King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (16 page)

“Destroy him not, for who can put forth his hand against the Lord's anointed, and be guiltless?” says David, who explains that Saul will surely die, but only when God says so: “The Lord shall smite him, or he shall go down into battle and be swept away.” (1 Sam. 26:9–10)
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So David is shown to leave the sleeping king undisturbed, pausing only to carry off his spear and a flask of water that lay at his side. Later, David hails the soldiers in the king's camp from a distance, and delivers a scolding to Saul's trusted general, Abner, for dereliction of duty. “Why have you not kept watch over your lord the king?” demands David, holding up the stolen spear and water flask to demonstrate how close he had managed to come to Saul. And when Saul awakens and overhears these taunts, he is struck with the same gush of sentiment he showed at En-gedi.

“Behold, I have played the fool,” the king says. “Blessed be
thou, my son David, thou shalt both do mightily, and shalt surely prevail.” (1 Sam. 26:21, 25)

At the end of each of the doublets, the conflict between Saul and David is resolved, the two men are reconciled, and each goes his separate way. But the happy ending is paper-thin, and the sharp edges of history always poke through. David may be bold, handsome, and charismatic, but the Bible allows us to see him as an outlaw, a mercenary, even a mass murderer, and it raises the alarming notion that he was a traitor, too. Even if, as the Bible intends, we fall in love with David—even if we conclude that he acted with such brutality and cunning only because he was forced to do so by the aloofness of the Almighty and the homicidal rage of King Saul—the Bible never allows us to forget that he is a Robin Hood with bloodstained hands.

A
t an odd moment in the account of David's outlaw years, the Bible records an event that signaled a sea change in the destiny of Saul and all of Israel.

The death of Samuel represented a blow to the newborn kingdom of Israel. After all, Samuel had once ruled the twelve tribes as the last of the judges. It was he who answered the people's call for a king of their own, and it was he who anointed the first two kings of Israel, the one who still reigned and the other who would reign if he managed to survive the first king's best efforts to kill him. Everyone in Israel, the Bible makes clear, felt a sharp sense of loss and dislocation. But for Saul, losing the man who had been his mentor, confessor, and father figure was a catastrophe. Ever since Saul had ordered the mass murder of the priests at Nob, no
other man of God besides Samuel had been available to minister to the troubled king or to intercede with Yahweh on his behalf. Now that Samuel, too, was dead, Saul discovered that he had irredeemably forfeited the favor of God.

The revelation came at a moment of acute danger to Israel. The Philistines fielded an army at a place called Shunem, and the Israelites gathered at Gilboa.
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But when Saul surveyed the battle lines and saw for himself the size of the enemy force, “he was afraid and his heart trembled greatly.” (1 Sam. 28:5) The king yearned for a word of comfort or advice from on high, but he found not a single priest among his entourage. So Saul was forced to seek an oracle from God on his own initiative.

God himself had fallen silent, and Saul realized that he was truly alone.

God's silence is a pointed reminder that he had long ago withdrawn from direct communication with his Chosen People. A careful reading of the Book of Samuel confirms that no one—not Samuel, not Saul, not even David—is privileged to converse directly with God. Indeed, one of the strikingly modern notes in the life story of David is the fact that he does not speak with God at all. Yahweh was not always so aloof. The Bible tells us that he had once walked and talked with the men and women he had created. In the Book of Genesis, God strolls through the Garden of Eden “toward the cool of the day,” hoping for a chat with Adam and Eve but failing to find them. (Gen. 3:8) He shows up at the tent of Abraham “in the heat of the day” and sits down to an impromptu meal of chops and curds. (Gen. 18:1, 8) He engages in
a wrestling match with Jacob—and loses! (Gen. 32:29) He routinely chats with Moses “face to face” and even “mouth to mouth, as a friend speaketh to a friend.” (Exod. 33:11, Num. 12:8) But Moses is the last human being to enjoy the privilege of direct conversation with God.

“Hear now my words,” God declared to Aaron and Miriam, Moses' brother and sister. “If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord do make myself known unto him in a vision, I do speak to him in a dream.” (Num. 12:6)

The death of Moses may be regarded as the great divide in the sacred history of Israel, the point in time when myth and legend come to an end and real history begins. The biblical authors who composed David's life story allowed that God might have walked on earth and conversed “face to face” with human beings at some point in the distant, dreamy past, but they did not entertain the notion that their contemporaries might hear the voice of God with their own ears or see him with their own eyes. A prophet like Samuel might hear from God, but only in dreams and visions and trance states. The rest of humankind—even “a man after God's own heart” like David—was restricted to the crude machinery of divination.

Divination by the casting of lots is an ancient, universal practice. Even if we now regard it as crude and superstitious, lot casting survives in the form of tossing a coin or plucking the petals of a daisy for decision making. According to the Bible, the ancient Israelites consulted Yahweh in exactly the same manner, using the Ark or the ephod or the mysterious ritual objects called the Urim and Thummim. Robert H. Pfeiffer characterizes the Ark as a “sacred divining box” and John Lindblom calls the ephod an “oracle-instrument”; each was more elaborate and ornate than a coin toss but no different in function.
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Divination is often mentioned but the paraphernalia are never described with clarity in the Bible. The lots were probably pebbles, sticks, arrows, or other objects marked with words and images and cast like dice or drawn at random from a container by
the person who performed the ritual. The Urim and Thummim may have been lots fashioned out of precious stones instead of river pebbles. The Ark and the ephod were probably used as containers for the lots, and so was the priestly mantle called “the breastplate of judgment,” where the Urim and Thummim were stored. (Exod. 28:30, Lev. 8:8)

An illuminating example of divination by lot casting appears in the Book of Samuel. Saul had decreed a day of solemn fasting on the eve of a battle with the Philistines, but Jonathan, unbeknownst to his father, violated the decree by eating on the fast day and encouraging the men in Saul's army to do the same. On this earlier occasion, too, God failed to respond to Saul's urgent plea for tactical advice from on high: “Shall I go down after the Philistines? Wilt thou deliver them into the hand of Israel?” (1 Sam. 14:37) Saul took the refusal to answer as a sign of God's displeasure, but he was baffled about the cause. So he ordered that the Urim and the Thummim be used to find out who had angered God. Was it Saul himself? Was it Jonathan, who had sampled some wild honey in the forest in defiance of Saul's decree? Or was it some other malefactor among the people of Israel?

