King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (39 page)

“Do as your wisdom prompts you,” said David to Solomon, “and let not his gray hairs go down to the grave in peace.” (1 Kings 2:6) (NEB)
¹³

David urged Solomon to show “constant friendship” to a man from Gilead named Barzillai, one of the allies who rallied to David's cause during the war with Absalom. But he revealed that he was still nursing a grudge against old Shimei, the man who had once cursed him as a “bloodstained fiend of hell.” Twice before, David had spared Shimei from death at the hand of Abishai, first when Shimei dared to curse him and again when David issued a general amnesty after the defeat of Absalom. Now, however, David instructed Solomon to punish Shimei for the old insult, and he admitted that by doing so he was carefully sidestepping his own vow to God.

“True, I swore by the Lord that I would not put him to death with the sword, but you do not need to let him go unpunished now,” reasoned the old king, sly and cagey to the end. “You are a wise man and will know how to deal with him—bring his gray hairs in blood to the grave.” (1 Kings 2:8–9)
¹⁴

Joab and Shimei, like David, were old men now. Their hair was gray, as David emphasized, and the old soldiers were surely
toothless. But the very last thoughts that flashed through David's mind as he approached the day he had long anticipated—the day when he would go to join the dead baby whom he had refused to mourn—were thoughts of vengeance and bloodletting. To the very end, then, David was a “man of war” and a “man of blood.”

Some late biblical editor, who probably came along a few hundred years after these lines were first written down, found himself appalled at the brutality, cynicism, ruthlessness, and sheer impiety of David's final charge to Solomon. So he decided to give the dying king a few theologically correct lines to speak, and he boldly wrote these new lines into the old text.

The words attributed to David in this passage bear the fingerprints of a biblical source known as the Deuteronomistic Historian, a title used by scholars to identify a school of priestly authors and editors whose theology was first defined in the Book of Deuteronomy. According to Deuteronomy, the fate of ancient Israel was
not
predetermined by God; rather, the Israelites enjoyed the gift of free will, and their fate depended on how they used it. So the promise of God to the house of David came with a big “if”: “
If
thy children take heed to walk before me in truth with all their heart and with all their soul,” David is made to quote God in a way that echoes the familiar phrases of Deuteronomy, “there shall not fail thee, said He, a man on the throne of Israel.” (1 Kings 2:4)
¹⁵

The biblical spin doctor at work here chose to ignore the
promise that God had once made to David through the prophet Nathan. “When thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee,” God had promised, “and I will establish the throne of his king
forever
.” (2 Sam. 7:12)
¹⁶
The later biblical sources were not quite as confident and optimistic as the earlier ones, and they began to wonder out loud if the reign of the house of David was not conditioned on good behavior after all.

From somewhere far beneath the layers of theological spin, however, the thoroughly mortal voice of David can still be heard. He was not at all concerned about the pious conduct of his son or the goodwill of God. Rather, he uttered a few plainspoken words that summed up his own credo and his own theology: “Be strong and show yourself to be a
man
.” (1 Kings 2:2) (NEB)

At the moment of his birth, according to a tale preserved in the Midrash, David was destined to survive only three hours. “He would have died immediately,” imagines the rabbinical storyteller, “had not Adam made him a present of 70 years.”
¹⁷
But the biblical authors did not engage in such theological speculation in reporting the death of David, perhaps because they were mindful that his real life story was poignant enough and impressive enough. Indeed, even though more biblical text is devoted to David than to any other figure in the Hebrew Bible, relatively few tales are told about him in the vast accumulation of legend and lore that we find in the Talmud and the Midrash. The flesh-and-blood David is rendered in the Bible with such brilliance that mere mythmaking seems hardly worth the effort.

“I go the way of all the earth,” said David to Solomon, and his biblical death notice is equally lyrical but also equally direct: “And David slept with his fathers and was buried in the City of David.” (1 Kings 2:2, 10)

Indeed, the very last words of the biblical life story of David read like an obituary.

Thus passed the living figure of David from the world of ordinary men and women into the realm of history and memory, theological speculation and messianic yearning. He will continue to be celebrated and even exalted in the pages of the Bible, and he will be slowly and subtly transformed into something rich and strange. But at this moment, the flesh-and-blood David, both a “man of blood” and “a man after God's own heart,” slips into that good night toward which every human travels.

S
olomon mourned the passing of King David with a hit list in his hand. And, no less ambitious or ruthless than his dead father, Solomon set about carrying out David's final instructions with genuine enthusiasm. So it was that Solomon, whose name means “peaceful,” ascended the throne on a flood tide of blood.
¹

Solomon's first victim, however, was one whose name did not appear on the death list—his brother Adonijah, the man he had forgiven for trying to take the throne away from him. If we take the biblical author at his word, Adonijah refused to give up his royal ambitions, and he now approached Bathsheba with a strange and shocking request.

“Do you come peaceably?” Bathsheba asked Adonijah as he presented himself at her quarters in the royal palace.

“Peaceably,” affirmed Adonijah, who promptly began to kvetch about his own sad fate to the woman least likely to sympathize with him. “You know that the kingdom was mine, and all Israel was looking to me to be king, but I was passed over and the throne has gone to my brother.” And then he added, piously but also a bit lamely: “It was his by the Lord's will.”

Then Adonijah revealed the real purpose of his visit to Bathsheba.

“And now I make one small request of you,” he said. “Do not refuse me.”

“Say on,” said Bathsheba, perhaps fascinated by Adonijah's naïveté and eager to know how far the fool would go in his foolishness.

