David Ascendant

by Brian Godawa

  In the back of the train were the chained captive Jebusite leaders led on foot through the streets of the city for humiliation of the vanquished and exaltation of the vanquisher. They would be executed when the king was enthroned as the final display of power over the principalities and authorities.

  The chariots of Elohim are twice ten thousand,

  thousands upon thousands;

  Adonai is among them;

  Sinai is now in the sanctuary.

  You ascended on high,

  leading a host of captives in your train

  and receiving gifts among men,

  even among the rebellious,

  that Yahweh Elohim may dwell there.

  There were five acts to the king’s enthronement and coronation. First, the procession arrived at the palace steps where David stepped off his carriage and stood on the steps before the people. It was a small Jebusite palace and would have to be rebuilt soon with the aid of David’s ally, the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre. But that would have to wait.

  The court prophets and priests surrounded David on the top of the steps. David’s eyes met with his close confidant, Nathan the prophet, who had been with him from the earliest days before Samuel’s school of prophets had been slaughtered by the Rephaim. They shared a bond of honesty that David treasured in a court full of sycophants. The high priest Abiathar approached David. He had also been with David from the early days after escaping Saul’s murder of the priests of Nob. These men had been through much pain and violence together.

  Abiathar placed a golden crown upon David’s head. This was the very crown retrieved by Namiaza from Saul’s dead body on Gilboa. It was a crown with a bloody past of betrayal and dishonor that David would now seek to redeem with his rule.

  He was also handed the “testimony,” a large scroll that contained the words of Yahweh’s Law handed down through Moses. He was charged with the obligation to uphold that holy code in his personal conduct as well as his governance of the nation. In Israel, the king was not above the law. All men were subject and accountable under Yahweh’s kingly rule, especially the monarch. He kissed the scroll and held it high to the cheers of the crowd.

  He glanced over at his wives, who stood to the side on the steps. He now had seven of them. When he became king of Judah at Hebron, he brought his two wives Abigail and Ahinoam with him. But while there, he married four others and began to have sons and daughters. He sired six of them at Hebron alone. It was a weakness that Nathan said would be the ruin of him: he loved women. As king he justified the need for a well-populated royal family and diplomatic ties with allies. But Nathan warned him it would be a habit that would assuredly be adopted with less restraint by his sons.

  David’s biggest heartbreak stood with the six other women: Michal. During the recent civil war with Ishbaal, Saul’s son and claimant to the throne of Israel, David had negotiated the return of Michal to his household. Though she was his first love and wife of his youth, she had been stolen from David by Saul and unlawfully married to another man. Nevertheless, it had been some ten years since she had been so unjustly treated by her father, and she had learned to adjust to her new life and even love her new husband.

  When she was returned to David, her husband, Palti son of Laish, followed her, weeping for miles. Her return to a distant and changed David with her own changed heart was bad enough. But to become one of seven in a harem of wives was devastating to her heart as it was to all their hearts. Now, she could not stop longing for the singular devotion of her second husband Palti, who worshipped her and treated her like a queen. Now, she was treated with the others like a pet.

  It was the universal curse of polygamy, an institution that favored the interests of men in a patriarchal society. It reduced women to breeders and objects of male sexual taste. A different wife for each night of the week or for each whim of desire for variety. When a relational problem arose with one wife, he would simply avoid that one by moving on to another until things settled down. It was a way for the husband to skirt the responsibility of relational holiness and sacrifice. It bred male selfishness and destroyed the one flesh unity that Yahweh had originally designed for marriage. While there was no explicit command forbidding polygamy by Yahweh in the Law David now held in his hand, it certainly defied the original definition of marriage in the Pentateuch, and worked against every intention of the heart of his God.

  Michal was now trapped in it like her other six sisters were. She suffered from bouts of sadness that rendered her morose and led to sleeping more hours than was healthy. She also sought more comfort praying in the arms of Asherah, her goddess.

