The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero

by Joel S. Baden

  The ambivalence we feel about David, when faced with the need to balance his lasting achievements against the reality of his behavior, parallels other modern feelings of moral uncertainty. The United States has long grappled with the guilt of driving millions of Native Americans off of their ancestral lands. Columbus Day has changed from a national day of celebration to one of soul-searching. And yet we are proud to be Americans, to call this land our home—just as we are proud to call Jerusalem our spiritual capital, despite the native Jebusites who were wiped off the map for it to become so. The Civil War ripped apart the fabric of American society, exposing the deep cultural differences between the northern and southern states and inflicting wounds that still have not entirely healed 150 years later. Yet we recognize the lasting value of holding the Union together by force—just as we recognize the lasting value of David’s creating by brute force, against popular will, a unified Israel. Among the most significant debates at the time this book was being written was the issue of targeting and killing those considered to be enemies of the state. Although we morally abhor the notion of state-sponsored murder, we are also aware that a case can be made that the continuing existence of the nation may be at stake—just as a case can be made that Judaism and Christianity as we know them may not have existed had David not murdered those who stood in his way. Moral ambivalence is a good thing, especially when it comes to the distant past. It tempers our pride in the present with the recognition that a price was paid to reach this point. It forces us to ask whether we would have made the same choices, knowing what we know now about how those choices turned out. And it permits us to accept what happened without wishing that it had to have been that way. Moral ambivalence is, in short, the sign of a maturing—if not yet fully mature—society.

  The David of history was who he was and did what he did—and there is nothing we can do to change that. The David of legend, however, is a cultural construction. He is a product not of historical reality, but of our own self-definition, and that of those who have preceded us. Recognition of the disconnect between the historical David and the legendary David is crucially important. The very fact that we have reconstructed David is meaningful. When we understand his humanity—when we see David clearly as a product of and a participant in a world very different from our own—the choices we have made in our own systems of values and behavior are brought into sharp relief. Our national and religious founding figure did things of which we cannot approve, things that we cannot accept as part of our cultural fabric. This is to our credit. We should be proud of the fact that we find the historical David difficult, even repelling. Our morals and actions are not mere replicas of those of the ancient world, despite our deep attachment to the people and events of that world. They are, rather, our own. We are not constrained by the past—we re-create it in our own image. If we are fundamentally opposed to the model of the historical David, it is because we have grown as a culture. Our values take precedence, and, as the historical David clearly shows, this is demonstrably for the better.

  In the end, perhaps the healthiest—and the truest—way to deal with the import of the historical David is to accept, maybe even gladly, that he was a fairly dislikable man. We know enough about the ancient world to know that many aspects of it stand in opposition to our own cultural standards: slavery, the treatment of women, bloody animal sacrifices, monarchy itself, to name only the most obvious. For all our reverence of it, none of us would want to live in the world of the Bible. David is part of that world, not ours. We have spent the past three thousand years evolving as a culture, developing and cultivating values that we hold dear, that we teach our children and inscribe in our cherished documents. The difference between the David we want to see—the David we have created—and the David who actually walked the earth three thousand years ago is the difference between the world that we have chosen to become and the world we have left behind. If the historical David didn’t strike us as problematic, it would speak rather badly of our cultural growth in the intervening millennia. The more we can see that David is not like us, but is deeply different, the more we can recognize how far we have come. An appreciation of history allows us to see ourselves more clearly.

  “DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL, lives and endures.” This was the song I grew up singing, probably the first context in which I ever heard or uttered David’s name. Almost thirty years would pass before I understood about whom I was really singing. There are two Davids—and the song is about both. The David of legend lives in our cultural imagination and endures in our liturgy, in our scriptures, and in our hopes. The David of history lives in our desire to understand the past, in our search for something like the truth among the millennia of accreted tradition. And he endures in our recognition that we are who we are both because of and in spite of him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE been possible without the help and support of four distinct parties. First, my family: Gillian, Zara, and Iris, who sustain me daily both wittingly and unwittingly. Nothing I do is accomplished without their sacrifices and love, and I am always grateful.

  There were three fine gentlemen who agreed, without coercion, to read the manuscript in full. Without their comments and gentle critiques—and sometimes not-so-gentle criticisms—the book would have suffered greatly. Thanks, therefore, are due to my father, Clifford Baden, my first and still best editor; my colleague and friend Professor Bruce Gordon; and Bill Goettler, who pushed me to write this sort of book even before I knew I wanted to do so.

  Roger Freet and the entire team at HarperOne have demonstrated repeatedly the value of a publisher that cares about both the material and the author. They have been continually supportive and generous at every stage along the way, making this as pleasant an experience as one could hope for.

