The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  As the expedition of twenty soldiers set out toward Hebron, Michal’s husband followed on foot, weeping for his wife.

  At Bahurim Abner rode back to the man and said, “Return to your house, Paltiel. There is no help for it. Michal is David’s wife now.”

  Paltiel stood still and watched the whole procession ride away. Michal showed no emotion of her own, but her lips were white.

  As they traveled south, Abner conferred with many of the elders in Israel and Benjamin. “Now is the time to make David king over us all,” he said. “The Lord has promised that it would be David who will save us from the Philistines.

  “I’m on my way to talk with David,” Abner said. “Are you with me?”

  When he came to Hebron, David welcomed him with an elaborate, formal feast.

  Michal sat in a stony silence beside David, king of Judah. The flesh had thickened on her bones. There were lines at the corners of her mouth.

  David, for his part, had lost his freckles—though his skin had fared poorly in constant sunlight. It was scarred on his face and arms from burning; but his breast was lily white and tender underneath his robe. His hair was as tangled as ever, but the red of it had deepened to a dark copper sheen.

  There was a melancholy in his golden eyes.

  When everyone had eaten, Abner rose to his feet and said, “The elders of Benjamin wish to make a covenant with you, David, that you reign over them. So do all the tribes between Mahanaim and this place. I have spoken with them. With your leave, therefore, I will travel north and gather all Israel to my lord the king.”

  David gazed at the commander of Israel as if interrogating him. Abner maintained his military bearing. Finally David said, “Go. You have my leave.”

  On the following morning, as Abner was departing through the gate of the city, he happened to pass Joab returning to Hebron with his men after a raid.

  Abner in the clean clothes of diplomacy, Joab in the sweat and the grit of warfare: they paused, facing one another.

  Joab said, “What are you doing here?”

  Abner answered with grace: “To honor your lord David and seek his agreement to become my lord king.”

  Joab hunched his broad shoulders.

  Suddenly he said, “Come here. I have something to say to you in private.”

  Joab led Abner into one of the small rooms at the side of the gate. Just as they entered, he turned and stabbed Abner in the belly with a knife so long that it came out his back and cut through the robe.

  Joab left the room without a word and went to bathe himself.

  When David heard of Abner’s death he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and mourned for him. The next day he walked behind Abner’s bier all the way to the grave, lamenting in a loud voice:

  Should Abner die surprised like Nabal the fool?

  Your hands were unbound!

  Your feet were unfettered!

  You fell as they fall who die on the knives of the wicked.

  Joab stood at the side of the road and heard the lament. He watched the funeral procession, unblinking and indifferent.

  The people knew that it had not been David’s will that Abner should die. But no one uttered blame against Joab.

  ABNER’S DEATH CAUSED Ishbaal, king of Israel, to sink into despair. Even outside his house people could hear him pacing the rooms, bemoaning his fate.

  One afternoon in the heat of the day, two captains of Saul’s old army came to the young king’s house. The doorkeeper was sleeping. They entered unhindered and found Ishbaal dozing face down on his bed. Without waking him, they cut off his head.

  The names of these men were Rechab and Baanah. They were brothers, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite.

  All night long they traveled to Hebron, carrying the head of Ishbaal to David himself.

  When they came before David, they said, “He sought your life. But the Lord has avenged you this day on Saul and on his offspring.”

  David walked to Rechab and Baanah where they stood. He put out his fingers and touched the solemn, puffy face of Ishbaal.

  Quietly he said, “Yesterday afternoon and evening. Last night all night long. Dawn and daybreak and morning.” David raised his eyes and looked from Rechab to Baanah. “During all your walking you did to get from Mahanaim to this place, for every step you took, did it never once occur to you that I might object to the murder of an innocent man in his own house on his own bed?”

  David turned and said to his bodyguard Benaiah, “Execute them.”

  In the heat of that same day, Rechab and Baanah were hung up without their hands and feet beside the pool at Hebron, dead.

  But the head of Ishbaal was buried in the tomb of Abner.

  IN THOSE DAYS the elders of the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said, “Behold, we are your bone and your flesh. In times past, when Saul was king over us, it was you who led Israel in war. And the Lord has said to you, You shall be shepherd of my people Israel.”

  So David made a covenant before the Lord with the people of Israel: he who was king in Judah now was anointed king of all the tribes, uniting Israel under his sole rule.

  David, when he began to reign, was thirty years old.

  III

  SOMEONE IS SINGING in the streets of Hebron. Early in the morning before the small shops open, before the daily bread is baked or any merchant has begun to call out the name of his wares, someone is passing below the king’s window, singing in a beggar’s rough voice these words:

  The Lord says to my lord:

  “Sit at my right hand, until I make your foe your footstool.”

  David wakes and hears that small snatch of song. Who is singing? A man or a woman? One of the prophets? One of those unkempt, alien beings, the whirling, wild-eyed dancers who used to attract Saul?

  The Lord says to my lord:

  “Sit down in power!

  Send forth your scepter!”

