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

Thus, the Bible is an elaborate tapestry rather than the work of a single author, human or divine, and we can tease out the strands that were woven into the narrative fabric by the various sources,each one putting a moral or political or theological coloration— or “spin”—on the text.
    The opening passages of the Book of Samuel, for example, seem to be the work of an author who embraces the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel, an author from the same circles that produced the fiery theological manifestos of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. 4 Unlike the Court Historian, the prophetic author is not much interested in the realpolitik of ancient Israel or the sexual adventures of its princes and kings. The only real concern of the theological spin doctor who describes the calling of young Samuel is the profound and enduring mystery of how God works his will in history. So this author composed the prequel to the life of David that appears in the opening passages of the Book of Samuel. That is why we meet Samuel—one of those cranky, carping, God-inspired men and women whom we call prophets—long before we meet David himself. And that is why Samuel is presented as a man with grave misgivings about the very idea of monarchy.
    In the Bible, as elsewhere in life and literature, nothing succeeds like success, and so David is forgiven for his sins and scandals by the Court Historian. But the prophetic sources lived long after the reign of David, and they witnessed the ultimate failure of kingship in ancient Israel. The dynasty founded by King David continued to reign for nearly five hundred years, but the Bible describes almost all of his successors as a sorry collection of apostates and blasphemers whose misconduct resulted in invasion and conquest, destruction and dispersion. For that reason, the first voice we hear in the Book of Samuel belongs to a biblical author who prefers holy men to kings and priests, and the tale opens with the prophet Samuel, the man whom God selects to make and break the kings of Israel.

THE WASTELAND
    Samuel was born in the land of Canaan a couple of hundred years after its conquest by the coalition of twelve tribes known as
b'nai
Yisrael
, the Children of Israel, at a time when things had gone terribly wrong for the Chosen People. The Bible characterizes Canaan as the Promised Land, “a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exod. 3:8) But, as it turned out, Canaan was not a virgin paradise. Rather, the land promised to the Israelites teemed with tribes and peoples—“seven nations greater and mightier than thou,” as God had warned the Israelites (Deut. 7:1)—who regarded Canaan as
their
homeland. Here begins the first and longest-lasting of the problems created by the disparity between what God promises and what God does in the Hebrew Bible.
    At first God had vowed to cleanse the Promised Land of its native dwellers. “I will send my terror before thee,” God promised Moses. “I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before.” (Exod. 23:27, 31) But he was so angry and disappointed with the “stiff-necked” Israelites, who were always so faithless and so defiant, that he changed his mind. “I will
not
drive them out from before you,” God later told Joshua, successor of Moses and conqueror of Canaan, “but they shall be unto you as snares, and their gods shall be a trap unto you.” (Judg. 2:3)
    Indeed, the Israelites found the pagan gods and goddesses whom the Canaanites worshipped with orgiastic abandon to be far more alluring than the stern and censorious God of Israel. Yahweh was a bachelor father, a loner who disdained a female consort, but the Canaanite pantheon included an array of she-deities who were both erotic and maternal, thus answering the human need for a feminine object of worship. Once in Canaan, the Israelites turned to idolatry, sacred harlotry, and other ritual practices that the pious biblical source regards as