  Abigail dealt with the plural status differently. By virtue of her age, she became a kind of older sister to the others, encouraging them to be strong in the face of adversity and to see their value to Yahweh in spite of a devalued harem status. Because of her harsh treatment at the hands of her previous husband, Nabal, she had become a survivor. Though she was older, without the nubile and innocent nature of the younger wives, David was still drawn to her most because of her strength and how she carried herself with such royal dignity. She knew Yahweh valued her, regardless of her social status or value to the king. She did not seek the praise of man but the praise of Yahweh, and ironically, that made her more desirable to the king. To David, the notion of a strong and virtuous, queenly woman willingly submitting herself to him was far more desirable than the young and simpleminded following him out of the weakness of their youthful will. And when it came to the marriage bed, a young wife would do as she was told, but an experienced older wife knew how to please without instruction.

  The second act of enthronement and coronation was the anointing, also performed by Abiathar. David bowed before him and he withdrew a horn of oil, which he poured down over David’s head. This act indicated that the king was Yahweh’s chosen one, the messiah of the nation.

  The third act was the proclamation of the anointed king and the people’s response of clapping and acclamation, “Long live the king! Long live the king!”

  With my holy oil I have anointed him,

  so that my hand shall be established with him;

  I will crush his foes before him

  and strike down those who hate him.

  My faithfulness and my steadfast love shall be with him,

  and in my name shall his horn be exalted.

  And I will make him the firstborn,

  the highest of the kings of the earth.

  I will establish his Seed forever

  and his throne as the days of the heavens.

  For the fourth act of the enthronement and coronation, the gathered throng of royalty and palace staff proceeded inside to the palace, where they seated David as king on the throne. An enthronement hymn was sung by the minstrels that marked his assumption of power.

  “I have set my King

  on Zion, my holy hill.”

  I will tell of the decree:

  Yahweh said to me, “You are my Son;

  today I have begotten you.

  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,

  and the ends of the earth your possession.”

  David’s heart melted with the recognition of his own unworthiness to be seated on such a holy throne of Yahweh’s Chosen Seed. He reflected upon the past twenty years since Samuel the Seer first anointed him. He had been so young back then—too young. He never forgot the words of the Seer over him as the oil dripped down his face as it did this day. “I anoint you, David, son of Jesse by the authority of Yahweh, elohim of Israel.”

  He could see now what Yahweh was doing; taking the youngest runt of a litter out of an insignificant family in an unimportant town, giving him the faith to face and defeat the titanic champion of Yahweh’s worst enemy with a mere stone, inciting Israel’s own mad king to hunt him down for years as an outlaw, and forcing him to live for a time in the lair of the dragon itself, all while waiting over twenty years to fulfill a promise. It was to show Yahweh’s greatnes
s and goodness in the face of David’s own weakness. Yahweh had forced David to be broken, so that he would have to trust in Yahweh and not his own strength. He would have to seek Yahweh’s righteousness in a thoroughly depraved world.

  But he could see now how he had failed to live up to that trust. As he sat in this holy position of honor, his sins flooded his memory as if raised by the Adversary of the Divine Council: his allowance of the idolatry of his first wife, Michal, ignored for the sake of his passions; his tolerance of wickedness within his warrior ranks for the sake of a better fighting force; his extortion of Nabal’s wealth in the name of “protection”; his rationalization of his regal polygamy to cover his insatiable hunger for more women; and possibly worst of all, his harsh temper that led to excessive violence far beyond Yahweh’s “eye for an eye” justice. He would never attain the goodness of his god for which he was called. He was a man of bloodshed and it had changed him so deeply and thoroughly from that young shepherd boy who played a lyre and wooed the girls of his village. Yet, in some ways, he had merely become a more sophisticated adult version of that same passionate, intemperate fool that he had been as a youth, with his spiritual highs and earthly lows, at war within himself.

