The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero

by Joel S. Baden

  This view of the story of David, the recognition that it is an apology, has ramifications for how we understand the Bible as a whole. We have been taught by generations of religious authorities that the history in the Bible is literally true. Even when we have agreed to discard the mythical (the creation, the flood, the splitting of the sea) or even the semimythical (the patriarchs, Moses), when we read the so-called historical books, especially the books of Samuel and Kings, we tend to read them as just that: historical. But no writing comes without an agenda, especially in the ancient world, before the idea of “objective” history entered human consciousness. And the biblical story of David preserved in the books of Samuel is no exception. It is, in fact, the very opposite of objective history. It is apologetic revision, its agenda evident at nearly every turn.

  Even when the biblical authors take it upon themselves to depict events from the past, it is not what we call history today. It is, rather, ideology expressed in the historiographical genre. Not a word of the David story—and perhaps the entire Bible—is intended solely to describe things as they truly were. Much of the Bible was written so long after the events it describes that there was no possibility for its authors to access the objective past. The story of the Exodus may have some kernel of truth to it—we cannot state definitively that it is wholly fictional. But the biblical description of the Exodus uses the distant past to make a point about the present. The David story is different in that the past it describes was barely past at all. Its audience had lived through David’s reign—indeed, his reign was not yet finished when the story was composed. There was no need merely to tell the Israelites of David’s time their own story. What was necessary was to reshape their conceptions of their story.

  The apology for David, a tenth-century BCE composition, was taken up and embedded in the more substantial seventh- or sixth-century BCE historical work that stretches from the beginning of the book of Joshua to the end of 2 Kings. Three hundred years after David lived and died, there was no further need to defend him. An uninterrupted succession of Judahite kings had traced their lineage back to David, the king who created the nation of Judah. He was their founder, both nationally and genealogically, and the success of their family in holding on to the crown—especially in contrast to the politically volatile northern kingdom—was evidence enough of David’s greatness and God’s favor toward him. It is from this later viewpoint that we get the explicit theologizing of David’s dynasty: “Your house and your kingship shall be secure before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7:16). These seventh- or sixth-century authors are responsible for David’s final speech to Solomon, which was heavily influenced by the contemporary book of Deuteronomy: “Yahweh will fulfill the promise that he made concerning me: ‘If your descendants are scrupulous in their conduct, walking before me faithfully, with all their heart and soul, there will never cease to be one of your descendants on the throne of Israel’ ” (2 Kings 2:4). It is these later writers who reconfigured David not only as blameless, but as actively righteous, as a model against whom all future kings were judged: “You have not been like my servant David, who kept my commandments and followed me with all his heart, doing only what was right in my sight” (1 Kings 14:8). Even the most ardently pro-David authors of the tenth-century BCE apology could not have said such a thing. But time heals all wounds.

  In the fourth century BCE, after Israel had returned from the Babylonian exile and the temple was rebuilt, the need was felt for a new recounting of Israel’s history. Long past was the need to legitimate David’s kingship. The Israel that existed now was David’s Israel, and he was to be emphatically glorified as the nation’s founding hero. The new narrative of David’s life would be based on the apology from the books of Samuel, but every story that might make David look anything less than perfect was excised. In the retelling of Chronicles, therefore, no mention is made of David’s service under Saul, his flight to the wilderness, the death of Nabal, David’s time with the Philistines, his affair with Bathsheba and Uriah’s death, the death of Amnon, Absalom’s revolt, or the conflict between Solomon and Adonijah. This whitewashed David is presented as the perfect king. Moreover, since in the fourth century the institution of kingship in Israel had ended and been replaced by a temple-centered leadership, extra attention was paid to David’s role as the founder of the Jerusalem cult. Though the tradition that Solomon was the one who actually built the temple could not be overcome, the authors of Chronicles did everything possible to make David into its true founder. Thus, before his death David is depicted as not only bringing the ark to Jerusalem and setting up its altar, but also organizing the Levites and priests according to their cultic responsibilities, establishing the regular cycle of cultic music and worship, providing men to guard the temple and its treasuries, and even bringing in the raw materials to build the temple and giving Solomon an exact written blueprint of how it should be built. Though Solomon is credited with the temple’s construction, he is portrayed as no more than a glorified foreman. David is the architect.

  By the end of the Old Testament period, Israel was truly David’s nation, both politically and religiously. Dreams of Israel’s future glory were pinned to the renewal of David’s kingship: at the eschaton, or the end of time, says the prophet Zechariah, “Yahweh will shield the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the feeblest of them shall be in that day like David, and the House of David like a divine being, like a messenger of Yahweh, before them” (Zech. 12:8). It is no wonder, then, that when the early followers of Jesus tried to position him as the fulfillment of God’s plan for Israel, they adopted David’s legacy. David was so fundamental that Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy leading from David to Jesus. A talmudic rabbi laid down a clear dictum: “Whoever says that David sinned is simply mistaken.”3 David’s transformation from a deeply flawed human to a perfected type was complete.

  THIS BOOK HAS TRIED to undo that transformation, to peel back the layers of literary interpretation and recover the human David. We are now in a position to think more broadly about his life—what he accomplished, and at what costs.

