The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero

by Joel S. Baden

  We are accustomed at this point to expect that every death that accrues to David’s benefit is to be laid at his feet: Nabal, Saul, Jonathan, Abner, and now Ishbaal. But though Ishbaal’s death did benefit David, it also benefited Rechab and Baanah and the northern kingdom they intended to represent. For the murder of Ishbaal had precisely the desired effect: David did not have to enter Israel with military force.19 With the death of Ishbaal, David’s reign in Israel was assured. Rechab and Baanah paid for it with their lives, but on a national scale the price was worth paying. David would have recognized the value of the gift when Ishbaal’s head was presented to him. But this is one death for which he probably did not bear direct responsibility.

  David, King of Israel

  THE NORTHERN KINGDOM HAD no choice. Its leading power, Abner, was dead by the hand of David; its king, Ishbaal, was dead by the hands of its own people. The only path was to acquiesce to David’s power. The biblical notice of David’s anointing as king of Israel is almost a complete parallel to that of his anointing in Hebron: “All the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before Yahweh. And they anointed David king over Israel” (2 Sam. 5:3). We may imagine the details of this episode to be essentially identical to those of the earlier anointing. After the death of Ishbaal, David summoned the elders of Israel—in this case, probably tribal leaders—to Hebron, where they were made to offer tribute and swear loyalty to their new monarch.

  With this crucial moment, David achieved something entirely new: the consolidation of the kingdoms of Israel in the north and Judah—which he himself had created out of nothing—in the south. For the first time in history, a single kingdom spanned the length of Israel, from Dan in the north to the Negeb desert in the south. For the first time, Israel was united. This was a moment of truly world-changing import. The idea of the people and land of Israel that we find throughout the Bible and beyond, and that is realized to this day in the modern state of Israel, is authentically due to the person of David. There can be no denying the extraordinary change that David wrought on the history of Western civilization. But as in the case of Judah, the glory we attribute to this unification hardly would have been felt by those who lived through it. For them, this was not unification—it was conquest. And at no point in David’s long career on the throne would Israel ever think of it otherwise.

  There was another party that recognized David’s enthronement over Israel as an act of aggression. It is one thing for a vassal to rule over a backwater region. It is equally fine for that vassal to cause trouble for the longtime enemy to the north. But when David became king over Judah and Israel, he crossed the line from useful mercenary to potential threat, and the Philistines were less than pleased.20 “When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king in Israel, all the Philistines went up in search of David” (2 Sam. 5:17). The sudden reemergence of the Philistines, entirely absent from the scene since David had become king in Hebron, reinforces the conclusion that David’s kingdom of Judah was a Philistine vassal state. The idea of a resurgent Israel—now even combined with Judah—was impossible for the Philistines to accept, and they were intent on doing something about it.

  Possibly the Philistines were putting on a show of force to remind David of his obligations to them, to see whether he would treat Israel as a Philistine vassal state as he had Judah. If so, they were to be disappointed, for David met them with force. Quite probably, the Philistines were trying to drive a wedge between Judah and Israel, thus preventing David’s access to the north.21 In this too they would fail. But even David knew, having just taken the throne, that he was in no position to meet the Philistines in the open field. So he returned to his old established ways and retreated to the wilderness. There, he waited for the Philistines in the hills, where their chariots and war machines were more an encumbrance than an advantage. The Bible reports that David delayed attacking until the Philistines had entered the forest—until he heard “the sounds of marching in the tops of the baca trees” (2 Sam. 5:24). David, in other words, took advantage once again of his knowledge of the rough terrain and of the Philistine difficulty fighting in the hills, just as he had under Saul. In repulsing the Philistines, David was simultaneously declaring—for the first time in almost ten years—his independence. He had been a loyal vassal, but his time had come. And with command of both Judah and Israel, he finally had the resources to stand up for himself.22

  David’s victory against the Philistines was, like every other such Israelite victory, defensive. He was able to push them back to their territory, but not to do anything more than that. Yet, as was always the case, the mere ability to fend off the Philistines was of major symbolic significance for Israel. David knew what he was doing on this front, both militarily and politically. Even if Israel saw him as a foreign conqueror, he was still performing the most important role of the monarchy: keeping his newly acquired kingdom safe from its great nemesis.

  But he was, nevertheless, a foreign conqueror. Although we think of David as emblematic of Israel, we should remember that he was not an Israelite by any contemporary definition of the term. He was born and reigned in Judah, a non-Israelite territory. That the two regions spoke basically the same language (though with dialectical differences) and worshipped the same deity did not make them the same. Judah was not Israel, as Canada is not the United States. David may be identified with Israel today, but he was an outsider, and he ruled only by imposing his will on the unwilling north.

