“And it came to pass in the morning, when the wine was gone out of Nabal, that his wife told him these things,” the Bible reports, “and his heart died within him, and he became as a stone.” (1 Sam. 25:37)
Ten days after his attack of apoplexy—or was it heartbreak over his wife's infatuation with the bandit-chieftain?—Nabal was out of the way. “The Lord smote Nabal,” the Bible reports, putting a proper theological spin on Nabal's convenient death (1 Sam. 25:38). David thanked God for his good fortune—and then he sent a hasty but confident proposal of marriage to his benefactress: “David has sent us to take you to be his wife,” his messengers explained. Just as quickly, Abigail accepted. “And she arose, and bowed down with her face to the earth,” the Bible reports, “and said: ‘Behold thy handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord’ ”—which David's messengers understood to mean “yes.” (1 Sam. 25:41)
Then Abigail rose to her feet, mounted her ass, and rode away from her dead husband's estate in the company of David's men and five of her maidservants. Promptly upon her arrival at David's encampment, the widow Abigail and the handsome outlaw who had come so close to killing her first husband were wed.
Abigail was only the latest of David's wives—David was still married to Michal, whom he had left behind in Gibeah, and later he managed to pick up another wife in the nearby village of Jezreel,32 a woman named Ahinoam. As befits a king, David was already assembling what would one day become his harem.
HIS SUBTLE WAYS
Now David and his band and their camp followers sought refuge in a place called Ziph, a remote stretch of wooded hill-country in the land of Judah. But the locals were no more enamored of David than Nabal had been, and they sent a delegation all the way to Gibeah to petition the king to rid them of him. They informed Saul exactly where David was hiding out—“The hill of Hachi-lah,” they reported with military precision, “which is on the south of Jeshimon”33—and begged the king to march against him. (1 Sam. 23:19)
“O king, come down,” pleaded the men of Ziph, “and our part shall be to deliver him up into the king's hand.” (1 Sam. 23:20)
“Perhaps he is planning some trickery!” the king fretted to himself, and so he insisted on confirmation of David's whereabouts before committing himself to a campaign. (1 Sam. 23:22) (AB) “Go, I pray you, and make yet more sure, for it is told me that he deals very subtly,” King Saul told the delegation. “Find out all the lurking-places where he hides himself, and come back to me—then I will go with you, and if he be in the land, I will search him out among all the thousands of Judah.” (1 Sam. 23:23)34
Whether inspired by his old paranoia or his grasp of strategy and tactics, Saul's demand for a fresh intelligence report turned out to be a sound move. For just as Saul had feared, David had already slipped out of Ziph and headed into the wilderness of Maon.35 When Saul learned of David's latest “lurking-place,” he mustered three thousand picked men and marched toward the mountain stronghold.
The king's army approached the mountain from the side opposite David's encampment. Saul divided his men into two units, sending them around both sides of the mountain in a classic pincer movement. Before he was able to close the circle and cut off any chance of escape, a courier from the royal headquarters appeared with an alarming message.
“Haste thee, and come,” the messenger told Saul, “for the Philistines have made a raid upon the land.”
With the capture of David so tantalizingly close, Saul was forced to break off his attack, turn his army around, and march back to face the Philistines. By the time he returned to the wilderness to resume his pursuit of David, the fugitive was on the run again. But, yet again, David's enemies among his own people betrayed his whereabouts to the king.
“Behold,” the latest informer addressed Saul, “David is in the wilderness of En-gedi.”
En-gedi was (and is) an oasis near the western shore of the Dead Sea, an idyllic place where shepherds watered their sheep at the spring-fed pools of sweet water and wild goats gamboled among the cliffs and outcrops. There Saul ran David to ground, and the young man seemed within the king's grasp. (1 Sam. 24:3)
A coarse but colorful tale is preserved in the Book of Samuel about the encounter between Saul and David at En-gedi. At an awkward moment during the search-and-destroy mission, the king sought out a cave among the rocks in order to defecate.36 By chance, David and his men were hiding in the deeper reaches of the same cave, and they watched in amazement as the king of Israel squatted on the cave floor and relieved himself in supposed privacy. How easy it would be for David to slip up behind the king at this vulnerable moment and strike him down once and for all!
