Samuel 12:11–23
David sorrows fiercely at the death of the boy he had fathered upon Bathsheba. His mourning is total. But when it is clear that the child indeed is lost forever, David makes a great recovery. He controls both his grief and his tragic acceptance of irreparable loss. I find it extraordinarily moving that he is so firmly in command of the vicissitudes of our lives. Who can forget “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me”? It sums up our relationship to all our loved ones who have preceded us into the valley of the shadow of death.
There is a great surge of force as we move from 2 Samuel 13 through 1 Kings 2, the Succession Narrative that takes us from David to Solomon, another of Bathsheba’s sons. William Faulkner, with his genius for matching the Hebrew sublime, composed the most powerful of his novels, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), employing this great Davidic myth.
The heart of the Succession Narrative is Absalom’s rebellion. Absalom, a kind of reincarnation of the young David, is his father’s favorite son, which adds poignance to his attempted usurpation of the kingdom:
And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father’s concubines, which he hath left to keep the house; and all Israel shall hear that thou art abhorred of thy father: then shall the hands of all that are with thee be strong.
So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.
2 Samuel 16:21–22
William Tyndale powerfully rendered the line in verse 21 as “For when all Israel shall hear that thou hast made thy father to stink.” Here is the KJB’s famous lament of David for the slain Absalom:
And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
2 Samuel 18:33
Strong as that is, I prefer William Tyndale’s version, since he conveys best of all the wildness of David’s grief:
And the king was moved and went up to a chamber over the gate and wept. And as he went thus he said: my son Absalom, my son, my son, my son Absalom, would to God I had died for thee Absalom, my son, my son.
I wonder what William Faulkner would have made of this had he looked into Tyndale’s Bible. With the death of Absalom, David’s story ebbs. It is unclear whether Bathsheba and Nathan urge David to name Solomon, or if this was in fact his own decision. Though Solomon is second in prestige only to David among all of the kings of Israel, he is an ambiguous personality. He builds the Temple, but we wonder why he should have been esteemed not just for wealth and erotic intensity but also for wisdom. David is an endlessly fascinating human being. By comparison, Solomon is a mystery. The book of Kings is highly ambivalent toward him, and his supposed authorship of the Song of Songs and of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) is unpersuasive.
Through 1 Kings 1–11, the story of Solomon seems to be told with considerable irony. We do not feel any affection for him at all. Instead we long for his charismatic father. Wealth, worldly achievement, contemporary fame—all these fade away where there is no personality.
The Hebrew Prophets
THE DISTINCTION between poetry and prophecy is always tenuous. The Hebrew word navi is mistranslated by the Greek prophetes, merely someone who interprets an oracle. A navi himself is the oracle. He answers the Yahweh-call. Each time he commences he asserts, “The Yahweh-word was to me.” The Hebrew for “word,” davar, means an act, as well as a word or a thing, and takes on the aura of the truth.
It always seems absurd to me that the Hebrew prophets should have been tamed by canonical inclusion. Making Amos into scripture is an act of interpretive violence. All institutionalizing of prophecy is betrayal. I myself greatly prefer First Isaiah and Amos to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, because Yahweh is more dangerously extreme in the latter two, most in the disturbed Ezekiel.
Prophecy indeed is a mode of poetry, but only one. Even deep readers have difficulty in trying to sort out the spiritual and aesthetic strands in their response to the Bible. I regard such difficulty as inevitable. Prophecy would be meaningless without Yahweh. But Yahweh is an uncanny, dangerous, altogether outrageous God. Though he is given to proclaiming his ethos, that always seems to me questionable. And his logos hardly exists when we compare it with his exuberant pathos, in which his legatee is King Lear.
To be Yahweh’s chosen man is a dreadful fate. Though the Judaic sages insisted there were fifty-five canonical prophets, I myself cannot locate nearly that many. Their prophet of prophets is Moses. To that, one responds that if Elijah and the First Isaiah are prophets, then Moses is something else. He is a literary character. But, then, so are Elijah and Isaiah. And though we resist this, so are Yahweh and Jesus.