  David rolls back the blanket and stands up in his room. Even so, the voice grows distant, swiftly receding:

  For day by day

  like dew from the womb of the morning

  your youth shall wash you strong again—

  Gone.

  By the time the king gets to the window and looks down, the dim streets of Hebron are empty.

  Moreover, it’s snowing. The air is visible and silent, all filled with falling. The low stone wall across the way has a woolen hood. Suddenly it occurs to David that snow would preserve the singer’s foot-tracks.

  He throws a robe around his shoulders, runs downstairs, crams sandals between his toes, and rushes out into the early cold of the morning.

  But when he gets to the side of the house where his window looks, he finds only Rothem, an ancient domestic servant hunched over her broom of twigs, sweeping the snow from the street. She is destroying the steps of the singer. She is humming tunelessly in her great nose. She glances up and sees the king and twists her face into an expression of greeting.

  “For your pretty foot, m’lord,” she croaks. “Because the king’s foot shouldn’t be bitten by winter.”

  David returns to his chambers and lies down again. But he can’t go back to sleep. He has been living in Hebron seven years now, and this is the thought that occupies his mind: his house is too small. He has seven wives, Michal among them, each woman with chambers and servants of her own. He has six sons; only Michal is barren, though she keeps nurses and tutors and toys as if she had a child. David’s house has counting rooms and a feast room and a place to stand before the Lord—but it has no place for the treasures his raids bring home, nor halls required by a king: a waiting room, a throne room, a place to render judgment. Moreover, there is no place for the ministers who serve him in the maintenance of a kingdom. His house is too small.

  Two years ago David spent time in the city of the Jebusites, called Jebus or Jerusalem, studying their methods of governance. Even before the tribes of Israel had anointed him king, he slipped into the city and spoke with the common scri
bes, those who labored in their king’s employ but whose level was beneath their king’s attention. From them he learned the administration of kingdoms.

  Lately David has been applying this knowledge. He has been appointing officers and counselors with which to rule Israel. Today the king has a royal cabinet—but he has no room for it!

  Seraiah, his secretary, knows seven languages and writes all of David’s correspondence. Seraiah keeps an account of the acts of the king, but he has no room for the records.

  Jehoshaphat is the king’s herald. He handles most of the affairs of state; but he lives at a distance from David’s house. He should be in the house.

  Benaiah now commands an entire band of fierce, loyal troops: David’s personal bodyguard. These men absolutely require space in the king’s house.

  And Joab’s duties as commander-in-chief have increased enormously, for he has organized the military into several distinct divisions: regiments of a thousand, companies of one hundred, platoons of fifty, and squads of ten men each. He who fights Philistines actually admires their effective declension of authority. It produces a remarkable coherence on the battlefield, however chaotic the fighting becomes.

  David knows what delights his passionless commander: that one word from his mouth can be multiplied by a thousand mouths to ten thousand troops, transforming a host of men into a singular, smooth, and murderous attack. Joab has the tactician’s mind. He also has the tyrant’s arrogance and the soldier’s impatience.

  But he has no room for his officers or for the keeping of his troops. Hebron is in the territory of Judah, whose elders want to exert control over Joab’s army. And the citizens of Hebron resist the imperious attitude and the categorical command of generals.

  Hebron loves the king.

  Hebron only tolerates his grim commander.

  But Hebron hates the army that sleeps in its houses and eats its food. Therefore David is contemplating change. Not just his house, but this whole city is too small for him—There! There it is again! The singing. Outside his window, cloaked in snowfall, David hears the rough voice singing:

  The Lord is at your right hand!

  The Lord will shatter kings!

  He will crack the heads of the nations,

  that you,

  when you pass that way, my pretty lord,

  may pause to drink from the small brooks.

  Peace.

  This time David doesn’t disturb the warmth of his bedding.

  He looks up at the oakwood beams and the grey clay troweled between them.

  “Tomorrow my ceiling will be cedar. And my house—” David ponders the thought, his hands behind his head, gazing upward, gazing through the ceiling, and then he whispers: “My house will be in Jerusalem.”

  THE ADVANCE OF DAVID, king of Israel, against Jerusalem of the Jebusites was no secret.

  His armies marched from Hebron in full view of every village and city on the ridge route north. His troops moved in such a disciplined silence that the Israelites who stood along the way also fell silent at their passage.

  David had initiated no discussions of treaty, nor had he responded to the ambassadors of the Jebusites. He did not want tribute. He wanted the city. And he wanted to take it by a force so fatal that no one would doubt his possession thereafter. The city would belong to him and then to the sons who came after him. And because the world should know the glorious thing which was occurring, David rejected stealth. But Jerusalem was mightily fortified. Parts of its walls were more than five hundred years old. And in the three hundred years since Joshua had invaded Canaan, Israel had not been able to defeat this city.

  The king of Jerusalem sent a messenger to David when he appeared in the hills south of the city. The messenger rode a horse. David rode a mule. As they approached each other in an open space, David called, “Does Jerusalem have something to say to David?”

  The messenger said: “The king says, ‘It is no use to attack our walls.’ My lord the king says, ‘With such walls even the blind and the lame could drive back David, the shepherd.’”