“The day has come!” whispered David's henchmen in excitement. “Yahweh has put your enemy into your hands, as he promised he would, and you may do what you please with him!” (1 Sam. 24:5)
But David, in a sudden display of piety and integrity, declared himself to be shocked—shocked!—at the suggestion. “God forbid that I should harm my master,” he scolded. “He is the Lord's anointed!” (1 Sam. 24:7)37
Here, as elsewhere in the Book of Samuel, one of the biblical sources has taken care to absolve David of any culpability, whether direct or indirect, for the fate of King Saul and his dynasty. Still, David was not too pure of heart to engage in a prank that can be seen as a tactic of psychological warfare. Sneaking up behind Saul as he was defecating, David drew his dagger, sliced off the hem of Saul's robe, and then slipped away unnoticed. Moments later, as Saul rearranged his garments and left the cave, David followed the king and called out to him.
“My lord the king!” David said. “Why do you harken to the ones who say: ‘David seeks to hurt you’?” (1 Sam. 24:9)38
Saul must have been no less amazed at the sight of his fugitive son-in-law standing above him on a rocky crag than David had been only moments before at the sight of the king of Israel squatting in the cave.
“Behold, this day your eyes have seen how Yahweh delivered you into my hand in the cave,” David continued. “Some bade me kill you, but I said: ‘I will not put forth my hand against my lord, for he is Yahweh's anointed.’ ” Then David held up the strip of cloth that he had just sliced from the royal cloak. “My father, see the skirt of thy robe in my hand!” he cried. “I cut off the skirt of thy robe, but I killed you not!” (1 Sam. 24:11–12)39
Saul, always thrown off-balance by sudden upwellings of emotion, was overwhelmed by the tender words that fell from the lips of the man whom he regarded as a traitor and an assassin, a conspirator and a usurper, a bandit and an outlaw.
“Is this thy voice, my son David?” And Saul lifted up his voice, and wept. And he said to David: “Thou art more righteous than I;40 for thou hast rendered unto me good, whereas I have rendered unto thee evil.”
(1 Sam. 24:17–18)
The interlude, which reads like a fairy tale from first to last, ends abruptly and implausibly as Saul concedes his crown to David: “And now, behold, I know that you will surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel will be established in your hand.” Then the reigning king is reduced to begging the future king for mercy: “Swear now to me by the Lord that you will not cut off my seed after me.” (1 Sam. 24:21–22)41
So the two bitter enemies part as friends in the biblical account of the encounter at En-gedi. But history reasserts itself when the narrative resumes a moment later: David is again on the run with Saul in pursuit, as if the encounter between the once and future kings of Israel at the fairy-tale oasis had never happened at all.
RETURN OF THE MADMAN
After so many hot pursuits and breathless escapes, David tired of the fugitive life and started to yearn for a more secure existence. “One of these days I shall be killed by Saul,” he thought to himself, apparently calculating that his good fortune might not last forever. And the Bible is blunt about what David did next: “The best thing for me to do will be to escape into Philistine territory. Then Saul will lose all further hope of finding me anywhere in
Israel, search as he may, and I shall escape his clutches.” (1 Sam. 27:1)42
So once again David sought refuge with the hated enemy of his people. He resolved to offer himself and his skills as a soldier of fortune to the king of Gath, and so he returned to the court of King Achish, where he had once played the mad fool to save his own life. With six hundred armed men under his command, the battle-hardened guerrilla commander cut a considerably more formidable figure than the lone fugitive whom Achish had beheld on David's earlier visit. A bit of David's customary swagger can be detected in his bold words to Achish.
