David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (13 page)

We have already suggested that the earliest stories of David as an outlaw were the product of his followers’ eagerness to celebrate the courage and cunning of their chief. We have also suggested that the interlocked cycle of David and Saul stories was the expression of an imaginative counterattack by the supporters of David against the damning accusations of betrayal by the supporters of the fallen Saul. But in the “Court History” and other chapters in the second book of Samuel there is another, entirely different kind of tale. Its stories are about court politics, royal rivalries, internal uprisings, and foreign conquests, played out on the stage of royal bedrooms and throne rooms,
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and in pitched battles between royal armies equipped with specialized units of infantry, cavalry, and chariotry.

A biblical passage relates that after clearing the Philistines from the Jerusalem area and securing his rule in his capital city, David ordered that the holy Ark of the Covenant be brought to Jerusalem in a joyous procession to mark the establishment of the nation’s eternal core.
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David’s wild, ecstatic behavior at the head of the marchers—“leaping and dancing before the Lord” (2 Samuel 6:16)—revealed his unkingly demeanor and enraged his royal wife Michal, daughter of King Saul. As Knauf pointed out, the story of Michal’s harsh rebuke to the dancing David ended with the cryptic statement “And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death” (2 Samuel 6:23)—a classic dynastic jibe, explaining why the Saulide line died out in Jerusalem.

Yet the sarcastic words of the aristocratic Michal to David—“How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” (2 Samuel 6:20)—are hardly conceivable in the context of a rustic highland chiefdom where social bonds, rather than social differences, needed to be stressed. Whether there was a real woman named Michal, daughter of Saul, who was married to the historical David, we may never know. But we can be safe in assuming that the story did not take its present form—and certainly its meaning—before the rise of a class-conscious aristocracy in Jerusalem.

Likewise, the complex love story of David and Bathsheba hardly makes any sense outside a distinctly courtly atmosphere. In the midst of the fierce fighting against the neighboring kingdom of Ammon, the biblical narrative described how King David, remaining in his palace in Jerusalem, is ensnared by his own lust.

The woman’s husband, Uriah, was engaged in the fierce battle for Rabbah, the capital of Ammon. Immediately David recalls him to Jerusalem, but all of his attempts to persuade the good soldier Uriah to sleep with his wife, Bathsheba (and thereby provide a cover for her adulterous pregnancy), fail. In an act of cold calculation that would forever cast a shadow on David’s reputation, he sends Uriah back to the front with a letter to his commander, ordering Joab to “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down, and die” (2 Samuel 11:15). In the bitter fighting beneath the walls of Rabbah, Uriah perishes and after a brief period of mourning the beautiful Bathsheba becomes David’s wife. But David soon faces the consequences of his actions. Reproached by the prophet Nathan, he bitterly repents his actions and watches helplessly as the child born of Bathsheba dies. This reversal of fortune proves to be a passing episode, for then “David comforted his wife, Bathsheba, and went in to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon” (2 Samuel 12:24).

Every detail of the story—from the king spying the bathing beauty from the roof of his palace to the notes dispatched by messenger from the royal palace, to the death of the cuckolded husband in the fierce siege of the heavily fortified city of Rabbah, capital of Ammon—is drawn from the scenes and events of royal life of a type that emerged only in the ninth century
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. We cannot know if David actually had an affair with a woman named Bathsheba, but the story of how David repented for his sin and how Bathsheba’s son, Solomon, succeeded to his father’s throne was, as many scholars have noted, a powerful political statement legitimizing Solomon’s line.
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That legitimation is argued in a detailed and realistic setting that only those who were familiar with the life of a royal court and the field procedures of a standing, professional army could possibly recognize.

So too, the tragic story of Absalom’s rebellion is deeply dependent on the morals and etiquette of a royal court. The Bible relates that despite great wealth, stunning military victories, and vast armies of conscripted royal laborers, all is not well in the closed circles of David’s court. Rivalries begin among the princes. The rape of Tamar, David’s daughter, by his hotheaded eldest son, Amnon, initiates a chain of events that reveals David’s growing weakness, if not as a king then as a man. Enraged by the crime, Tamar’s brother Absalom murders Amnon and flees northward to spend years in exile with the Arameans. Upon returning to Jerusalem he hatches a conspiracy to overthrow his father’s increasingly rigid rule. David, growing emotionally weak, is forced to flee Jerusalem for his life. The revolt is finally suppressed, David returns to his capital, and Absalom is hunted down and killed by David’s forces. Yet this victory is at the same time David’s greatest personal disaster.

Learning of Absalom’s death, “the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son’” (2 Samuel 18:33).