  Saul’s Descendants

  WITH SAUL AND JONATHAN dead, the war between David and the north decisively concluded in David’s favor, and with Israel subjugated, it might seem that David could turn to the task of building up his new kingdom without any further concerns about the legitimacy of his kingship. After all, who could possibly pose a challenge to him at this point? But David was keenly aware of how the Israelites perceived him. They might have no choice now—but they surely would not miss any future opportunity to remove him and replace him with one of their own. No people willingly accepts foreign domination indefinitely, and especially in a culture so centered on kinship ties, a nativist movement was bound to arise as soon as it was feasible. The northern kingdom had known only one family as king, that of Saul, and so it was likely enough that, should any steps be taken to throw off David’s yoke, the hopes of the people would rest with someone from Saul’s lineage. (This may be contrasted, perhaps ironically, with the constant desire of the Israelites after the exile in 586 BCE that the Davidic kingship would one day be restored.) No matter how spectacular David’s reign, he would never be from the royal family of Israel. It was thus imperative that he find a way to remove the potential for a Saulide uprising, and do so as soon as possible.

  In the ancient Near East, royal dynasties had an inherent staying power. The patronage system ensured that there would always be those in high positions who remained loyal, even after a king and his family had been deposed. Any faltering on the part of a royal usurper would inevitably lead to calls for the restoration of the old dynasty. Even though kings were often seen as repressive forces by much of society, better the king you know than the king you don’t. There was a comfort in familiarity, in tradition. It was harder to maintain a theology of kingship—that the monarch and his descendants ruled by virtue of the divine will and were the earthly stewards of the deity—when there was no continuity.

  For all these reasons, it was commonly understood that a usurper would try to eliminate as much of the surviving royal family as possible. We may mention Jehu, the ninth-century BCE king of Israel, who murdered all seventy sons of his predecessor Ahab—and who is praised for it by God: “You have acted well and done what was right in my eyes, having done all that was in my heart toward the House of Ahab” (2 Kings 10:30). Any remnant of the former dynasty was a potential threat to the new regime. This principle would have been familiar to anyone in the ancient Near East, and even into more recent times, as Machiavelli knew: “To pos
sess [dominions] securely it is enough to have eliminated the line of the prince whose dominions they were.”23

  David was therefore in something of a bind. He wanted to ensure that Saul’s line would never challenge his rule in Israel, but at the same time he did not want to give the Israelite populace any reason to detest him further. He was already established as king—to eliminate Saul’s remaining descendants at the height of his new powers would appear to be an act of unprovoked cruelty. What David needed was an excuse to get rid of Saul’s descendants. And, eventually, he found one.

  Later in David’s reign, according to 2 Samuel 21:1, there was a famine in the land. Famine was not an uncommon occurrence in ancient Israel.24 The agricultural system hung by a thread on what little rain fell in the region, and it was a precarious situation: any reduction in rainfall had disastrous consequences. Just a few fewer inches of rain per year, and what was once marginally fertile land was transformed into virtual desert. For the ancient Israelites, as for people throughout the ancient Near East, rain, like everything else, was controlled by the deity. And the deity’s decisions regarding rainfall were, in turn, tied to Israel’s behavior. Thus in the Bible we find passages explaining that the reward for Israel’s obedience is “rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce” (Lev. 26:4); “Yahweh will open for you his bounteous store, the heavens, to provide rain for your land in season” (Deut. 28:12). But if rain was considered a blessing, then drought—along with its inevitable result, famine—was a curse: “I will make your skies like iron and your earth like copper. . . . Your land shall not yield its produce” (Lev. 26:19–20); “Yahweh will make the rain of your land dust, and sand shall come down upon you from the sky” (Deut. 28:24). Once obedience was tied to climate, climate was necessarily tied to obedience. Thus if there was famine, it was only logical to look for the reason among the Israelite people.

  The most obvious place to look first, however, was the king himself. When the nation suffered, who could be to blame but the nation’s sole representative, the individual in whose name the nation acted?25 For David more than most, the famine represented a potential crisis. His claim to the kingship was tenuous enough; now it might appear as if God too had turned against him. Remarkably, however, David—or at least the Bible—found a way to turn this crisis on its head and use it to justify the destruction of what remained of Saul’s line.

  According to the biblical story, David asked God what had caused the famine and received a startling reply: “It is because of the bloodguilt of Saul and his house, for he put the Gibeonites to death” (2 Sam. 21:1). Immediately, we know that the famine is not David’s fault—remarkably, it is Saul’s fault. To understand why, we have to understand who the Gibeonites were and what the Bible has told us of them to this point.

  The inhabitants of Gibeon were not considered ethnically Israelite. They seem to have been an enclave of a native Canaanite population that was not absorbed by the emerging Israelite people when the Israelites settled in the central hill country of Canaan.26 As Israel developed traditions about the conquest of the land under Joshua, in which it was declared that they would wipe out all of the native populations, the presence of these foreigners in their midst required explanation: why were they permitted to survive? The answer came in the story now found in Joshua 9. The Gibeonites saw that Joshua and Israel had razed the cities of Jericho and Ai, the first two towns destroyed in the conquest, and hatched a plan to avoid the same fate. They sent messengers to Joshua presenting themselves not as native Canaanites, but as outsiders, who were therefore not subject to the same destruction visited upon the Canaanites. They offered to be Israel’s servants, and so Joshua made an agreement with them that their people would be spared. Soon enough, the truth was revealed, and Israel realized that it had made an oath of friendship with one of the peoples that it had been instructed to obliterate. But the oath was sworn, and it could not be undone. This, then, is the story of how Gibeon came to live among Israel even though it was not really an Israelite population.