  On a personal level, David achieved what most only dream of. He rose from the humblest of beginnings to become the most powerful man whom Israel had ever known. He proved himself to be a superior military strategist and a brilliant political tactician. Perhaps more important, David changed the face of Israel. He coalesced the scattered communities of Judah into a kingdom, one that would last for more than four hundred years, longer even than its historically dominant northern counterpart. He unified Israel and Judah under a single crown, a union that no one before had accomplished, or perhaps even considered possible. He incorporated into Israel territories that had long been independent enclaves, foremost among them Jerusalem. He turned Jerusalem into a royal capital and a major cultic center. He secured and expanded Israel’s borders. For the first time in generations, the Philistines ceased to be a threat. The Ammonites went from a menacing neighbor to a vassal state. Major trade routes to the south were opened. Diplomatic relations to the north were initiated. David left an Israel more secure, more capable of defending itself, and more important internationally than it had ever been before.

  David reshaped Israel, but there was significant loss along the way. Success rarely comes without a price. The sublimation of the once-independent northern tribes into David’s unified kingdom occasioned great resentment against David and Judah. Before David, the two territories had coexisted peacefully, each recognizing the other as a nonthreatening neighbor. Once they were combined, against Israel’s will, the narrative changed: now Israel felt the need to separate itself from Judah, and thus Judah became viewed as a problem. By forcing Israel and Judah together, David polarized them. Once they were separate, Judah looked to bring Israel back into the fold, though as a vassal state rather than as equals; Israel, for its part, wanted to do the same to Judah. For much of the next two hundred years, Judah and Israel were in a near-constant state of war with each oth
er. It is impossible to know whether these conflicts would have erupted had David not created the united kingdom. It is certain that the conflicts that did occur can be traced back to David.

  David began the process of unraveling the fabric of traditional Israelite tribal society. He put an end to the long-standing tribal armies—perhaps a good for the security of the state, but a step toward the hated military conscription that would occur under Solomon. He undermined the established kinship-based system of land tenure, the inviolable rights of families, clans, and tribes to their property. He trampled on the ancient cultic traditions, seizing the venerated ark of the covenant and using it to his economic advantage. He disregarded his responsibility as an Israelite leader to ensure that justice was upheld, that the rights of the individual were maintained—a job that had once fallen to local elders but now rested on the king’s shoulders. On the whole, David ignored or disdained the needs of his subjects. Their desire simply to live as they always had was subsumed by his desire to become something new.

  Amid all the national upheaval David’s kingship created, we cannot forget the human toll. As David gained power, many people died—or were murdered. Nabal, Saul, Jonathan, Abner, Ishbaal, Rechab, Baanah, Uriah, Amnon, Absalom, Amasa, Ahitophel, Sheba—and those are just the ones whose names we know. There were surely many, many others, including Saul’s remaining sons and grandsons. David and his militia must have slain hundreds if not thousands of opponents over the years—often Israelites—from David’s time in Philistia to Absalom’s revolt. Communities were destroyed: the Jebusites, the longtime inhabitants of Jerusalem, saw their entire culture wiped away so that David could have a new capital. David left a wake of death and destruction behind him as he moved mercilessly toward the throne.

  We have no first-person reports of David’s life, no personal letters that might shed light on his character. We have only his actions. It is only by what he did that we can assess what kind of a man he was. He was not kind or generous. He was not loving. He was not faithful or fair. He was not honorable or trustworthy. He was not decent by almost any definition. What he was, was ambitious and willing to abandon all of these positive qualities to achieve that ambition. David was a successful monarch, but he was a vile human being.

  Some may observe that David was no different from any aspiring monarch of his day, especially a usurper—that all of his actions can be seen as in line with the standards of the time, as no more than realpolitik, and that to castigate him too strongly is to ignore his cultural context. The first part of this is true enough. David was not the only person in the ancient Near East to use murder as a stepping stone to power. But to absolve him for this reason carries a faint whiff of moral relativism. Just because some people murdered to gain power in the ancient world—just as today—does not mean it was culturally acceptable. Most people were not murdering others left and right in an attempt to become king. They sacrificed potential power in exchange for the social good. And, it should be remembered, the particular society in which David lived was very clear about its intolerance for murder: “He who fatally strikes a man shall be put to death” (Exod. 21:12); “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in his image did God make man” (Gen. 9:6). Indeed, the very lengths to which the biblical authors go to absolve David of these murders—and the curses against Joab that they put into David’s mouth—demonstrate the cultural values of the ancient Israelites. David, even in his own day, was considered guilty of horrific crimes. We cannot judge him any differently.

  NO ONE WISHES TO claim as their founding figure a usurper, a traitor, a murderer. Yet this is the situation we face. There are various ways to deal with this reality. We could essentially ignore it: take a Machiavellian stance, that the end justifies the means. We could worry less about how David accomplished what he did and instead recognize what those accomplishments ended up meaning. By both creating a kingdom of Judah and bringing it together with the northern kingdom of Israel under a single crown, David gave Israel a sense of nationhood that it would not otherwise have had. We think of some peoples in the ancient Near East as nations—the Arameans, the Philistines, the Phoenicians—but they never actually had any unified national self-conception. No Philistine would have thought to describe himself as such; he would have been an Ekronite, an Ashkelonite, an Ashdodite. Before David, even in the time of Saul, the same was true in Israel: one was a Benjaminite, or an Ephraimite, or a Danite. Israel is Israel, a true national body, because of David. This national self-identification can be credited with being at the root of Israel’s survival over the millennia, through war, exile, and diaspora.

