King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (20 page)

The prize that Yahweh had set aside for young David when he was just a lad tending his father's flocks was now within his grasp—but, for the moment, David was king of Judah only. Even as David was crowned by acclamation of his own tribe, a man named Ishbaal, one of Saul's surviving sons,
⁵⁰
was being conducted to a safe refuge in the forest of Gilead on the far side of the Jordan by Abner, a first cousin of Saul and general of his army. Abner took the bold initiative of crowning Ishbaal as king over a shaky coalition of peoples and tribes—the people of
Gilead and Geshur and the Jezreel Valley, and the Israelite tribes of Benjamin and Ephraim
⁵¹
—but he was sufficiently astute in matters of politics to dub the hapless son of Saul “king over all Israel.” (2 Sam. 2:9) Thus, at the very moment of his coronation, David found himself in a civil war, and the crown of Israel was at stake.

D
avid reigned as king of Judah in Hebron for exactly seven and a half years, but he ruled only a tribe and not the nation of Israel. Although Saul was dead, his dynasty survived in the person of his eldest son, a forty-year-old nebbish whom the Bible sometimes calls Ishbaal and sometimes Ish-bosheth. So long as a king from the house of Saul still reigned, David would remain only a tribal chieftain, and his path to the throne of all Israel would still be barred.

Sound political instincts had prompted David to send gifts to the tribal elders in his campaign for the crown of Judah. Now he made much the same effort to win the more glorious crown of Israel. Indeed, the Bible suggests that David embarked on a Machiavellian enterprise, forging alliances with the various tribes of Israel, currying favor with their elders, and acquiring a harem worthy of a great monarch, thus making himself an even more plausible candidate for the kingship of all Israel. Of course, David was ready to go to war for the crown, but his preparations for war were rooted in politics.

What prompted his next public gesture was an exploit by the men of Jabesh-Gilead. Upon hearing that the Philistines had hung the bodies of the slain Saul and his sons from the walls of Beth-shan, the pious heroes of Jabesh decided to do something about it.
¹
They infiltrated Beth-shan by night, lifted the mangled corpses from the wall, and spirited them back to Jabesh, where the remains were cremated with honor under a sacred tamarisk tree. (1 Sam. 31:11–13) David had played no part in their exploit—but as king of Judah he saw fit to honor the men who had honored Saul.

“Blessed be ye of the Lord,” went the message that David sent to the people of Jabesh, “and the Lord show kindness and truth to you, and I also will requite you this kindness, because you have done this thing.” (1 Sam. 2:5–6)

But, even as he honored the people of Jabesh, David issued a warning. “Now let your hands be strong, and be you valiant, for Saul your lord is dead,” his message continued, “and also the house of Judah has anointed me king over them.” (1 Sam. 2:5–7)
²
His point was unmistakable: David, king of Judah, aspired to the throne of all Israel, and a civil war between Judah and the house of Saul seemed inevitable. And so the people of Jabesh, like everyone else in the land of Israel, would be forced to take sides.

The incident that turned the mounting tribal rivalries into a clash of arms starts out as a slightly comical encounter.

The army of Ishbaal, under the command of Abner, marched out of the stronghold in Gilead, while the army of David, under the command of Joab, marched out of Hebron. The two generals and their men encountered each other at the pool of Gibeon,
³
Abner on one side and Joab on the other side.

Abner was Saul's first cousin, and Joab was David's nephew, and so the bond between each king and his general was a matter of blood rather than politics—a reminder that loyalty to family,
clan, and tribe was still more crucial in ancient Israel than any sense of citizenship in a tribal confederation.
⁴
Indeed, the fact that Abner and Joab each supported a different candidate for the kingship of Israel did not yet make them open adversaries, and they were comfortable in chatting with each other across the pool of Gibeon.

“Let some of the young men take the field,” Abner called to Joab, as if suggesting an impromptu game of football, “and play before us.”

