King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (22 page)

D
avid's first act as king of Israel was to select a new royal capital for the united kingdom over which he now reigned. As a battle-tested military strategist, he wanted a place that was centrally located and easily defensible. As a savvy politician, he wanted a place that belonged to none of the twelve tribes. The capital was to be regarded as an island of national identity in a sea of tribal rivalries—a symbolic function not unlike that of the District of Columbia in the early history of the United States. So David chose as his new capital a fortified hill-town in the heart of ancient Israel, a place that had always belonged to the Jebusites, one of the native-dwelling tribes of Canaan, a place called Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has long been regarded in pious tradition as a place of surpassing holiness. According to the the Talmud, Jerusalem was the place where Adam offered the first sacrifice to God, where Noah erected an altar after the Flood, where Abraham was called to slaughter Isaac.
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So sacred was Jerusalem that in one rabbinical
fairy tale David refuses to mount a military assault on its defenses. Instead, he orders Joab to climb to the top of a cypress tree near the city wall; the tree is pulled back with ropes and then allowed to spring back into place, and Joab is catapulted over the high wall and into the heart of Jerusalem. The surprised Jebusites surrender to Joab without a fight, and the city wall lowers itself to allow David to stride into Jerusalem.
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The truth, as recorded in the Book of Joshua, is rather more brutal. Unlike the other cities of Canaan, Jerusalem had beaten back the Israelite armies under the command of Joshua during the invasion and conquest that first established Israelite sovereignty: “And as for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out.” (Josh. 15:63)
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To make Jerusalem the capital of his new monarchy, David would have to succeed where the mighty Joshua had failed.

“You will never get in here!” the Jebusites taunted David and his men from the ramparts of Jerusalem. “Even the blind and the lame will turn you back.” (2 Sam. 5:6) (New JPS)

But the Jebusites badly underestimated David's cunning and ruthlessness. He sent a squad of commandos to infiltrate the fortifications and surprise its defenders, issuing an order of shocking brutality.

“Whoever smites a Jebusite,” David ordered his men, “let him strike at the windpipe, for David hates the lame and the blind!” (2 Sam. 5:8) (AB)

The blood-shaking command of David has been the source of much consternation over the centuries. What, after all, are we to make of the fact that God's chosen king declares his hatred for “the lame and the blind” with such callousness and cruelty? The question is even more frustrating because the biblical text itself is so “troubled” and even “corrupted” that we cannot know with
certainty what the biblical author meant to convey with these words.
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Still, the mighty efforts of scholars and theologians to explain away David's death sentence on the disabled is significant in itself—King David is ultimately so charismatic that sympathetic Bible readers have come up with some highly inventive arguments to excuse his less savory words and deeds.

Thus David's order to “strike at the windpipe,” as P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., renders the Hebrew text of 2 Samuel 5:8 in the Anchor Bible, may mean only that David was urging his men to kill rather than maim the enemy in the assault on Jerusalem—he was a pragmatic soldier, and he did not want to be burdened with wounded prisoners of war once he had conquered Jerusalem.
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Indeed, the seemingly bloodthirsty order may be understood as evidence of David's compassion: he was expressing a preference for a clean kill in battle, McCarter proposes, out of respect for “religious scruples against the mutilation of living human beings, a violation of the sanctity of the body to which David finds killing preferable.”
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Other scholars suggest that the phrase is a metaphor that reveals how David managed to penetrate the defenses of Jerusalem. The Hebrew word for “windpipe”
(sinnor)
also means “water pipe” in postbiblical usage and may refer to a gutter or conduit that ran through the city walls to the nearby Spring of Gihon, the principal source of fresh water supplies for Jerusalem. Thus, some translators suggest that David ordered his men to penetrate the defenses of Jerusalem by crawling up the waterworks: “Getteth up to the gutter” is how
The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text
(JPS) renders the same phrase.
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Still others regard
sinnor
as a kind of grappling hook, which is the meaning of a similar word in Aramaic, and thus the New English Bible translates the same text in a much different way: “Let him use his grappling-iron to reach the lame and the blind, David's bitter enemies.”

Of course, none of these theories account for the unsettling fact that David is said to
hate
“the blind and the lame,” and a heroic effort has been made over the centuries to explain it away. Medieval commentators imagined that the Jebusites had posted images of a blind Isaac and a lame Jacob on the ramparts of
Jerusalem to demoralize the Israelites.
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One especially imaginative sage of the late Middle Ages proposed that “the lame and the blind” were water-powered robots, and he explained David's supposed attack on the waterworks of Jerusalem as a way of disabling them by cutting off their power supply!

Modern scholars have proposed more reasonable, if not necessarily more accurate, approaches to the same troubling text. Maybe “the lame and the blind” were “taboo cultic personnel of the Jebusite shrine” who were stationed on the fortifications in the hope that David and his men would break off their attack for fear of violating the taboo.
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Or “perhaps [the Jebusites] paraded the blind and the lame of the city on the walls, as was the custom of the Hittite army, to warn any soldier who dared to penetrate the stronghold of his fate.”
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Each of these scholarly arguments, no less than the fanciful tales offered by the Talmudic storytellers, is intended to give us a kinder and gentler David than the ruthless warrior-king who is depicted in the Book of Samuel.

The most straightforward reading of the text does not require such exertions. The Jebusites taunted David—“Even the blind and the lame will turn you back”—and David replied with a taunt of his own: “David hates the lame and the blind.” Even if this exchange of threat and counterthreat was merely an example of battlefield rhetoric, full of sarcasm and perhaps a bit of bluff, it rings true of David. He had always been willing to act ruthlessly against anyone he regarded as an enemy or a security risk, and nothing he said or did during the conquest of Jerusalem would have come as a surprise to those who knew him before he was king of Israel.

