The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero Read Free

regard for her late husband.
    Without altering the basic sequence of events, the biblical version of what happened dramatically tilts the moral balance of the story. Nabal, the ostensible injured party—as the one who ends up dead—is positioned as the bad guy, as an evildoer, nasty, a fool, his character impugned even by his own wife. David, the ostensible aggressor, is rendered as the aggrieved party. Abigail can no longer be seen as a victim but becomes a willing participant and a willing newlywed, even a prophetess of David’s glory. Nabal’s death is the work of no human hands—least of all David’s, as the story emphasizes more than once—but is in fact divine punishment.
    How do we evaluate the claims of the biblical story? We begin by recognizing that the Bible is not objective history, nor was it ever intended to be. The idea, and much more so the practice, of “objective history” was unavailable to its authors. To state it baldly, the Bible is not history: it is the Bible. The biblical narrative breaks most of the fundamental rules of modern history writing. We find in the biblical story, presented as fact, aspects that no historian could know: private and unverifiable elements, including events that occurred behind closed doors; dialogues; and even internal monologues. We find characterizations of the various individuals in the story that are far from unbiased. And, perhaps most notably, we find the introduction of divine intervention as an explanation for the course of events. We can hardly blame the biblical author for failing to follow conventions of history writing that developed thousands of years after he wrote his narrative. At the same time, however, we cannot read the biblical text as if it were a piece of modern history writing. It may be describing the past, and in that sense it is historical in nature, but it describes the past using conventions more familiar to us from the genre of historical fiction. Moreover, these conventions serve a particular purpose: in our case, they glorify and idealize the Bible’s main character and most prominent hero, David.
    Thus the aspects of this narrative that are foreign to the modern genre of history writing—those that are more biblical than historical—all work toward the same ends: to denigrate Nabal and to raise up David. This can hardly be coincidence—especially when, as we will see, this pattern holds for the entirety of the David story in the two books of Samuel. Nor should it be surprising, since David is the unparalleled hero of the Hebrew Bible. He is the king against whom the Bible measures all subsequent kings and who stands unsurpassed by any who followed him. He is, as we have seen, the symbol of Israel’s incipient messianic hopes. We should not be surprised that the biblical version of his life is weighted in his favor.
    To realize that the biblical narrative is pro-David, however, is also to realize that it cannot be read at face value if we want to know the real history of David’s life. But recovering the historical David is not, unfortunately, as simple as merely reading and remembering the often overlooked biblical account of his life, as if a deeper reverence for the scriptures would lead to historical truth. Quite the contrary: the Bible is a necessary source of information, but it is neither sufficient nor particularly trustworthy. For much of the past three thousand years, and for many people still today, such a statement is impossible to accept. For some, the biblical narrative is considered to be unimpeachably true, as the Bible bears the stamp of God. If it was written by God or with divine inspiration, there is no reason to doubt it—although, it may be noted, the books of Samuel and Kings with which we are concerned here make no claims for divine origin or inspiration, and indeed no one considered them to have such qualities for several hundred years after they were written. The unassailability of the biblical text is a