  With all these memories of his moral failures and fleshly excesses, he felt like a fraud. He did not deserve this throne. Jonathan of the house of Saul did, and he had lived the faith required for it. David had sought greatness over goodness, but saw how the good were rarely the great and the great were rarely the good. Jonathan had chosen goodness over greatness.

  But Jonathan was dead. And Yahweh had chosen David, not because of David’s righteousness, but because of Yahweh’s own mysterious purposes. Just as he had chosen Abraham out of pagan Ur, dim-witted Isaac over Ishmael, and the deceiver Jacob over Esau. Yahweh seemed to enjoy using the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, the weak and worthless things to shame the strong, and the low and despised, the things that were nothing, to bring to nothing the things that were. God used sinners and their evil to accomplish his good. But he also redeemed them and made them good.

  For I know my transgressions,

  and my sin is ever before me.

  Against you, you only, have I sinned

  and done what is evil in your sight.

  Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

  wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  Create in me a clean heart, O Elohim,

  and renew a right spirit within me.

  Cast me not away from your presence,

  and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

  Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

  and uphold me with a willing spirit…

  For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;

  you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.

  The sacrifices of Elohim are a broken spirit;

  a broken and contrite heart, O Elohim,

  you will not despise.

  The fifth and last act of the enthronement ritual had the king receive the high officials of the state, who declared their fealty to his throne and to the kingship of Yahweh Elohim over all the earth. As each member knelt before him, David reminisced over their impact on his ascendancy to kingship over the years.

  Benaiah, son of Jehoiada of Kabzeel, bent his knee and pledged his heart and soul to the king. This Judahite from the desert was his most trusted warrior. He had the kind of holy devotion that reminded David of Jonathan. He had saved David’s life from the Lion Men of Moab and the Egyptian giant who sought his head. He had an obsessive mistrust of non-Israelites and all things foreign, which made him a harsh taskmaster of the Cherethite and Pelethite bodyguard under his command. He had purified the ranks of soldiers, but David worried that his rigid righteousness was so excessive that he failed to understand faith and how it played into a convert’s identity.

  And David knew that Benaiah was driven by his guilt for having been betrayed by his Edomite lover in his past. Though he was a thoroughly devoted man of Yahweh, he had yet to discover a faith somewhere between complete suspicion of man’s evil and naïve trust in man as the image of Yahweh.

  The brothers Joab and Abishai, sons of Zeruiah, bowed the knee with their fealty to David. These two brothers from the very start had been the most fierce and ruthless in their devotion to David. They were competitive, trying to outdo each other in everything, whether deeds of greatness or acts of loyalty. Unlike Benaiah or Nathan the prophet, who challenged David all the time regarding his own obedience to Yahweh’s Law, these two were unquestioning in their own obedience to their earthly lord. Which actually disturbed David. For men who did not question their king by a higher law were men who could do much evil should their king become lawless. Without a loyalty to something higher than the king or the state, what would stop them from disobeying a god for the sake of their king? They tended to act in the name of the king before receiving royal approval, which caused David much trouble. And they seemed to have a secret between them, an oath of some kind that hid their past, hinted at by the scar on Joab’s face. It was as if their display of loyalty was an energetic attempt to redeem themselves from some shame they would never speak of.

  When David first became king of Judah, a civil war had been initiated by Saul’s General Commander, Abner, by crowning Saul’s son Ishbaal as king over Israel. Many battles for superiority ensued between Judah and Israel as the house of David and the house of Saul. Abner eventually deserted Ishbaal for David. Ishbaal was killed, resulting in David being the one king over all the tribes of the land. But in the course of these events, Abner had killed the youngest brother of Abishai and Joab. The brothers refused to believe Abner’s loyalty, and killed him in revenge for their brother’s death. David was so vexed that he cursed the house of the two brothers with perpetual sickness and violence. But he would not execute them. They had become so critical to his success and greatness that he overlooked their lack of goodness. David had succumbed to favoritism and it haunted him.