All the prophets have extraordinary personalities, Ezekiel and Jeremiah in particular. Though they are great poets, they oscillate between bipolarity and psychosis. I always think that, if Ezekiel and Jeremiah are prophets, then Amos and Isaiah of Jerusalem are something better, because their message is social justice.
Oral prophecy is very difficult to apprehend. Yet it puzzles me that only Isaiah of Jerusalem seems as much a historical figure as the purely legendary Elijah and Elisha. Elijah and his disciple Elisha are uncanny. They work miracles, and they have a power of resurrection. Elisha, a rather nasty blunderer, is a much more archaic personality than the transcendental Elijah. The prestige of Elijah is so enormous that it rivals the high place of Moses. I still remember my awe at every Passover seder as I sleepily stared at the wine glass set aside for Eliayhu ha-Navi. Sometimes I had the fantasy that the fiery prophet had indeed passed by and drained the wine.
Elijah never dies. Instead he ascends to Yahweh in a chariot of fire. His anxious disciple Elisha does the reverse, and returns to earth at the end. I personally am delighted by that splendid couple, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. “Ahab” was appropriated by Herman Melville for the great avenger who sails the whaler Pequod to its doom. Nobody now names their daughter Jezebel, which I regret. In the same spirit that I argue the Macbeths to be the happiest married couple in Shakespeare, I vote for Ahab and Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible. Though Jezebel and Ahab end badly, their mutual compact is never abrogated.
The first appearance of Elijah is sublime and disruptive. It is driven by a divine impetus, as you might expect from a prophet whose own name fuses “El,” “the almighty,” and “Yahweh.” Here is the extraordinary swiftness in which Elijah first comes into our view:
And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.
And the word of the Lord came unto him, saying,
Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.
And it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.
So he went and did according unto the word of the Lord: for he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.
And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook.
1 Kings 17:1–6
Yahweh’s opponent, Baal, is a rain god. Elijah simply erupts. The village of Tishbe is unknown. With Yahweh’s authority, his prophet Elijah proclaims drought. From that moment on, his career will be a continuous miracle, until his ascension in the flaming chariot. Much more than his New Testament anxious imitator, John the Baptist, Elijah is a Yahweh-like phenomenon. He is at once transcendent and immanent, a divine fire and “a hairy man.”
Always a solitary until he accepts Elisha as his disciple, Elijah is a frightening precursor for the entire tradition of prophets. His most famous challenge is to the 450 prophets of Baal, gathered together by Jezebel with a group of four hundred more prophets of Asherah, the mother of the gods of Canaan. The agon takes place upon Mount Carmel. Elijah stands alone against 850 false prophets and satirizes them into absurdity.
And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.
Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the Lord; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men.
Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under:
And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.
1 Kings 18:21–24
Elijah’s ironic derision breaks forth with splendid intensity when Baal simply fails to respond.
And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
And they cri
ed aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.
And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.
And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down.
1 Kings 18:27–30
The fire of Yahweh comes down. The absurd contest ends. His life threatened by Jezebel’s vengeance, Elijah flees south of Beersheba into the wilderness of the Negev. He stands upon Horeb, sacred mountain of Yahweh, and a great epiphany follows:
And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah?
And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.
And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
1 Kings 19:9–12
The Hebrew qol demmanah daqah is oxymoronic. It could be translated as “a soundless stillness,” “a small voice of silence,” or, better yet, “a voice of thin silence.” The King James Version triumphs in “a still small voice.” I can think of only two ways of understanding Elijah: that of Jezebel and Ahab, and that of Elisha. Ahab is so afraid of Elijah that he does not dare execute him. The ferocious Jezebel would risk anything. But both end as Elijah prophesied. Ahab is slain in battle, and the dogs lick up his blood; poor Jezebel is defenestrated, and much of her corpse is devoured by dogs.
