THE BLESSING AND THE CURSE
Four fateful covenants between God and humankind are described in the Hebrew Bible. The first deal is struck with Noah: “Never again shall the waters become a flood to destroy all living creatures,” promises a remorseful God (Gen. 9:11 NEB). The second covenant is the one between God and Abraham, who is destined to become “the father of a multitude of nations” and whose descendants will be given the Promised Land “for an everlasting possession” (Gen. 17:4, 8). The third covenant is God’s vow to Moses to make the Israelites “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:5–6) if they will agree to observe his commandments, which add up to 613 by the closing pages of the Five Books of Moses. And the fourth covenant is the one between God and David, a promise that has come to be understood by Jews and Christians alike as God’s solemn commitment to redeem our own world from suffering once and for all.
“When thy days are fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee … and I will establish his kingdom,” God tells David. “My mercy shall not depart from him …, [a]nd thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam. 7:12, 15-16).
In fact, the royal house of David ruled the ancient kingdom of Judah for some four hundred years30—a dynasty of unprecedented length and stability in the ancient world and, especially, the ancient Near East. The Almighty’s promise to David was recalled each time one of his descendants ascended to the throne of Judah: “And thy house and thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever” (2 Sam. 7:16). And, according to ancient tradition, each new king in the Davidic line was anointed with holy oil during the ritual of coronation. For that reason, each new king in the line of David was regarded as an “anointed one”—the Hebrew word is mashiach, but we are more familiar with the Greek rendering of the same word: Messiah.
But the divine promise to David was not kept. The Davidic line of kings finally ran out in 587-586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians conquered the southern kingdom of Judah and destroyed the temple that Solomon had built at Jerusalem. According to the Book of Kings, the last heir of David to actually sit on the throne of Israel in Jerusalem is Zedekiah, a young man who serves at first as a quisling king appointed by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, but later rises up against his overlord. Zedekiah’s rebellion fails, and the last sight he is allowed to see is the slaying of his children. Then his eyes are put out, and he is carried off in chains to Babylon, where he is put to work as a slave in a mill (2 Kings 25:7). No heir of David ever takes the throne in Jerusalem again.
To explain why God apparently reneges on his solemn promise to David, a later biblical author argues that God’s promise of kingship to David and his “royal seed” is conditioned on the strict observance of divine law by the monarchs and their people. The fact that the Davidic kings, starting with Solomon and continuing through Zedekiah, engaged in pagan worship and other “abominations” explains why God does not regard himself as obliged to live up to his end of the bargain with David. Indeed, the Book of Kings gives us a scene in which David explains to Solomon that God’s covenant comes with a big “if.”
If thy children take heed to their way, to walk before Me in truth with all their heart and with all their soul, there shall not fail thee, said He, a man on the throne of Israel (1 Kings 2:4).
So it is the faithlessness of Israel, and not a breach of contract by God, that leads to the destruction of Israel, according to the revisionist version of the covenant between God and David. Indeed, the prophets work themselves into a frenzy of blame in their efforts to convince the Israelites that their long ordeal of conquest, occupation, and dispersion is their own fault. “[T]he rulers transgressed against Me,” God complains to the prophet Jeremiah, and “all the families of the house of Israel,” too (Jer. 2:4, 8).
Wherefore should I pardon thee?
Thy children have forsaken Me,
And sworn by no-gods;
And when I had fed them to the full, they committed adultery,
And they assembled themselves in troops at the harlots’ houses.
They are become as well-fed horses, lusty stallions,
Every one neigheth after his neighbour’s wife.
Shall I not punish for these things? (Jer. 5:7–9).
The theological revisionism that we find within the pages of the Bible is probably the work of priests and scribes who lived around the time of King Josiah, a distant descendant of David and a fierce religious reformer of ancient Israel. In 622 B.C.E., a book of sacred law mysteriously turned up in the Temple at Jerusalem; it was the Book of Deuteronomy, according to recent Bible scholarship, or at least a significant chunk of it. Deuteronomy embodied a new and stern theology that blames all of the woes of ancient Israel on the breach of God’s covenant with Moses. By worshipping strange gods and goddesses, thereby defying the “statutes and ordinances” of divine law, the author of Deuteronomy declares, the Israelites will forfeit the blessings that God promised to his Chosen People and, instead, call down upon themselves the curses that are set forth at length and in bloodcurdling detail in the Book of Deuteronomy.
“I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse,” says Moses in Deuteronomy. “Therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed” (Deut. 30:19).
Significantly, the influence of the Deuteronomist can be detected in several other books of the Bible: Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, and First and Second Kings, all of which are known among scholars as the Dueteronomistic History. And the Deuteronomist displays a none-too-subtle agenda throughout these several books of the Bible: he too seeks to validate the royal house of David as the legitimate rulers of Israel, but he also seeks to explain the unhappy destiny of Israel by blaming various of David’s descendants for committing “abominations” in violation of God’s law. One king after another “did that which was evil in the eyes of the Lord,” the Deuteronomist insists, and that is why God withdrew his blessing from his Chosen People.