“Let them take the field,” Joab answered in the same spirit of sportsmanship. (2 Sam 2:14)
⁵

As the two generals and the rest of the soldiers watched from the edge of the pool, twelve of Abner's men and twelve of Joab's approached each other to “play,” each man lining up face-to-face with his opposite as if for a scrimmage in a game of touch football. A similar scene is recorded in the history of the Third Crusade, when a few warring Franks and Saracens declared an impromptu truce, rested together, and set the young boys from the two sides in mock combat with each other. But according to the biblical account, this contest suddenly escalated from a sporting match into bloody combat.

One reading of the biblical text suggests a deadly irony at work: the soldiers on both sides were Israelites, members of the same tribal confederation and worshippers of the same God, and yet they turned their weapons against each other with tragic consequences. The same text, however, can also be understood as the report of a gladiatorial contest rather than a game that spins out of control. Josephus, a soldier and a scholar, describes the incident as purely a military encounter from the first moment—the
two generals “wished to discover which of them had the braver soldiers, and it was agreed that twelve men from either side should meet in combat”
⁶
—and his modern counterpart, Yigael Yadin, also a soldier and a scholar, comes to the same conclusion. The young men, Yadin writes, were apparently selected to engage in a series of single combats, man on man, just as David had once taken up the challenge of Goliath to engage in a duel that would decide a battle.
⁷

Whether it began in jest or in earnest, the incident at the pool of Gibeon symbolizes the futility and tragedy of civil war among the tribes of Israel: each man was killed in the act of killing his adversary, and so it was a battle with no victors. The site of the tragedy came to be called the Field of the Flints in apparent reference to the flint-bladed weapons that the men had used.
⁸
Once the twenty-four men had fallen, the rest of the soldiers closed with each other in force: “And the battle was very sore that day.” (2 Sam. 2:17)

David's army was the victor in the skirmish at the pool of Gibeon, the first battle of the civil war between Judah and Israel. But the biblical author pauses to relate another incident that helps us understand the highly personal nature of combat in the ancient world and, especially, the terrible intimacy of civil war. Although Abner served as commander in chief of Israel's army, he found himself face-to-face with the enemy when a foot soldier named Asahel, the brother of Joab, singled him out on the battlefield. Abner broke and ran, and Asahel followed.

“Turn aside from following me,” Abner pleaded as he struggled to escape his pursuer. “Why should I smite you? How then should I hold up my face to Joab, your brother?” (2 Sam. 2:21–22)
⁹

Abner's plea to Asahel reminds us that the combatants were related to each other by blood, and they were mindful of the ancient
tribal code of vengeance that obliged a man to avenge the death of a near relation—the Arab word for “clan,” to take an example from a similar culture, can be rendered more literally as “blood revenge group.”
¹⁰
Thus, Abner was hesitant to slay Asahel precisely because he feared that Joab would regard the death of his brother not as a casualty of war but as an insult to family honor that required the taking of a life in exchange.

But Asahel continued his deadly pursuit, and so Abner executed a deft maneuver, thrusting his spear backward as he ran from Asahel and impaling him with such force that the spearhead passed through his groin and came out through his back. And, just as Abner had feared, what had begun as a death in the heat of battle was now the cause of a blood feud—Joab and another one of his brothers, Abishai, took up the chase.
¹¹
By nightfall, Abner and his men found themselves trapped on a hilltop, surrounded by Joab and his army.

“Shall the sword devour forever?” Abner called to Joab in a line of biblical text that rumbles with augury. “Do you not know that it will be bitterness in the end? How long shall it be, then, before you bid your troops to stop the pursuit of their kinsmen?” (2 Sam. 2:26)
¹²

Abner may have been begging for mercy, but his words were also statesmanlike. The people of Israel ought to look beyond the old loyalties to family, clan, and tribe, he suggested, and instead regard themselves as citizens of the nation of Israel and subjects of its king, Ishbaal. And, significantly, Joab heeded Abner's desperate but earnest words—he gave up his effort to avenge his slain brother and signaled a cease-fire by sounding a note on the ram's horn. At the sound of the shofar, which was used for both military and ritual purposes in ancient Israel, “all the people stood still, and pursued after Israel no more, neither fought they anymore.” (2 Sam. 2:28)