“Grant me a place in one of the cities in your country,” he proposed. Then he posed a rhetorical question that was tinged with menace: “Why should I remain in the royal city with your majesty?” (1 Sam. 27:6)43
David and his army did not intend to leave the king and his city in peace unless they were given safe refuge elsewhere, or so his words implied. And the threat was not lost on Achish, who evidently decided that it would be better to comply with David's demand than to try to expel him from Gath by force of arms. So he gave David the town of Ziklag.44 “That is why,” the Bible notes in passing, “Ziklag still belongs to the kings of Judah to this day” (1 Sam. 27:6)45—an intriguing aside that suggests the passage was composed at a time when men with David's blood in their veins still reigned in ancient Israel. Harried out of his homeland by King Saul, forced to seek protection wherever he could find it, and perfectly willing to make a deal with the traditional enemy of his people, the future king of Israel was now a vassal of the Philistines.
David and his men marched out of Gath and set up a base of operations in Ziklag. They were soon joined by their wives and families, and the army in exile was fortified by Benjaminite defectors who had apparently lost faith in Saul, at least according to the revisionist account in the Book of Chronicles: “They were among the mighty men, his helpers in war.” (1 Chron. 12:1) The escape from Judah into Philistia had accomplished precisely what David had hoped for: “And it was told to Saul that David was fled to Gath, and he sought no more again for him.” (1 Sam. 27:4)
“SURELY HE HAS BECOME LOATHSOME TO HIS OWN PEOPLE”
Safely ensconced in the land of the Philistines under the patronage of the king of Gath, David and his men supplied themselves by raiding the nomadic desert tribes whose settlements and pasturages lay to the south of Gath in the direction of Egypt, “the Geshurites and the Gizrites and the Amalekites.” (1 Sam. 27:8) The Bible suggests that he confined his predations to non-Israelites and left his own people unmolested, but confirms in plainspoken language that David was merciless toward his victims.
And David smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive, and took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels, and the apparel.
(1 Sam. 27:9)
Significantly, David no longer bothered to consult Yahweh about his choice of targets, and no longer did he dignify his raids as blows against the Philistines, as he did when he marched to the “rescue” of the townspeople of Keilah. Indeed, David dutifully reported back to his new liege, King Achish, with a daily accounting of his plunder.
“Where was your raid today?” the Philistine king would ask.
“Against the Negev of Judah,” David would respond, naming the desert stretches of his own tribal homeland, “and against the Negev of the Jerahmeelites, and against the Negev of the Kenites.” (1 Sam. 27:10)46
Here David was teetering on the verge of treason. According to the conventional reading of the biblical text by pious commentators, David's reference to “the Negev of Judah” was meant to deceive the king of Gath into believing that David was raiding the towns and villages of his tribal homeland as a loyal vassal of the Philistines when, in fact, he confined himself to murdering and plundering only the traditional enemies of his people, such as the Amalekites. But the text raises the unsettling notion that David was willing to make victims of his own people, too—an interpretation that would explain why many Judahites were so quick to inform on him to King Saul.
Whether or not David was a traitor in service to the Philistines may be debatable, but the Bible leaves no doubt at all that he committed the kinds of atrocities that we call war crimes. As if already considering the political repercussions of his banditry on his future efforts to gain the throne, David adopted a brutal policy of leaving no eyewitnesses to his deeds.
And David left neither man nor woman alive to bring them back to Gath, saying: “Lest they should tell on us.”