“Speak to King Solomon—for he will not refuse you!—and ask that he give me Abishag the Shunamite in marriage.” (1 Kings 2:12–18)
²

The audacity of Adonijah's request must have stunned a savvy political insider like Bathsheba. To claim a king's concubine, as we have seen many times before, was to claim the crown. Solomon had once forgiven Adonijah for his royal ambitions, but surely he would not do so a second time! Indeed, Adonijah's demand was so plainly suicidal that scholars cannot take it seriously—perhaps, they suggest, Bathsheba falsely accused Adonijah of making a demand for Abishag in an effort to persuade her son to eliminate him as a potential rival, or maybe some later biblical author made up the whole encounter in order to provide a plausible excuse for Solomon's assassination of his own brother.

“We doubt if even the most fervid supporter of Solomon could have related this tale without tongue-in-cheek,” writes Frank Moore Cross. “If Adonijah did in fact behave as claimed, he deserved to be executed—for stupidity.”
³

“Very well,” promised Bathsheba, perhaps hiding a sly smile. “I will speak for you to the king.” (1 Kings 2:18)
⁴

Bathsheba hastened to Solomon and relayed Adonijah's remarkable demand for the hand of the king's concubine in
marriage. As everyone in the royal household
except
Adonijah seemed to recognize, the request was a plain act of treason, and Solomon recognized it as such.

“You might as well ask for the throne!” cried Solomon. “So help me God, Adonijah shall pay for this with his life!” (1 Kings 2: 22, 23) (NEB)

The task of putting Adonijah to death was assigned to Benaiah, captain of the praetorian guard, “a sinister thug who out-Joabs his predecessor.”
⁵
Once Adonijah had been slain, Benaiah went to work on the other men whose names appeared on the hit list that David had bequeathed to his son.

First on the list was Joab himself, the old cohort and henchman who had served David so faithfully throughout his life. When Joab learned that he was under a death sentence, he fled to the tent-shrine of Yahweh and clung to the horned altar, just as Adonijah had once done.

“Come forth!” demanded Benaiah, unwilling to violate the sanctity of the shrine and the ancient tradition of sanctuary.

“Nay,” replied Joab, “but I will die here.” (1 Kings 2:30)

Benaiah returned to King Solomon and reported his dilemma, but the king did not share his henchman's pious concerns about entering the shrine of Yahweh with a sword and slaying a man who claimed sanctuary at the horned altar, which is what Joab had challenged him to do.

“Do as he said,” ordered Solomon, “and fall upon him, and bury him.” (1 Kings 2:31)

Solomon's excuse for violating the old tradition was that Joab deserved to die “because he fell upon two men more righteous and better than he”—Abner, commander of Saul's army, and Amasa, commander of Absalom's army—“and slew them with the sword.” Solomon preferred to overlook the fact that Joab had also taken the life of his own half brother, Absalom. Perhaps because Solomon
had just ordered the murder of another one of his half brothers, Adonijah, he was willing to overlook Joab's role in the death of Absalom.

“So delicate a brush stroke of irony shades a majestic and imposing royal amnesia,” observes Joel Rosenberg. “The cornerstone of an eternal dynasty has been laid, and the bodies of its enemies and victims cemented in.”
⁶

Shimei, the next man whose death David had ordered, survived another three years. Solomon placed him under a kind of house arrest, sternly warning that he would forfeit his life if he ever dared to leave Jerusalem. One day, the Bible reports, two servants of Shimei ran away from his house and sought refuge in the Philistine city-state of Gath—and Shimei, no sharper than Adonijah, promptly saddled up his mule and rode off in pursuit. Somehow we are expected to believe that the conditions of Solomon's amnesty had slipped Shimei's mind. But, needless to say, Solomon had not forgotten. When Solomon learned of Shimei's escapade, he dispatched the faithful Benaiah to carry out the long-delayed death sentence.

To Abiathar, the high priest who had sided with Absalom in the struggle for the throne, Solomon showed a measure of mercy. “You deserve to die,” Solomon warned the old priest, “but I shall not put you to death because you carried the Ark of the Lord God before my father David, and you shared in all the hardships that he endured.” But Abiathar was condemned to spend the rest of his life under house arrest on his estate, and Zadok alone, who had possessed the sound political instinct to side with Solomon, was designated to preside as high priest of Israel.

King Solomon's extraordinary ruthlessness in ridding himself of enemies and rivals has convinced some scholars that David is wrongly blamed in the Bible for the crimes of his son. Perhaps, they speculate, the life story of David—or at least the so-called Succession Document that describes how Solomon came to be his successor—was first composed in the court of King Solomon to explain (and excuse) his willingness to kill for the crown. If, as the Bible records, Solomon was the fourth son of David and the
offspring of a marriage that began in adultery, the royal chroniclers in Solomon's court might have felt it necessary to explain how and why he ended up on the throne ahead of his three older brothers. And, significantly, they may have decided that a frank account of
David's
life as a “man of blood” would make Solomon look somewhat less bloodthirsty, if only by comparison to his father.

“The palace intrigue which placed Solomon upon the throne,” observes the pioneering Bible scholar Julius Wellhausen, “is narrated with a naïveté which is almost malicious….”
⁷

At last, when the purges and assassinations were complete and all of the potential rivals for power in ancient Israel had been eliminated, Solomon was ready to fulfill the promise of his name: he would reign in peace over the empire that his father had bequeathed to him, and his era would come to be known among scholars as the Solomonic Enlightenment. The Bible pronounces a similar judgment: “And Solomon sat upon the throne of David his father, and his kingdom was firmly established.” (1 Kings 2:12)