“As God lives,” Joab called out to Abner, “if you had not spoken, the soldiers would not have given up the pursuit of their kinsmen until the morning.” (2 Sam. 2:27)
¹³

Both Abner and Joab ordered their men on night marches— Abner fled across the Jordan River to put himself beyond striking distance in case Joab suffered a change of heart, and Joab hastened to reach Hebron by first light to announce his victory to David. Unlike the fantastic body counts that are often reported in the Bible, the number of casualties of the battle at the pool of Gibeon is entirely credible: David's army suffered only twenty deaths, including Asahel's, and “three hundred and three-score” of the men in Abner's army were slain in battle. But it was only the first skirmish in the civil war between Judah and the rest of the Israelites: “Now there was long war,” the Bible confirms, “between the house of Saul and the house of David.” (2 Sam. 2:32, 3:1) David had been right in warning the men of Jabesh to prepare for war. A price would be paid in blood for the crown that he sought, but not the blood of David.

The life of David and the history of ancient Israel, as described in Samuel, were compounded of sex and politics, and sometimes it is impossible to say where sex leaves off and politics begins. One example is an incident that took place within the house of Saul in the aftermath of the old king's death. Once again, the biblical author is foreshadowing an even more sordid incident of the same kind that will soon arise within the house of David.

Abner had contrived to put Saul's son on the throne of Israel—but Abner was the hand that worked the puppet named Ishbaal, and only once did the puppet admonish the puppet-master. Abner had availed himself of the sexual favors of a woman named Rizpah—a concubine of Saul and the mother of two of Ishbaal's half brothers—or so the new king had somehow come to believe. Intimacy with a royal concubine was regarded in ancient Israel not only as a violation of a sexual taboo and an insult to the reigning king, but—even more ominously—as an act of treason.
“To lie with a monarch's concubine,” explains Bible scholar Anson Rainey, “was tantamount to usurpation of the throne.”
¹⁴

“Why have you lain with my father's concubine?” Ishbaal demanded of Abner, surely surprising himself no less than Abner with his sudden audacity.

“Am I a dog's head that belongs to Judah?” said the defiant Abner. “I have been loyally serving the house of Saul, and I have not delivered you into the hand of David, and yet you reproach me over a woman!” (2 Sam. 3:8)
¹⁵

The cagey Abner never actually confirmed or denied Ishbaal's accusation, and the Bible does not tell us whether the charge was true or false. If, in fact, Abner had summoned a royal concubine to his bedchamber, it would have confirmed that the kingmaker held the king in contempt or, even worse, that he aspired to replace Ishbaal on the throne. Indeed, the fact that the fearful Ishbaal dared to make such an accusation reveals how little he trusted his own general. In any event, Abner responded to Ishbaal's question with a bold and unambiguous threat: “May God do thus and more to Abner if I do not do for David as the Lord swore to him—to transfer the kingship from the house of Saul, and to establish the throne of David over Israel and Judah from Dan to Beersheba.” (2 Sam. 3:9–10) (New JPS)

The hapless king fell silent at Abner's self-righteous speech. “And he could not answer Abner another word,” the Bible reports, “because he feared him.” And, true to his threat, the treacherous general promptly sent a message to David, offering to betray the son of Saul. “Make league with me,” Abner proposed, “and, behold, my hand shall be with you to bring over all Israel unto you.” (2 Sam. 3:11, 12)

David was willing to accept Abner's offer, but he had a grievance of his own to settle before he would make a deal. Years earlier, when David was still a fugitive, King Saul had annulled the marriage of David and Michal and married his daughter to a man named Paltiel. Since then, of course, David had collected a half-dozen more wives—not only Abigail and Ahinoam, whom we
have already encountered, but Maacah and Haggith and Abital and Eglah, too, all of whom had borne him sons. But now David wanted Michal back, if only to enhance his kingly stature and to strengthen his claim on Saul's throne by putting a royal princess back into his own harem. (2 Sam. 3:2–5)
¹⁶