  The modern state of Israel is directly dependent on David’s political accomplishments. The very notion of a political unity that stretches from the Negev to the Galilee, a notion we now take for granted, was David’s previously unimagined dream. The name “Israel” itself, so natural to us now, was a conscious decision on the part of the modern state’s founders, and one that they debated intensely. In deciding on “Israel,” they chose the name of David’s unified nation, linking the emergence of Israel in the twentieth century CE with the emergence of Israel in the tenth century BCE. The flag that waves throughout Israel, and in synagogues and on other Jewish buildings all over the world, bears the Star of David. David bestowed Israel with a sense of its own independence that it had never had before, and that it would experience only rarely for the next three millennia—but that is at the very heart of the modern independent state of Israel. Geographically, politically, and ideologically, the Israel we know today is the embodiment of David’s legacy.

  By taking the ark to Jerusalem and founding a cultic site there, David laid the groundwork for Jerusalem to become the holiest city in the world. Without David, Jerusalem would have had no temple—the religious center of Israel for a thousand years, including during Jesus’s lifetime, and the focus of Judaism’s hopes for restoration ever since then. The eschatological idea of the heavenly Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem, found in both the New Testament and in Jewish texts, is built on the foundations David laid in the earthly Jerusalem. From the Crusades to our own time, disputes over who has the right to possess Jerusalem, to call it a capital, are all based on the city’s recognized sanctity. It is the city of Isaiah, of Jesus, and even of Muhammad. But above all it is the City of David.

  Often unrecognized is the effect that David had on the Bible itself, both by his unification of Judah and Israel and by his inauguration of the Jerusalem cult. Before David, Israel and Judah were never considered a single entity. Yet think of all the biblical passages that presume their essential unity: everywhere that Judah is included under the heading of “Israel”—most notably the narratives involving Jacob and his twelve sons. These stories, which we think of as fundamental and especially ancient parts of Israel’s past, could not have been conceived of without David. They are reflections of the united monarchy, not prefigurations of it. Every passage that is written from a pro-Judah perspective—the whole of both books of Kings, for example—depends on David’s creation and elevation of the kingdom of Judah. Every text that celebrates the Jerusalem temple and its cult owes its existence to David. This means all of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lamentations, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, and, at least implicitly, almost all of the Psalms—these are books that could not have been written without David. These are only the most obvious examples. With only a few exceptions, some or all of every book in the Hebrew Bible is rooted in David’s kingdom and David’s cult. More than most people realize, the Bible is really David’s book.

  It is possible, then, to look at the results of David’s actions—a nation, a holy city, and, in the Bible, the basis of the Judeo-Christian religions—and conclude that these ends are more valuable than the means by which they were achieved. This view is especially tempting since we continue to live under the influence of David’s accomplishments. But this also makes it susceptible to charges of cultural egocentrism. In a thousand years, if th
e Judeo-Christian traditions have fallen victim to the same fate as almost every other religion in history and disappeared, will historians still consider David’s actions justifiable? Even today, what might a person outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition think of David? We need not be proud of him merely because we are part of the culture he helped to create.

  In fact, as we see more clearly what David did on the way to creating our culture, we recognize that his actions, far from being uniquely guided and approved by God, are at times virtually indistinguishable from those of his ancient Near Eastern contemporaries. This should have important ramifications for how we view ourselves. We can no longer maintain that Judaism, or its religious descendants, is exceptional by virtue of its divinely ordained origins. Had the Arameans, or the Assyrians, or the Hittites survived rather than the Israelites, they would be telling the same story we are. Our existence and self-importance are no more due to David than the nonexistence and lack of importance of the Hittites are due to Hattušili. Judaism emerged from a cultural landscape in which it, and its founding figure, were anything but unique. We may not blame earlier generations for attributing Israel’s survival to divine salvation, but neither should we feel free to perpetuate the propaganda of the past to inflate our own sense of self-worth over other peoples. We come from entirely unexceptional origins. If we are to consider ourselves special in the world, it will have to be because of who we are and how we act today—not because of David, and certainly not because of how he acted.

  THOUGH IT IS TEMPTING to throw David’s sins into the dustbin of history, it is irresponsible to do so. The past matters. If David’s historical existence is irrelevant, if all that matters is the biblical depiction, then the Bible becomes a mere storybook and David no better than a fictional character. Ironically, by recognizing the fundamentally literary nature of the biblical account, we can recognize the historical realities standing behind it. There was a David. He lived in a particular place and time, and his actions changed the world. We cannot accept the results he achieved without accepting the rest of him as well, the man in full. We cannot wish away our intimate association with the historical David and with the crimes he committed. We can, however, come to terms with it and with what it means for us.