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

king. It is noteworthy that these men are described as warriors—this is the Chronicler’s revision of Samuel’s description of David’s band as “every man who was bitter of spirit.” Any potentially negative aspect of David’s life and actions to be found in Samuel, down to the smallest detail, is fully expunged in Chronicles. The David of Chronicles is unimpeachable—which seems to be precisely what the Chronicler had in mind when he rewrote the narrative of Samuel.
    Our modern cultural memory of David, then, stands in a long line of increasing idealization and reconstruction. From the spin of Samuel to the cleansing of David’s image in Chronicles to the messianic connection in the New Testament to the present, the historical David has been successively and successfully diminished, replaced by the legend we are now familiar with.
     
    R ECOGNITION THAT EVEN THE Bible presents an idealized David—and that the Bible is the only written source of information we have about David’s life—has led some scholars in the past few decades to claim that David never existed at all. They argue that the biblical David is not the idealization of a real historical figure, but is rather an invention out of whole cloth, a projection into the past by later kings who wanted to legitimate their lineage and status and who created a legendary founding figure against whom to compare themselves. Yet this is akin to claiming that England’s Henry V never existed if we had no source of information other than Shakespeare’s idealized good king. To a certain extent, these scholars have bought the spin of the Bible just as fully as those who, like Matthew Henry, call David a saint.
    It is, in fact, the very existence of the biblical spin that argues in favor of David’s existence. There is no need to spin a story that has no basis in reality. If the fundamental aim of spin is to say “it may seem that the event happened one way, but it really happened another way,” then there has to have been an actual event in the first place. And who, given the chance to create a legendary figure from the past to serve as an ancestor and model, would invent a story such as that of David and Nabal? When the stories in the two books of Samuel are understood as pro-David spin, the question of David’s existence is rendered moot: he must have existed for the text to look like this. Moreover, the stories about David must have been written relatively soon after the events they describe, for they are grounded in the assumption that their audience knew something about those events. 6
    The task, then, is to find the middle ground between accepting the biblical narratives at face value and rejecting them altogether. This entails digging beneath the pro-David spin of the two books of Samuel—removing, as we did with the David and Nabal story, those elements of the narrative that we recognize as generically nonhistorical—in order to access the fundamental events of the past, and then trying to reconstruct the more likely story of what really happened.
    In doing this, it is important to remember that the historical David was part of a very different place and time, the ancient Near East. The political conventions of the ancient Near East, and the cultural history of early Israel, provide a crucial lens through which we must view and evaluate David’s actions as he seeks to attain and retain the throne. Similarly, understanding the literary conventions of the ancient Near East will reveal that the literary techniques used in the retelling and interpretation of David’s life—the spin—were not uncommon, especially in stories about and by kings. David as a person and David as a literary figure participate equally in their ancient context and are illuminated by that context.
    Such is the aim of this book: to bring the historical David to life by reaching back through the accumulated legend, beyond the pro-David agenda of the biblical text, into the ancient