(1 Sam. 27:11)
The biblical author seems to anticipate a gasp of horror from his readers—“You mean David did that?”—and so he affirms the accuracy of his account. “So did David,” the Bible continues, “and so hath been his manner all the while he dwelt in the country of the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 27:11)
Here David betrays a cynicism so deep that it still has the power to shock us: the man who had won the hearts and minds of all Israel is apparently willing to afflict his own people on behalf of their worst enemy, and he makes sure that no one will be left alive to testify against him later on. Achish's cynicism, however, was even deeper. “Surely he has become loathsome to his own people, Israel!” the king of Gath smugly observed. “I shall have him for a servant always!” (1 Sam. 27:12) (AB)
Achish's sense of mastery—“a slave of eternity” is the literal translation of the words (obed olam) he used to describe David47— was only strengthened when he put the mercenary general to a test of loyalty. When the armies of Philistia were mustered for yet another attack on the land of Israel, Achish summoned David to his court and questioned him closely.
“You know,” Achish said to David, “that you and your men must take the field with me.”
“Good,” David answered smartly. “You will learn what your servant will do.”
“Then I will make you my bodyguard for life!” snapped an exultant Achish in response to David's declaration of loyalty. (1 Sam. 28:1–2)48
At this bleak moment in the biblical narrative, the troubling question of David's nature and motives is left unanswered. Was he really so quick and so willing to take up arms against the king of Israel? According to the conventional reading of the Bible, David never meant to join the Philistines in battle against the Israelites but sought to deceive Achish by affirming his willingness to do so. After all, if David had declined to go to war with the Philistines, he would have put his own life at risk then and there. So he gave the answer that Achish wanted, thus passing the loyalty test for the moment, and he hoped that the king of Gath would not call his bluff by ordering him and his men to march against Saul and the army of Israel.
DOUBLETS
The exploits of David during his fugitive years are described with shocking candor by one of the original authors of his biography as we find it in the Bible. But an open-eyed reading suggests that another pen was at work on the same text, a pen in the hand of a spin doctor who tried to put every act of brutality and betrayal in the best possible light. Thus, the Bible has been decorated with “correctives” to the awkward passages where “the future king of Israel is depicted in the embarrassing role of a Philistine-hired mercenary,” all in an effort to “explain away the facts of history.”49
The best example is the spin that is put on David's raids in the ill-defined stretches of “the Negev of Judah.” By parsing out the words and phrases selected by the biblical source, we are meant to conclude that David was seeking to deceive the king of Gath. “David, no traitor at heart and not wishing his fellow countrymen to think him such, continued to play a devious game,” insists Bible historian John Bright. “While convincing Achish by false reports that he was conducting raids into Judah, he actually devoted himself to harrying the Amalekites and other tribes of the southern desert whose incursions had always plagued neighboring Israelite clans….”50
Far less subtle is the biblical source who put a theological spin on the otherwise realistic episodes of David's outlaw years. When David is tutored in the art o
f guerrilla warfare by the prophet Gad, for example, it is a man of God rather than a man of war who acts as his mentor. (1 Sam. 22:5) David seeks permission from God before going into battle. “Shall I go and smite the Philistines?” he asks by means of divination, and God responds: “Go and smite the Philistines.” (1 Sam. 23:2) When David cuts off the hem of King Saul's robe while he is relieving himself, David is shown to reproach himself for his prank: “Yahweh forbid that I should do such a thing to Yahweh's anointed!” (1 Sam. 24:7) (AB) And Saul, who is depicted throughout the Book of Samuel as a homicidal maniac, turns suddenly sweet and gentle when he discovers that David has spared his life, and he literally thanks God for his salvation. “The Lord handed me over to you and you did not slay me,” he says. “May the Lord reward you with goodness for the goodness you have done for me today.” (1 Sam. 24:19–10)51
Perhaps the best evidence that these passages consist of theological subtext rather than history or biography can be found in the “doublets” that appear in the text of Samuel. A doublet, as we have noted, is a tale that is preserved in the Bible in two or more versions—Saul is twice shown to learn of David's whereabouts from the men of Ziph; the king twice leads an army of three thousand men in pursuit; and, most notably, he is twice spared from death by David, first in the cave at En-gedi, and then, a few chapters later, when David and his men slip into the royal barricade at “the hill of Hachilah.”
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 11