  This book would, without exaggerating at all, simply not have existed without my dear friend and co-conspirator, Professor Candida Moss. She not only opened the door for this project at its inception, she pulled me through it and showed me the way. She is the finest scholar and best exemplar I know, and my debts to her neither begin nor end with this work.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. See also Ezek. 37:24–25.

  2. Psalms of Solomon 17:21; b. Sanh. 98a–b.

  3. Jewish Antiquities, VI. 307.

  4. See Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 2 (2d ed.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 903 n. 72.

  5. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. 2 (Old Tappen, NJ: Revell, 1925), 413.

  6. On the early date of the majority of 2 Samuel, see the extensive treatment of Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 57–72.

  7. b. Ber. 3b–4a.

  8. See Paul A. Riemann, “Dissonant Pieties: John Calvin and the Prayer Psalms of the Psalter,” in Inspired Speech (ed. J. Kaltner and L. Stulman; Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 378; London: T&T Clark, 2004), 354–400.

  Chapter 1: David’s Youth

  1. There is some disagreement in the Bible as to whether Jesse had seven sons (1 Chron. 2:13–15) or eight (as here). For discussion, see P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel (Anchor Bible 8; New York: Doubleday, 1980), 276. For our purposes, it is less important which number is correct and more significant that the dispute exists at all, for it raises the question of the Bible’s ultimate trustworthiness when it comes to historical facts. Indeed, the number seven has such regular symbolic value throughout the Bible, and elsewhere in the ancient Near East, that either figure may be considered historically dubious, especially as Samuel preserves the names only of the elder three. See Steven L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 52–54.

  2. Although the Bible does not give David’s age explicitly in these stories, he must be more than a mere child. He shepherds his father’s flock (1 Sam. 16:11), a task not left to children (see Gen. 37:2, where Joseph does the same job
at age seventeen); he is strong enough to carry Saul’s heavy arms (1 Sam. 16:21); his father is already old by the time of the battle against the Philistines (17:12); and his three elder brothers are fighting (17:13), which means they must be older than twenty, the standard fighting age in ancient Israel (cf., e.g., Num. 26:2)—and on the reasonable assumption that Jesse’s sons were born in sequential years, that puts David at approximately age fifteen (with his remaining four elder brothers filling the gap from ages sixteen to nineteen).

  3. 4QMMT C10. Compare this with what we find in the New Testament, in Luke 24:44: “Everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”

  4. See, e.g., Mark 12:36 (citing Ps. 110:1), Acts 2:25–28 (Ps. 16:8–11), Acts 4:25–26 (Ps. 2:1–2), Rom. 4:6–8 (Ps. 32:1–2), Rom. 11:9–10 (Ps. 69:22–23), Heb. 4:7 (Ps. 95:7–8).

  5. b. B. Bat. 14b.

  6. John Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, preface (1571).

  7. Some named, and some unnamed; see, e.g., Gen. 38:1, 2; Exod. 2:1; Lev. 24:10; Judg. 13:2; 19:1; 1 Sam. 1:1; 21:7; 1 Kings 20:13, 35; 22:34; 2 Kings 4:1; Ruth 1:1.

  8. On the editorial nature of this verse, see McCarter, I Samuel, 304.

  9. That particular profession may also render unlikely David’s claim that he is unable to wear armor, “for I am not used to them” (1 Sam. 17:39).

  10. Almost all—but not all. For the Septuagint version preserves Saul’s assessment of David as a mere boy, not a warrior, which remains in contradiction with the description of David in 1 Sam. 16:18.

  11. McCarter, I Samuel, 306–9.

  12. This is, in fact, how the rabbis of the Talmud understood the situation: “David wrote the Book of Psalms, including in it the works of ten elders, namely, Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman, Jeduthun, Asaph, and the three sons of Korah” (b. B. Bat. 14b–15a). Although there are no superscriptions mentioning Adam, the rabbis assigned him one verse, Ps. 139:16 (“Your eyes saw my unformed limbs / they were all recorded in your book; in due time they were formed / to the very last one of them”), and for Melchizedek, Ps. 110 (despite its Davidic superscription, because it states in v. 4, “You are a priest forever, after the manner of Melchizedek”). Abraham was equated with Ethan (Ps. 89). Notably, they make no mention of Solomon, despite the two psalms with his name in the title.

  13. 1 Chron. 6:16–33; 15:16–22; 16:4–36, 41–42; etc.

  14. See, e.g., the city-state of Ugarit, which flourished on the northern coast of the Levant in the Late Bronze Age, a few centuries before David, where the king was the primary cultic officiant. See Paolo Merlo and Paolo Xella, “The Rituals,” in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (ed. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt; Handbuch der Orientalistik 39; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 287–304 (at 296–300).