  When Ittai the Gittite bowed before David, the king considered him an ironic contrast with the two brothers before him. Ittai’s past was thoroughly confessed to David in all its excruciating detail. Ittai’s honesty and repentance made him as trusted as Benaiah. David had given Ittai command of a squad of six hundred Philistines who had joined David from Gath. They were affectionately referred to as the Gittite Brigade.

  The real tragedy was the Gittite’s own inability to believe he could be redeemed. He regretted the miserable accident of his birth as a Philistine. He showed more faith in Yahweh than any in all of Israel, and yet, his presumed identity as a Rephaim born of Nephilim blood caused him to have returning grief and doubts of his own atonement. Despite this unjustified fear, he had given up everything to follow Yahweh, even the joy of offspring with his beloved wife Ummi in order to stop his cursed bloodline. What more could illustrate the faith of a redeemed Seed of Abraham, and not the damnable Seed of the Serpent? Ittai’s mother was the Rapha, not his father, and the seed came from the father. Ittai’s genealogy was not everything he had first thought it was. What David did not tell Ittai was how much he had learned from the doubt-wracked Ittai about true believing faith.

  The rest of the Gibborim commanders and other ministers of state pledged their lives to the king in order. It was a long and torturous affair where David barely managed to stay awake. But when it was done, he felt a new surge of excitement. The coronation and enthronement was followed by a feast, where he would finally get a chance to play his lyre again with the musicians before the court. He had gotten much out of practice over the years of running and hiding and fighting. He had written during this time of painful anxiety, but did not have the opportunity to play his instruments. Now that he was ensconced in the throne, he had every intention of getting back to playing the music that soothed his soul and filled his difficult life with shalom, the peace of wholeness.

  Clap your hands, all peoples!

  Shout to Elohim with l
oud songs of joy!

  For Yahweh, the Most High, is to be feared,

  a great king over all the earth.

  He subdued peoples under us,

  and nations under our feet.

  He chose our heritage for us,

  the pride of Jacob whom he loves. Selah

  Elohim has gone up with a shout,

  Yahweh with the sound of a trumpet.

  Sing praises to Elohim, sing praises!

  Sing praises to our King, sing praises!

  For Elohim is the King of all the earth;

  sing praises with a psalm!

  Elohim reigns over the nations;

  Elohim sits on his holy throne.

  The princes of the peoples gather

  as the people of the Elohim of Abraham.

  For the shields of the earth belong to Elohim;

  he is highly exalted!

  David would have a hard time enjoying the celebration, because his next plan preoccupied his thoughts. It would be a bold move that would require spending much money and the enlistment of the pagan king Hiram of Tyre to help him.

  Chapter 79

  Phoenician laborers, carpenters, and stone masons filled the streets of the City of David. Large logs of cedar from the forests of Lebanon were carted to a work area along with quarried stones to build the palace of King David. The city of Tyre was known throughout the world for its master craftsmen and architectural artistry. Their buildings were the finest in all of Canaan, so David wanted the very best of designs for his own palace residence.

  It was a perfectly political agreement between the two kingdoms. Hiram of Tyre wanted safe trade route access to Anatolia in the north, Mesopotamia in the west, and Egypt in the south; David wanted quality Phoenician craftsmanship and access to the greatest port of sea trade in all of Canaan. The Phoenicians worshipped Asherah and Ba’al and other deities, but artistic design was not in itself evil. Yahweh had given a Canaanite temple design for the Tabernacle to the Israelites in the desert, complete with outer sanctuary and holy of holies, just like the pagan peoples Israel was to annihilate. Even their sacrifices were similar. But Yahweh did not curse the creativity of the idolaters. Though morally corrupt, the Sea People were still imagers of Yahweh with their artistic imagination. An aesthetic style was only evil when it was used for evil purposes. But it was morally sanctified when used for righteous purposes.