The sorry and squalid history of the descendants of King David gives the Deuteronomist much to complain about. David is not faultless, as we have seen, and Solomon commits the ultimate sin of worshipping pagan gods and goddesses. All but one of David’s descendants are found wanting by the Deuteronomist in one way or another. Only a single Davidic monarch is singled out for unqualified praise31—King Josiah, a white-hot religious reformer who transformed the religious practices of ancient Israel in the early seventh century B.C.E. Until Josiah came along, and the Book of Deuteronomy was discovered, the religious practices of ancient Israel encompassed the worship of Baal and Asherah, the adoration of the sun and the moon and the stars, even the sacrifice of children to the god known as Moloch (2 Kings 23). To the joy of the Deuteronomist, Josiah vows to purge the nation of Israel of all but the strictest form of worship.
Josiah has been characterized by some contemporary critics as Davidus redivivus32—a resurrected David—and the otherwise obscure king is praised even more lavishly than David by the biblical authors because of his efforts to purify the faith of ancient Israel. King Josiah is credited with purging the Temple of paraphernalia for the worship of Baal and Asherah, pulling down “the houses of the sodomites” where women were put to work at making such paraphernalia, suppressing the worship of pagan gods and goddesses at the altars and “high places” in Jerusalem and elsewhere around ancient Israel, slaying the renegade priests who presided over such ceremonies, and burying the sites of pagan worship under “the bones of men” (2 Kings 23:4–20). For his efforts, King Josiah is described with a fervor that the Deuteronomist reserves for only one other man in all of the Bible—the prophet and lawgiver, Moses.
“And like unto him was there no king before him,” the biblical author writes of Josiah, echoing the very words and phrases that are used to describe Moses, “that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after
him arose there any like him” (2 Kings 23:25).
Because Josiah alone enjoys such unreserved adulation, contemporary biblical scholarship suggests that the bocks of the Bible known as the Deuteronomistic History were first composed while Josiah sat upon the throne. Indeed, the Book of Deuteronomy itself has been called a “pious fraud” because the book is presented as one of the Five Books of Moses—“These are the words which Moses spoke unto all Israel beyond the Jordan” (Deut. 1:1)—when Deuteronomy was obviously composed by a different (and later) author than the ones who composed the other four books.33 The authors of the Deuteronomistic History lionized King Josiah, the otherwise obscure monarch under whom they lived and worked, because they endorsed his policy of centralizing and standardizing the worship of Yahweh to the exclusion of the other gods and goddesses that the Israelites seemed to find so alluring.
So the Bible, as we know it, preserves a snapshot of the court politics and the theological priorities at a single moment in the long history of ancient Israel. But the doing of “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord” by the Israelites and the monarchs who ruled them does not end with Josiah. The kings that come after Josiah are no better than the ones that came before him, according to the author of the Book of Kings, and the Davidic line comes to a final and sorrowful end with the Babylonian Conquest and the destruction of the Temple. As it turns out, no descendant of David will take the throne again. So the biblical authors find themselves with an awkward question to answer: If God has promised King David that his descendants will sit on the throne of Judah “for ever,” when and how will God’s promise be kept?
“THEY SHALL NOT HURT NOR DESTROY”
Solomon is an unlikely figure to succeed David to the kingship of the united monarchy of Judah and Israel. After all, he is the offspring of a marriage that was brokered through adultery and assassination, and he stands no closer than tenth in the line of succession. The Succession Narrative is intended to show how war and politics, intrigue and conspiracy, bloodshed and betrayal combined to bring him to the throne of Israel. Yahweh, reduced once again to the role of “a god of convenience,”34 is rarely seen or heard, and the Court Historian allows us to see David and his contemporaries as “men who no longer walk by faith in the cultic religious symbols of the past,” as one scholar puts it, “but contend for temporal power and freedom of self-expression in the mundane world.”35
Still, as it turns out, the mundane world was not kind to the House of David or the united monarchy that he founded, and ancient Israel was soon reduced to civil war, conquest, occupation, and exile. Confronted with the harsh realities of their history, the Israelites began to reinterpret the divine promise to David in new and momentous ways. Since the throne of David was empty and no descendant was at hand, the next king in the Davidic line came to be understood as someone who would appear at some unknowable moment in the future and usher in an era of perfect peace and harmony—a rescuer, a redeemer, a savior. The “anointed one”—the Messiah—was slowly and subtly transformed from yet another flesh-and-blood monarch into a mysterious and miraculous figure who would fulfill God’s original promise to King David.
