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

faith commitment, not a historical fact. The attempt to recover historical fact means relinquishing, at least for this purpose, the faith commitments that preclude any challenge to the received tradition.
    This means recognizing that the Bible is a product of human minds, and that, like all literature, it is subject to the biases and agendas, both conscious and unconscious, of its authors. The critical study of the Bible entails pressing against those biases, peeling back those agendas. Scholars of literature call this reading with a “hermeneutic of suspicion”—being aware that the conclusions to which a piece of writing leads us are those to which its author wants us to be led, and stepping back to ask how and why such efforts were made. We must first remove the nonhistorical pro-David elements from the story, to expose the basic events underneath. When we do this, it is harder to maintain the overwhelmingly positive picture of David we get from the Bible. In the case of the David and Nabal story, for instance, we are left with the stark sequence of events as presented at the beginning of this introduction—and, when we attempt to understand those events from an objective historical perspective, we are left with the strong possibility that David may in fact have been running a protection racket, may in fact have killed Nabal, and may in fact have covered up his acquisition of Nabal’s property by marrying Abigail. Given this potentially damning depiction of David, it is no wonder that the biblical author went to such lengths to render the story in pro-David terms. To use a modern analogy, the biblical narrative may be considered the ancient equivalent of political spin: it is a retelling, even a reinterpretation, of events, the goal of which is to absolve David of any potential guilt and to show him in a positive light.
    As spin, it has been remarkably effective, in no small part for the simple reason that it is from the Bible. The revelation of private thoughts, conversations, and events; the characterizations of the participants; the divine intervention—all of these, and with them the decidedly pro-David interpretation of the events, have been taken as representing the historical truth, or at the very least the moral truth. The Jewish historian Josephus, retelling the story in the first century CE , plays up Nabal’s wickedness and David’s innocence: “Nabal had died through his own wickedness and had given [David] revenge, while [David] himself still had clean hands . . . the wicked are pursued by God, who overlooks no act of man but repays the good in kind, while he inflicts swift punishment upon the wicked.” 3 The ancient rabbis, perhaps realizing that the biblical account did not sufficiently justify Nabal’s death, devised a number of rationales not found in the text, from greed to pride to idolatry. 4 Matthew Henry’s commentary on this chapter, from the early eighteenth century, portrays David as exceedingly humble in his request and emphasizes his need: “David, it seems, was in such distress that he would be glad to be beholden to him [Nabal], and did in effect come a begging to his door. What little reason have we to value the wealth of this world when so great a churl as Nabal abounds and so great a saint as David suffers want!” 5
    Ironically, while postbiblical readers and commentators bought into the pro-David spin in Samuel, other biblical authors writing about David were made uncomfortable by it. The author of Chronicles, one of the latest books of the Hebrew Bible, seems to have recognized that even when interpreted in favor of David, the events described in Samuel are still rather unpleasant stories to be telling about Israel’s glorious king. Thus in Chronicles we find no trace of the David and Nabal story—in fact, David’s entire time in the wilderness, which occupies twelve chapters in Samuel, is reduced to the list of warriors who went to the wilderness to support David as