“If this guilt lie in me or in my son Jonathan, O Lord God of Israel, let the lot be Urim,” Saul asked. “If it lie in thy people Israel, let it be Thummim.” (1 Sam. 14:41) (NEB)
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Urim
originally meant “condemned” and
Thummim
meant “acquitted,” according to one scholarly surmise.
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So Saul posed his question, the lots marked as Urim and Thummim were drawn at random, Urim was selected, and thus the guilty one was either Saul or Jonathan. Now the king asked the next crucial question. “Cast between me and Jonathan, my son!” he ordered. “Let him whom Yahweh takes die!” (1 Sam. 14:42) (AB)

“Let it not be so!” cried the soldiers, but Saul insisted—and the casting of lots identified Jonathan as the wrongdoer. (1 Sam. 14:42)
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Once Jonathan's guilt was established by the casting of lots, he confessed to his sin. “I did certainly taste a little honey,” he
declared. “Here am I—I will die.” (1 Sam. 14:44) Saul sentenced his son to death, but the army rallied to his defense: “So the army rescued Jonathan, and he died not.” (1 Sam. 14:45)

The trial-by-divination of Saul and Jonathan had taken place long before God withdrew his blessing from Saul and anointed David as the next king of Israel. Since then, God's only direct contact with Saul had been the “evil spirit from Yahweh” that occasionally possessed him and literally drove him mad. Now Saul desperately sought an oracle from God on the eve of a crucial battle with the Philistines—and Saul was reminded that one might “inquire of God” and receive no answer at all.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” God had decreed to Moses long ago on Mount Sinai, and all of the black arts were flatly condemned as “abomination to the Lord” in biblical law: “There shall not be found among you one that useth divination, a soothsayer, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or one that consulteth a ghost or a familiar spirit, or a necromancer.” (Exod. 22:17, Deut. 18:10–12)
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Saul had dutifully enforced the divine law against practitioners of magic, and he “banished from the land all who trafficked with ghosts and spirits.” (1 Sam. 28:3) But now he was in despair and close to panic. If God on high would not answer him, he resolved, he would find someone to summon up a familiar voice from the spirit world, even if it meant his own damnation.

“Seek me a woman that divines by a ghost,” Saul ordered his courtiers, “that I may go to her, and inquire of her.” (1 Sam. 28:7)

“Behold, there is a woman that divines by a ghost at Endor,” his dutiful courtiers replied.

The Bible does not explain why his courtiers had neglected to inform the king before now, but Saul was glad to discover that at least one diviner had escaped his purge. By long tradition in biblical translation and commentary, she is known as the witch of Endor,
but there is another and even spookier way to render the original Hebrew text: “ghostwife.”
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Disguising himself in commoner's clothes, Saul waited until nightfall to call upon her.

“Divine unto me, I pray thee, by a ghost,” demanded Saul from behind the cloak that he wore to hide his face, “and bring up the man I shall name.” (1 Sam. 28:8)
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Perhaps the wily woman was fooled by his disguise—or perhaps not. Her coy response may have been intended to signal Saul that she knew exactly who he was.

“Behold, thou knowest what Saul hath done, how he hath cut off those who speak with ghosts and spirits,” she said self-righteously. “Why then layest thou a snare for my life, to cause me to die?” (1 Sam. 28:9)
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“As Yahweh lives,” Saul vowed, “no punishment will fall upon you for this thing.” (1 Sam. 28:10)
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His words were doubly ironic. As Saul knew—as perhaps both of them knew—the king could hardly put the woman to death for doing exactly what he asked of her. What's more, his vow to protect a witch in the name of Yahweh was itself a blasphemy—after all, it was God who condemned every practice of the occult. But as the witch of Endor could plainly see, Saul simply did not care that he was breaking his own law and damning himself.

“Whom shall I bring up unto thee?” asked the woman. (1 Sam. 28:11)

“Bring me up Samuel,” said the king, and his words were surely a cry from the heart.

Here is yet another moment when the theological niceties seem to evaporate and we glimpse something that is deeply forbidden. Elsewhere, the Bible regards the occult as not only sinful but utterly false and useless. “The faith of the Old Testament carried on … warfare with special bitterness … against belief in the spirits of the underworld, against demons and spirits of the dead, against soothsaying and necromancy,” writes the venerable Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad.
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He is seconded by the philosopher Martin Buber: “That is the religion of Moses, the man who experienced the futility of magic.”
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Yet black magic is shown here to
be fully effective, and the witch of Endor succeeds in summoning up the spirit of the dead Samuel just as Saul had demanded.
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No eerier scene is presented anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. We can only imagine what Saul saw as he watched the woman— did she groan and babble, sway and keen, and mutter strange spells and incantations in order to conjure up a ghost from the spirit world? But the Bible allows us to understand that the woman herself was suddenly seized with remorse, bewilderment, and plain terror as Samuel struggled up from the grave at her command.

“Why hast thou deceived me?” she moaned aloud as she worked her magic. “For thou art Saul.”

“Be not afraid,” said Saul to the witch of Endor in another ironic reversal of roles. “What seest thou?”