  15. Another psalm of lament, Ps. 54, receives a similar heading, though with reference to a different episode: “Of the leader, with instrumental music. A maskil [a type of song] about David, when the Ziphites came and told Saul, ‘Know that David is hiding among us.’ ” Again, there is nothing specific to the narrative in the psalm—indeed, the headings for Pss. 3 and 54 could easily be interchanged. See further Rolf Rendtorff, “The Psalms of David: David in the Psalms,” in The Book of Psalms: Composition and Reception (ed. P. W. Flint and P. D. Miller; Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 99; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 53–64.

  16. Note particularly those psalms in the Septuagint that have both the superscription mentioning David and an explicit date long after David’s time: Ps. 71, which refers to “the first of those who were taken captive”; Ps. 96, which says “when the temple was built after the captivity”; and Ps. 137, which is said to be by Jeremiah. McKenzie, King David, 39.

  17. Samuel Horsley, The Book of Psalms, vol. 1 (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1815), xiv. On the misattribution of the psalms to David, see McKenzie, King David, 39–43.

  18. The earlier prophet’s words are, broadly, found in Isa. 1–39, and the exilic prophet’s in Isa. 40–55. According to many scholars, there is a third prophet to be identified in Isa. 56–66.

  19. Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite Kings (Lund: Gleerup, 1976), 175.

  20. The main internal difficulty in the chapter is found in 17:50–51: in the first of these verses, we are told that David killed Goliath with his slingshot; in the second, that he killed Goliath by cutting off his head, the stone having merely knocked the giant down. This confusion stems, however, from the combining of the independent David and Goliath story with that found in the Septuagint; the Greek version does not have 17:50 in it.

  21. This same Elhanan seems to be mentioned only in one other passage, 2 Sam. 23:24, which is merely a list of David’s elite warriors.

  22. We probably are able even to identify when the older stories were reassigned to David. In 1 Sam. 17:54, the Bible notes that David took the head of Goliath to Jerusalem, which is distinctly confusing insofar as Jerusalem was, at the time, a non-Israelite city and would not become Israelite until David, as king, captured it. It thus is likely that the adoption of the Goliath story occurred some time thereafter in order to bolster David’s royal reputation.

  Chapter 2: David in Saul’s Service

  1. See Th. P. J. van den Hout, “Apology of Hattušili III,” in The Context of Scripture, vol. 1 (ed. William W. Hallo; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 199–204; Harry A. Hoffner Jr., “Propaganda and Political Justification in Hittite Historiography,” in Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature, and Religion of the Ancient Near East (ed. H. Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), 49–62. For other ancient Near Eastern royal apologies with similar features to the David story, see Michael B. Dick, “The ‘History of David’s Rise to Power’ and the Neo-Babylonian Succession Apologies,” in David and Zion (ed. B. F. Batto and K. L. Roberts; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 3–19.

  2. See most prominently P. Kyle McCarter’s seminal article “The Apology of David,” Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980): 489–504. Early steps in this direction were taken by Niels Peter Lemche, “David’s Rise,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 10 (1978): 2–25.

  3. For a full treatment of this inscription, known as the Tel Dan Stele, see George Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal and a New Interpretation (New York: T&T Clark, 2003).

  4. See the assessment of the David story by Albrecht Alt, “The Formation of the Israelite State in Palestine,” in Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 223–309: “It is the creation of a genuine historian, who conceals rather than reveals his historical purpose” (268).

  5. See J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 139–41.

  6. On the nature of Israelite political organization before the monarchy, see the classic study of Alt, “Formation,” 227–32.

  7. On the influence of the Philistine threat on the emergence of kingship in Israel, see Alt, “Formation,” 252–55. It is an oversimplification to tie the emergence of the Israelite kingship exclusively to external pressure, though the Philistine threat may have been the tipping point. For a more nuanced and complete view, see Carol Meyers, “Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy,” in The Oxford History of the Biblical World (ed. Michael D. Coogan; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 178–83; Israel Finkelstein, “The Emergence of the Monarchy in Israel: Environmental and Socio-Economic Aspects,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44 (1989): 43–74.

  8. Many scholars have described Saul’s position in anthropological terms as a “chiefdom” rather than as a real kingship. See James W. Flanagan, “Chiefs in Israel,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 20 (1981): 47–73; Frank S. Frick, The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel: A Survey of Models and Theories (Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series 4; Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 1985). For an assessm
ent of these approaches, see Paula McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1999), 112–42. On the archaeological evidence for the nature of Israel during Saul’s reign, see Baruch Rosen, “Subsistence Economy in Iron Age I,” in From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel (ed. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman; Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1994), 339–51.

  9. See Alt, “Formation,” 255: “The king ruled the national army; his authority only really came into effect in camp and in battle and had hardly any function in peacetime. It was a kingship for the sole purpose of defence against the Philistines.”