King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Read Free Page A

(1 Sam. 1:5) (NEB)
    The voice called to him twice more during that fateful night, and twice more Samuel answered “Here am I”
(Hineni)
. At last the voice revealed itself to be the God of Israel, who now manifested himself before Samuel and spoke again. (1 Sam, 3:4–10)
    “Behold, I will do a thing in Israel,” God told Samuel, “at which both the ears of everyone that heareth it shall tingle.” (1 Sam. 3:11) 3
    Here, in the opening passages of the Book of Samuel, we find ourselves in a world of auguries and omens, priestcraft and prophecy, a world quite unlike the one inhabited by David himself. David, as we shall come to see, never actually
hears
the voice of God, and his biblical life story is strikingly modern precisely because we are shown how human beings use and abuse one another when God is silent and aloof. At the outset of Samuel, however, we are still in the “dreamtime” of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a time and place where a boy might be roused at midnight by a mysterious voice and suddenly find himself in the physical presence of God. Only later will David stride out of these mists and into the full light of history. For now, the Bible focuses on the crucial figure who is called by God to set into motion the chain of events that will one day put David on the throne of Israel.

SPIN DOCTORS
    To understand why King David's life story begins with the calling of the prophet Samuel, we must first pause to consider some of the Bible's deepest mysteries: Who wrote the book that three faiths regard as Holy Writ? When and where did the biblical authors live and work? And why were they so much at odds with one another on matters of both theology and history? The answers to these questions reveal why the Bible is such a crazy-making book, so full of flaws and contradictions, so confusing in its depiction of who God is and what God wants that the Almighty comes across as a deity with a multiple-personality disorder. Above all, the answersreveal why the Bible celebrates a man like David—as sullied and sinful as any potentate of the ancient world—as “a man after God's own heart.”
    The Bible, according to the consensus of modern scholarship, is a patchwork of ancient texts that were composed and compiled by countless authors and editors, men and women alike, over a period of a thousand years or so. Among the strands of the biblical tapestry are history and biography, myth and legend, poetry and prayer, sacred law and secular law, rites of animal sacrifice and rituals of sympathetic magic, carpentry instructions and dermatological procedures, military tactics and dietary advice, and much else besides. The various biblical sources lived and worked at different times and places in the distant past, each one serving his or her own moral, political, and theological agenda, each one putting words into the mouths of biblical characters, and each one putting his or her own spin on the history of ancient Israel.
    The oldest passages of the Book of Samuel, as we have seen, are generally attributed to the source known as the Court Historian, a man or woman who may have been an eyewitness to the reign of David and who dared to tell his remarkable life story with both deep compassion and brutal honesty. Later, the oldest passages of the Book of Samuel came to be overwritten with the work of other sources—priests and scribes, archivists and chroniclers, apologists and propagandists, bards and troubadours—who felt at liberty to embellish and edit the Court Historian's work.
    The composite text was given a high polish by a source known as the Deuteronomistic Historian, a term used by Bible scholars to identify a school of priests and scribes who brought the Book of Samuel and other biblical books into line with the distinctive theology that is first announced in the Book of Deuteronomy. And the Bible as we know it today bears the fingerprints of one final set of editors known collectively as the Redactor (or “R”).