  David sat astride his mount, smiling with a sunny praise upon the Jebusite messenger, as if the man had just sung a delightful song.

  The messenger cleared his throat. “Sir,” he said, “does Israel have a reply?”

  “Thank you for asking,” said David. “Yes. I do.” He turned to Joab and in conversational tones said, “Tell the troops that whoever reaches the water shaft first and there smites Jebusites who are by nature lame and blind—he shall be my chief and my commander.”

  Joab nodded and repeated the order to an aide.

  David turned to the messenger and said, “You’d best not hesitate.” The poor fellow was gaping past David, where Joab’s command was multiplying itself over and over, farther and farther away. “Someone is liable to get home ahead of you.”

  The man whirled about, whipped up his horse, and tore north over the hills to Jerusalem screaming: “The water shaft! Garrison the water shaft!”

  David watched him go, his face now fixed in a pale mask. Softly he said to Joab, “Go.”

  Joab barked a more brutal command. The horn of war awoke all down the column of warriors, and the armies began to move.

  David turned his mount aside and climbed a high bluff in order to watch the campaign.

  Joab bent his body and galloped forward at breakneck speed, ten men riding immediately behind him. They outdistanced the foot soldiers, who ran in companies of a hundred.

  Indeed, the commander-in-chief was the first to arrive at Gihon, a spring in the Kidron valley just below Jerusalem. Here was the water shaft that David had named. It had been cut upward through rock so that the city could come down for water during a siege. A Jebusite guard was stationed here, but Joab and his men attacked with such astounding savagery that they scattered.

  Enemy soldiers appeared in the mouth of the water shaft.

  Joab’s men shot them with arrows.

  Soldiers began to pour from the shaft.

  Joab dismounted and threw himself bodily against these, killing them with two short daggers in close spaces. Then he began himself to ascend the narrow tunnel, meeting the Jebusites one by one and climbing their bloody corpses like steps.

  The ten Israelites came immediately behind him. None of them spoke. Every man knew precisely the plan their commander had conceived.

  Within the city itself, they burst from the shaft like a fountain of bright iron. Side by side they fought toward the great gates in the western wall. Two Israelites died, bitten by Jebusite arrows. Another stumbled with a spear in his side. A fourth man ran forward, drawing a hail of arrows from all the warriors of Jerusalem, emptying their bows so that Joab could safely lunge the last few feet to the gates. There, surrounded by six Israelites in leather armor, Joab heaved the bar from its metal braces and swung wide the gates to the city, and so a great stream of troops surged in, flooding the pavements, the streets, the houses of Jerusalem, slaughtering soldiers and driving the citizens back against their walls.

  David entered the western gate on his mule, unhindered.

  The king of the Jebusites was brought before him.

  David said, “Is it better to live blind and lame or better to die entire? A shepherd wants to know.”

  The king gave David a wicked look, but he said nothing.

  David sighed. “Well, then I will choose for you and grant you an honorable death. But know this first before you die: that the city has a new name now. I have named it the City of David.”

  LATE THAT SAME NIGHT, King David walked along the northern ridge of his new stronghold. He stopped at the ravine that had for centuries protected Jerusalem against assaults from the north. He stood in the cold night wind and gazed across at a hill yet higher than this one. But David wasn’t thinking about fortifications just now. He was thinking about the history of these hills, and their future.

  “Moriah,” he said. He murmured the word slowly: “Mount Moriah,” the ancient name of that highe
r hill before him, grizzled with brush and rock and age. It was there that Abraham had almost slain his son Isaac and sacrificed him to the God whose name he did not know. But God—even David’s God, the Lord—had saved Isaac by providing a ram for the sacrifice. “And so you saved us too, by saving the seed of our grandfather.” David was speaking aloud in the wintry night. His breath made ghostly puffs in the cold air. “Right there, on that hill, one thousand years ago, the flint knife of an old man did not cut his son’s throat. O Lord God of Israel, now that you have given it to us again, it is on that same hill I want to build a house for you, on Moriah, the place of saving!”

  LONE MONTH LATER, news came to David that the Philistines had mustered their armies in Gezer and were now marching into the valley of Rephaim.

  David was not surprised. As long as he had stayed in Hebron, the Philistine lords saw him as a soldier of fortune raiding the useless hills of Judah. But now he was king of territories north and south with a city of his own between the two. Now a stronghold of ancient reputation bore his name and protected his person. There was in Israel a king greater than Saul!

  David summoned his advisors to the western gate of the city. Abiathar brought the ephod so that the king could seek the will of the Lord.

  David asked, “Shall I ride forth against the Philistines? Will you give them into my hand?”

  The Lord said to David, Ride forth. I will certainly give the Philistines into your hand.

  So David and Joab and all their mighty men gathered in the hills east of the valley of Rephaim. They spread through rocks and the rugged terrain and concealed themselves. When the Philistines appeared at the far end of the valley, David whispered to his armies, “Wait.” The Philistines were looking for a place to establish the camps of a long campaign. They came closer and closer, but David whispered, “Wait.”