A second and entirely different version of the conquest of Jerusalem appears in the Book of Chronicles. As we have already seen, the Chronicler is always quick to censor the scandalous details of David's life. He betrays no knowledge of David's brutal
sentiments toward “the lame and the blind,” nor does he report a commando attack on the waterworks of Jerusalem. Rather he gives an antiseptic account that focuses on an act of daring and courage by Joab.

“And David said: ‘The first man to kill a Jebusite shall become chief and captain,’ ” goes the account of the Chronicler. “And Joab went up first, and so he was given the command.” (1 Chron. 11:6)
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Chronicles is a much later—and much fussier—source than the Book of Samuel, and that's why scholars are tempted to regard the older work as the more authentic one, especially when the two are at odds. The Chronicler's tale, for example, suggests that Joab first achieved his high rank in David's army by his feat of arms in the conquest of Jerusalem. The Court Historian, by contrast, assigns Joab a prominent role throughout the civil war that brought David to the throne. Both sources, however, agree that Joab was a crucial figure in David's life; indeed, Joab is “second only to David and Absalom in frequency of reference,” as Bible scholar Joel Rosenberg points out, and he will come to play a fateful if ultimately tragic role in preserving David's monarchy.
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In fact, some scholars suspect that the greater role allowed to Joab by the Chronicler is evidence that David's rough-and-ready henchman may have been an even more prominent figure in ancient Israel than the Court Historian was willing to admit.

“Joab is a sympathetic figure,” explains Rosenberg, “decisive when the king is vacillating, loyal to David throughout his reign and the interregnum, active where the king is sedentary, performing the work that the king finds odious, deferring to the king where credit is to be claimed for victories, and, in general, devoted to the civil peace, or at least, like any good Machiavellian courtier, devoted to the economy of violence.”
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For the moment, David still regarded the conquest of Jerusalem as a personal triumph, and rightfully so. According to the Court Historian, David devised the strategy for penetrating the defenses, and he led his own men in the successful assault. Significantly, he neither asked for nor required any assistance
from the tribal militia that had served King Saul—David conquered Jerusalem with only the picked men of his own army.

“The capture of Jerusalem was entirely a private affair of David's,” observes Gerhard von Rad,
¹⁴
and Frank Moore Cross, another luminary in biblical scholarship, points out that Jerusalem is depicted as “the personal possession of the king by right of conquest, providing the king with an independent power base over which he exercised absolute sway.”
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Accordingly, David promptly named the city he had conquered—or, at least, the citadel at the center of Jerusalem—after himself.

“And David dwelt in the stronghold,” the Bible reports, “and called it the City of David.” (2 Sam. 5:9)

Here we can discern two different explanations for the same event: the Court Historian credits the flesh-and-blood David with the victory over the Jebusites, but more pious biblical sources insist that the credit belongs to God alone. Shrugging off David's military genius and the sheer guts of the men who served him, one of the later biblical authors puts a theological spin on the Court Historian's battle report—the conquest of Jerusalem ought to be seen as the fulfillment of the promise that God had made to David so many years before.

“David kept growing stronger, for Yahweh, the God of Armies, was with him,” goes one characteristic passage that has been written into the Court Historian's account. “Thus David knew that Yahweh had established him as king over Israel and had exalted his kingship for the sake of his people Israel.” (2 Sam. 5:10, 12)
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The same tension between history and theology, of course, can be detected throughout the biblical life story of David. Some Bible readers, like some of the biblical sources, will entertain the idea that David succeeded on the strength of his own brilliant but thoroughly mortal gifts and powers. Others see David's successes as the working out of God's will in history. Not a few Bible readers and Bible scholars are able to hold both thoughts in their minds at once—David was both gifted
and
God-inspired, and that is why he survived and prevailed against every enemy and every defeat
that stood between him and the glorious kingship described in the Bible.

In either case, David was now ready to take on the momentous task of nation building, which both God and David saw as his destiny and which Bible historians praise as his greatest accomplishment. The obstacles that he faced were daunting: the twelve tribes of Israel were not yet a unified people, and David would have to overcome their tendency toward blood feuds and civil war. Indeed, the Israelites were not far removed from their origins as pastoral nomads, and they lacked the resources of the powerful monarchies and empires that surrounded them on all sides—a powerful king with a cabinet of ministers and counselors, an efficient bureaucracy, a professional army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry, and the other elements of what we would today call infrastructure.

But it is exactly here and now that David reveals his stature as a leader, a mover and shaker, the maker of a nation and an empire. Significantly, he is shown to embellish his new capital in a manner befitting a great and glorious king. Under the Jebusites, Jerusalem centered around a hilltop citadel, but David pushed to the outer limits of the site: “And he built the city from around the Millo to the surrounding wall.” (1 Chron. 11:8) (AB)
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David received emissaries from the king of neighboring Tyre, Hiram, who sent him a supply of the rare and prized lumber from those famous cedars of Lebanon and a contingent of carpenters and masons whose skill and sophistication was unmatched in tribal Israel.
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Once construction of the palace was under way, David began filling the royal harem with fresh young women and the royal nursery with more children. Perhaps to ingratiate himself with the Jebusites over whom he now ruled—Jerusalem was, after all, a conquered and occupied city—David “took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem,” and his new wives turned out to be blessedly fertile: “And there were yet sons and daughters born to David,” eleven of whom are named at this point in the Bible. (2 Sam. 5:13)
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David was now firmly seated on the throne of Israel, and he
was approaching those sublime heights of power and glory toward which he had long struggled. “And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, for his kingdom was exalted exceedingly, for His people Israel's sake,” the Chronicler exults. “And the fame of David went out into all lands, and the Lord brought the fear of him upon all nations.” (1 Chron. 14:17)