The deadly rivalry of princes and the conflict and defection of trusted royal advisers all bespeak a far more complex social background than was apparent in tenth-century
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Jerusalem. There are many more examples—King Hiram of Tyre’s provision of building supplies for David’s palace (2 Samuel 5:11); David’s diplomatic marriage to the daughter of the king of Geshur (2 Samuel 3:3); David’s bestowal of an agricultural fiefdom to Saul’s surviving grandson, the crippled Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 9); David’s stationing of garrisons in the territory of Aram of Damascus and in Edom in southern Transjordan (2 Samuel 8:6, 14); and Joab’s detailed royal census of David’s far-flung domains (2 Samuel 24:1–9). All these vivid details seem out of place for the context that the historical David, ruler of a modest chiefdom in the southern highlands, would have known.

MORE GEOGRAPHICAL CLUES

But why date these stately descriptions specifically to the ninth century and not later? In this case the answer again lies in geography. Take the kingdom of Geshur as an example. It is mentioned as an ally of David (2 Samuel 3:3) and as the place where Absalom (the son of the Geshurite wife of David) found refuge after the killing of Amnon. Geshur appears in these biblical texts but is not mentioned in the eighth-century
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Assyrian records. The large, fortified site of Bethsaida on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee may have been its capital. It was established in the ninth century and initially shows clear Aramean material culture, while in the eighth century
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, when perhaps it was conquered by the northern kingdom, its Aramean character ends. The only logical chronological setting for a story in the land of Geshur is therefore in the ninth century
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.

The description of the extent of the census carried out by Joab toward the end of David’s reign offers additional ninth-century geographical evidence:

According to this description, David’s kingdom encompassed all of the central highlands as well as the Transjordanian plateau from Aro‘er in the south to the Golan in the north. Aro‘er is located on the northern cliff of the deep valley of the Arnon River in Moab, and the only possible historical reality for the mention of this place is the conquests of the Omrides in Moab. Jazer and Gilead apparently refer to the northern areas of Transjordan. To the west of the Jordan, the northern boundary extends from Dan to the border of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon. And in the south, it extends to the Beer-sheba Valley, where the first evidence of royal control appears only in the ninth century. Some minimalist scholars have argued that this description of the borders of the Davidic state is a late and completely imaginary creation, yet it uncannily retraces the combined territories of the emergent kingdoms of Israel and Judah
together,
at the time when their royal lines were at least temporarily merged.

Such is also the case with the biblical accounts of David’s great military victories against the neighboring powers, detailed in 2 Samuel 8, 10, and 12. Moab is the first foreign conquest, a foreshadowing of the conquests of the Omrides in the same area:

Next comes the war with the Arameans of Syria in the north:

In addition to the mention of massive forces of chariotry and infantry that recall Ahab’s contingents at the battle of Qarqar in 853
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, the general perspective is of the ninth century, as noted by the Israeli biblical historian Nadav Naaman. First of all, the stories describe Aramean states, whose independent existence was short-lived, ending with their annexation to the Assyrian empire in the eighth century
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. The Aramean states that are mentioned in the story, except for Damascus, are missing from the eighth-and seventh-century
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records. More important, these were areas that were fought over and at least partially controlled by the Omrides at the height of their power in the mid–ninth century
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. Lastly, the main figure in the story, Hadadezer, corresponds to the Aramaic name Adad-idri, who was the king of Damascus in the mid–ninth century
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. Adad-idri appears in the monolith inscription of Shalmaneser III as one of the prominent figures in the coalition of Levantine states that faced the Assyrians at Qarqar. Another powerful king in that coalition, as we mentioned earlier, was Ahab the Israelite.

The “Court History” of David thus offers a whole series of historical retrojections in which the founder of the dynasty of Judah in the tenth century is credited with the victories and the acquisitions of territory that were in fact accomplished by the ninth-century Omrides. But why would a
Judahite
author model the achievements of his kingdom’s founding father on the wars of the later Omride kingdom of
Israel
?

THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF THE DAVIDIC DYNASTY

As things turned out, the dynastic marriage of the house of Omri and the house of David had a violent and unhappy ending that, at least briefly, threatened the survival of the Davidic dynasty. By the mid–ninth century
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, the heyday of the Omride kingdom was already passing. One by one, its imperial possessions were falling away. By this time, there are enough external historical sources that, with due caution, we can confirm at least the main historical outlines of the biblical accounts. The Mesha inscription (and 2 Kings 3:5) records an armed uprising in Moab that swept away its control by the kingdom of Israel after Ahab’s death. The major blow is recorded in the Tel Dan inscription (described in Appendix 1)—the earliest nonbiblical evidence for the name David—which confirms the defeat of the Omrides by Hazael, king of Damascus. With differences in circumstances and detail from the biblical account in 2 Kings 9, it reports the killing of the Judahite king Ahaziah and his more powerful contemporary, the Israelite king Joram. Destruction layers in many sites in the north may provide gloomy evidence for the subsequent Aramean assault. Within the northern kingdom itself, a new pretender, the army commander Jehu (whose name also appears in contemporary Assyrian records), arose to oust and exterminate the surviving members of the Omride line.