“For a child is born unto us,” the prophet Isaiah declares in a familiar biblical passage that fairly burns with the messianic yearnings of an oppressed people. “A son is given unto us; and the government is upon his shoulder.”
And of peace there be no end,
Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom,
To establish it, and to uphold it
Through justice and through righteousness
From henceforth even for ever (Isaiah 9:5–6).
Here we come to the fork in the road where Judaism and Christianity move off in different directions, so fatefully and with such bloody consequences. Jewish tradition regards the Messiah as a divinely anointed but thoroughly human figure who will “execute justice and righteousness in the land” (Jer. 23:5)—and, crucially, the Jewish faith holds that we are still awaiting the arrival of the Messiah. Christian tradition regards the Messiah as the Son of God and the source of heavenly salvation—and the Christian faith interprets the words of Isaiah and other prophets of the Hebrew Bible to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, a word that is translated into Greek as Christos and is rendered in English as “Christ.” From this fundamental difference of opinion about the identity of the final heir of David, more than two thousand years of hatred, oppression, suffering, and death have flowed, and no end is yet in sight.
More than one bitter irony is at work in these crucial biblical texts. David is regarded as “a man after God’s heart,” and yet God is not much in evidence in the Book of Samuel and, especially, in the rape of Tamar. Her ordeal, one of the most harrowingly realistic accounts in the Bible, is used by the biblical narrator to foreshadow the realpolitik of the court of King David, a place that fairly sizzled with Machiavellian intrigue and cynical power politics. The fact that David is an inadvertent accomplice to her rape—and, more troubling still, the fact that he does nothing to vindicate her or punish her rapist—is entirely overlooked by the Almighty.
But, then, the Book of Samuel allows us to understand that God does not much care about the high crimes and sexual misadventures of King David. When the Almighty first resolves to punish David for his adultery with Bathsheba and his role in the foul murder of her husband, it is an innocent baby who bears the brunt of divine wrath! As for David’s brutality in politics and war—his path to the throne is littered with the dead bodies of his rivals and adversaries—the only punishment from on high is that Solomon, rather than David, will have the honor of building the Temple at Jerusalem. “Thou shalt not build a house for My name,” God says, “because thou art a man of war, and thou hast shed blood” (1 Chron. 28:3). All is forgotten, all is forgiven, by the time God bestows his eternal blessing on David and decrees that his dynasty will ultimately bring forth the Prince of Peace, the Messiah.
“The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness,” boasts David. “According to the cleanness of my hands hath He recompensed me” (2 Sam. 22:21).
The greatest (and crudest) irony of all is the fact that so much blood has been spilled over so many centuries precisely because we cannot agree on what the Bible says and means about the coming of the Messiah. Both Christians and Jews share a common belief, however, that the Messiah will be (or is) a descendant of David—“a shoot out of the stock of Jesse,” as Isaiah puts it, referring to the father of David (Isa. 11:1). And so we must pray, Christian and Jew alike, that all of the words of prophecy will be realized in a time and place where deadly enemies make peace, where children are no longer at risk, a world where Tamar need not fear Amnon, and Amnon need not fear Absalom, and Absalom need not fear David.
And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
And the cow and the bear shall feed;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp,
And the weaned child shall put his hand on the basilisk’s den.
They shall not hurt nor destroy
In all My holy mountain (Isa. 11:6–9).
To which all readers of the Bible, Christian or Jew or Muslim, agnostic or atheist, ought to be able to say: Amen.
* The Bible tells us that the Ark of the Covenant was a chest containing the stone tablets on which God inscribed the Ten Commandments. The Ark was fashioned of acacia wood and decorated with two cherub figures (not the fat angels of Renaissance art but fierce beasts), and was imagined to be the throne on which God sat during earthly visitations. The Ark was carried by the ancient Israelites on their wanderings through the wilderness and into battle with their enemies, but it was David who first brought the Ark to Jerusalem and Solomon wh
o installed it in the innermost sanctum of the Temple at Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies. The Ark disappeared from the Bible—and from history—with the destruction of Solomon’s Temple during the Babylonian Conquest.
* Actually, some scholars have suggested that “David” may be a title or a throne name rather than a personal name, which may help to explain why Samuel tells us first that someone named David slew Goliath (1 Sam. 17:50) and later credits a man named Elhanan with the same deed (2 Sam 21:19). Were David and Elhanan one and the same? If not, we have stumbled across yet another biblical mystery about who really did what to whom.
* One astonishing rabbinical pronouncement that Ginzberg left out is an explanation of why Amnon’s “love” for Tamar turns so abruptly to hatred—Amnon, the Talmud proposes, sustained an embarrassing and painful injury when he found himself entangled in Tamar’s pubic hair during the rape!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GOD’S NOVEL HAS SUSPENSE
THE FACE OF GOD WHAT DOES GOD WANT?
MIDRASH GOD’S NOVEL
When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
—GRAHAM GREENE
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 35