  Fast-forward to David’s time: if Saul had truly tried to wipe out the Gibeonites, perhaps in some moment of nativist zeal, he had thereby violated the oath that Joshua had made centuries earlier and thus brought about God’s wrath in the form of the famine. David therefore asked the Gibeonites what he could do for them to make restitution for Saul’s actions. Their answer was predictable: hand over Saul’s remaining descendants so we can kill them. David had no choice but to acquiesce—the fate of the nation was at stake. Two of Saul’s children, through his concubine Rizpah—the same concubine whom Abner had been accused of sleeping with—and five of his grandchildren through his eldest daughter Merab were killed in Gibeon, thus eliminating all of Saul’s descendants (all but one, to whom we will turn presently).

  This story is pure literary invention. Its roots are found in a different biblical book, in a different biblical story, one that was itself invented to explain the anomaly of Gibeon’s ethnic distinction from the rest of Israel. It depends on laws from Deuteronomy and narratives from Joshua. It is fiction built upon fiction. And its coincidences are too hard to overlook. Why should Saul’s crime be punished with famine only now, years after Saul supposedly oppressed the Gibeonites? Why do we learn only at this point that Saul did so, instead of during the account of his reign?27 Is it believable that the Gibeonites should independently ask for the one thing David most desired? Is it believable that David’s one course for saving Israel was the murder of Saul’s family?

  Reconstructing what actually happened, however, is not a simple matter. We can posit at least one basic aspect: it was David who was responsible for the deaths of Saul’s descendants. But was Gibeon really involved? Was there really a famine? Did the story occur when the Bible says it did?

  Gibeon may have had a part to play—not because Saul had tried to eliminate the Gibeonites, for there is no record of this having actually happened, but perhaps because Gibeon was never loyal to Saul.28 Nowhere is it said that Gibeon was part of Saul’s kingdom. The city was an independent territory within Israel’s borders. This being the case, the Gibeonites’ assistance in this matter may have been a means of currying favor with David. We may even imagine that this story is the real explanation of how Gibeon became part of Israel: in order to ensure that David would not try to conquer them by force, the Gibeonites agreed to dispatch Saul’s descendants and become part of David’s kingdom peacefully. Others had recognized that eliminating David’s enemies might be a way to win his good graces. Gibeon may have had the same idea. It is also possible that Gibeon had made some sort of deal with David even earlier. The battle between Abner and Joab mentioned above took place at none other than Gibeon—which, if it was an independent territory, is something of a strange place to fight. Note, however, how the Bible presents the setting of the battle: Abner “marched out from Mahanaim to Gibeon,” after which Joab came to confront him (2 Sam. 2:12–13). It is thus conceivable that Abner went to Gibeon not to meet David’s forces, but to attack Gibeon itself, to make it part of Ishbaal’s kingdom—and that Joab went not only to fight Abner, but to protect Gibeon and keep it out of northern hands. Thus Gibeon’s part in the deaths of Saul’s sons may have been a way of thanking David for his support.

  As for the famine, it seems a bit of a contrivance. The famine is part of the literary and theological framework of the narrative. It is the precipitating event for the entire narrative, found in the first verse of the story, and the relief from the famine forms the story’s conclusion: “They did all that the king had commanded, and thereafter God responded to the plea for the land” (2 Sam. 21:14). There is no question that famines occurred in Israel, but one that begins because of Saul’s actions and ends because Saul’s descendants were killed by the Gibeonites is a dramatic event, not a climatic one.

  If the famine is discounted, then we are left to wonder when Saul’s descendants really died. The Bible is unclear on this count: rather than date the famine relative to other e
vents in David’s reign, it says only that “there was a famine in the days of David” (2 Sam. 21:1). We may be meant to understand that this occurred late in David’s kingship, as the story comes almost at the end of 2 Samuel, but we may also conjecture that the authors’ lack of a specific timeline indicates otherwise.29 In fact, it strains credulity to imagine that David would leave Saul’s descendants alive, as a lingering threat to his kingship, for any significant length of time. In the other biblical examples of a new ruler eliminating the previous royal family, the murders take place immediately. Of all people, David was not one to permit any challenges to remain, especially ones that could be so easily resolved. It is most likely, then, that David had Saul’s descendants killed shortly after he became king in Israel. But it was one thing to have participated in the battle that led to Saul’s and Jonathan’s deaths, where blame could be cast on the Philistines. The killing of Saul’s remaining descendants would be much harder to attribute to anyone but David, as he would be the only one to benefit. Thus the invention of the story of Saul’s attempt to conquer Gibeon. David had Gibeon take responsibility for eliminating Saul’s descendants, probably in exchange for a peace treaty. Now, finally, David could be confident that, whatever else might come his way, he no longer had anything to fear from Saul. Many years after he had first entered Saul’s service, the battle between Saul and David was finally concluded. David stood alone.

  Meribbaal