King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Jonathan Kirsch Page B
Authors: Jonathan Kirsch
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hands when he killed the Philistine, and the Lord won a great victory for Israel? You saw it, you shared in the rejoicing. Why should you commit a sin of innocent blood by putting David to death without cause?” (1 Sam. 19:4–5) 5
Jonathan's open praise of David seemed to succeed in softening Saul's anger, if only momentarily, perhaps because of Jonathan's earnest and eloquent words, or because his own mood had lurched once again from murderous rage to impulsive affection, or because he had decided to feign a change of heart.
“As the Lord lives,” King Saul vowed, “he shall not be put to death.” (1 Sam. 19:6)
So Jonathan conducted David back to the court of Saul. David took up residence with his new wife and resumed his duties as an officer in the king's army. Once again he marched off to war, and once again he marched back in victory over the Philistines. “He slew them with a great slaughter,” the Bible reports, “and they fled before him.” (1 Sam. 19:8) But David's victories in battle only stoked King Saul's mad rage.
CRAZY QUILT
The episode of Michal's deception and David's getaway is salted with allusions to other passages in the Bible, some subtle and some pointed, all of which demonstrate how the crazy quilt of biblical text is stitched together. As bits and pieces of what we now call the Bible were compiled and collated, revised and redacted, and sometimes even censored by generation after generation of authors and editors, people and events were combined and conflated. The same story was sometimes told two or three times, each in a slightly different version; words, phrases, and whole passages were sometimes cut out, put aside, and restored in a different place. As a result, here and there in the biblical text we are able to glimpse a landscape that is profoundly at odds with the official theology of the Bible.
Michal's ruse faintly echoes an incident in the Book of Genesis—and both episodes reveal something shocking about the casual use of idols by the ancient Israelites. According to the tale in Genesis, the patriarch Jacob fled from his father-in-law, Laban, in the company of the two daughters whom he had taken as his wives, Leah and Rachel. Laban's daughters carried off their father's teraphim, and Rachel contrived to hide the stolen idols from her pursuing father by secreting them in the cushions of a camel saddle that had been carried inside their tent for safekeeping, seating herself on the saddle, and then telling her father that she could not rise from her seat because she was menstruating. (Gen. 31:34–35) 10
Both of these stories feature a household idol that is used by a daughter to deceive her father, although the teraph that Michal used to simulate a sleeping David was apparently a mask or a statue of life-size proportions rather than a statuette. What is especially shocking and revealing about the episode is the fact that, as late as the lifetime of David in the early tenth century B.C.E. , the Israelites were still keeping and using idols despite the oft-stated loathing of Yahweh for polytheism and paganism.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is the first of theTen Commandments, and the second commandment is even more specific: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, [and] thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.” (Exod. 20:3–5) God threatens plague and famine and exile as punishment of the Israelites for the sin of idolatry, and he decrees a holy war to expunge idol-worship by the non-Israelites who claimed the Promised Land as their homeland.
Ye shall surely destroy all the places, wherein the nations that ye are to dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountain, and upon the hills, and under every leafy tree. And ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces in their pillars, and burn their Asherim 11 with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of
Jonathan's open praise of David seemed to succeed in softening Saul's anger, if only momentarily, perhaps because of Jonathan's earnest and eloquent words, or because his own mood had lurched once again from murderous rage to impulsive affection, or because he had decided to feign a change of heart.
“As the Lord lives,” King Saul vowed, “he shall not be put to death.” (1 Sam. 19:6)
So Jonathan conducted David back to the court of Saul. David took up residence with his new wife and resumed his duties as an officer in the king's army. Once again he marched off to war, and once again he marched back in victory over the Philistines. “He slew them with a great slaughter,” the Bible reports, “and they fled before him.” (1 Sam. 19:8) But David's victories in battle only stoked King Saul's mad rage.
CRAZY QUILT
The episode of Michal's deception and David's getaway is salted with allusions to other passages in the Bible, some subtle and some pointed, all of which demonstrate how the crazy quilt of biblical text is stitched together. As bits and pieces of what we now call the Bible were compiled and collated, revised and redacted, and sometimes even censored by generation after generation of authors and editors, people and events were combined and conflated. The same story was sometimes told two or three times, each in a slightly different version; words, phrases, and whole passages were sometimes cut out, put aside, and restored in a different place. As a result, here and there in the biblical text we are able to glimpse a landscape that is profoundly at odds with the official theology of the Bible.
Michal's ruse faintly echoes an incident in the Book of Genesis—and both episodes reveal something shocking about the casual use of idols by the ancient Israelites. According to the tale in Genesis, the patriarch Jacob fled from his father-in-law, Laban, in the company of the two daughters whom he had taken as his wives, Leah and Rachel. Laban's daughters carried off their father's teraphim, and Rachel contrived to hide the stolen idols from her pursuing father by secreting them in the cushions of a camel saddle that had been carried inside their tent for safekeeping, seating herself on the saddle, and then telling her father that she could not rise from her seat because she was menstruating. (Gen. 31:34–35) 10
Both of these stories feature a household idol that is used by a daughter to deceive her father, although the teraph that Michal used to simulate a sleeping David was apparently a mask or a statue of life-size proportions rather than a statuette. What is especially shocking and revealing about the episode is the fact that, as late as the lifetime of David in the early tenth century B.C.E. , the Israelites were still keeping and using idols despite the oft-stated loathing of Yahweh for polytheism and paganism.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is the first of theTen Commandments, and the second commandment is even more specific: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, [and] thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.” (Exod. 20:3–5) God threatens plague and famine and exile as punishment of the Israelites for the sin of idolatry, and he decrees a holy war to expunge idol-worship by the non-Israelites who claimed the Promised Land as their homeland.
Ye shall surely destroy all the places, wherein the nations that ye are to dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountain, and upon the hills, and under every leafy tree. And ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces in their pillars, and burn their Asherim 11 with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of
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