King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (40 page)

The united monarchy over which David had reigned, however, did not survive Solomon's death. Indeed, the kingdom shattered along the same stress lines of tribal politics that can readily be seen in the life story of David. Only the tribe of Judah recognized Solomon's son as his successor. Te n of the other tribes now seceded from the tribal union and established their own monarchy. A king named Jereboam reigned over the breakaway northern kingdom, which is called “Israel” or sometimes “Ephraim” in the Bible, and a king named Rehoboam reigned over the southern kingdom of Judah from the City of David.
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The Book of Kings records the unhappy fate of these two rival
kingdoms. The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in 722
B.C.E.
and its people were dispersed and destroyed—a catastrophe so complete that they have come to be known as the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. The southern kingdom lasted a century and a half longer, and the house of David, among the longest-reigning dynasties in the ancient world, continued to provide kings for the land of Judah for a total of five centuries. But Judah, too, eventually fell to a foreign power when the Babylonians invaded and conquered the southern kingdom in 597
B.C.E.
and began to send the aristocracy, intelligentsia, and priesthood into exile.

So the biblical authors who chronicled the long history of Israel and Judah were confronted with an awkward and unavoidable problem. God may have promised eternal kingship to David and his descendants—“And thy house and thy kingdom shall be made sure forever”—but history proved God to be wrong. The Babylonians occupied the land of Judah in 597
B.C.E.
and swiftly deposed the reigning king and put a more compliant one on the throne. But the kingdom of Judah survived only until 586
B.C.E.
, when the Babylonians completed their conquest of Judah by destroying the Temple of Solomon, razing the city of Jerusalem, and dethroning the last Davidic king.

By now, of course, we have passed out of the realm of biblical myth and crossed into the terrain of historical fact. The king of Judah who reigned in Jerusalem at the time of the Babylonian invasion—Jehoiachin, a young man who claimed direct descent from King David—was among the first unfortunates to be deported to Babylon. Remarkably, both the fact and the circumstances of Je-hoiachin's exile as reported in the Bible (2 Kings 24:12 ff., 25:27 ff.) are confirmed by fragmentary clay tablets that have been uncovered by archaeologists at the site of ancient Babylon. The tablets preserve an official record of the precise amount of the ration of oil issued to Jehoiachin and his family by their captors. Indeed, the fact that Jehoiachin is referred to as “the king of Judah” in the imperial archives suggests that the Babylonians still regarded him as the rightful monarch of the kingdom they had conquered.
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The very last reigning king of Judah was a man called Zedekiah.
He was a relative of Jehoiachin but had been chosen by the Babylonians to replace him on the throne, presumably because they expected Zedekiah to be a more obedient vassal. They were wrong. Zedekiah went into rebellion with the encouragement and assistance of the Egyptian pharaoh and other allies. But the Babylonians crushed the rebellion, laid waste to Jerusalem and the Temple, captured the fleeing king, and carried him off to a far crueler exile than Jehoiachin had known—all of which is reported in the Bible. (2 Kings 25:1 ff.)

The reign of King Zedekiah ended in humiliation and horror. The deposed king was forced to witness the murder of his sons— and the Babylonians made certain that it would be the very last sight he saw. “And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him in fetters, and carried him to Babylon.” (2 Kings 25:7) Once in exile, according to the prophet Jeremiah, he was imprisoned and put to work as a slave in a mill house “till the day of his death.” (Jer. 52:11)
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The men and women who had been exiled to Babylon began to return to the land of Judah in the late sixth century
B.C.E.
, but they were now a people without a king or a country of their own. We might begin to call them “Jews,” a term that derives from the name of the tribe of Judah but signifies a people and a faith rather than a sovereign nation. Indeed, the land of Judah became the province of Judea, a backwater of the Persian empire. Although the Jewish people would achieve a brief period of national independence under the Maccabees in the second century
B.C.E.
, the long reign of the Davidic kings was over. Never again would a man in whose veins ran the blood of King David sit on the earthly throne of Judah. God's promise to David had been broken, or so it seemed, and the kingship of the house of David was not eternal after all.

Confronted with the hard facts of history, the men and women who returned from Babylon to a ruined and kingless Jerusalem
struggled to understand God's broken promise of eternal kingship. Maybe God had not been speaking literally of a dynasty of Davidic kings who would reign without interruption into eternity. Perhaps what he really meant (but failed to mention) was that the kingship of the house of David might be interrupted from time to time by some historical calamity, but a Davidic king would be restored to the throne one day in the distant future.

Slowly and subtly, the notion of eternal kingship began to be reworked and reinterpreted, and a new theological spin was put on God's vow to King David as reported in the Book of Samuel. David, of course, had been a man of flesh and blood who fought his way to the throne, but—according to the prophetic writings of the Bible and the commentaries of the Talmud—the
next
king from the house of David would be a spiritual emissary from God, both a king and a messiah, and he would reign not in the here and now but in the end times. And yet, even then, the Messiah-King would be a direct descendant of David. Indeed, he might be David himself, raised from the dead and elevated to the right hand of God. Thus was David transformed from an earthly king into a celestial one.

Here is exactly the point in history where “messiah” began to take on the profoundly mystical and history-changing meaning that is now attached to the word in both Jewish and Christian tradition. As used in the Book of Samuel, the phrase “anointed one” (
mashiach
in biblical Hebrew, “messiah” in English translation) refers to anyone who was anointed with oil in a ritual of coronation. Saul and David and most (but not all) of the Davidic kings were “anointed ones” in that sense. Later, the term was used in the Bible to identify anyone who merited the special favor of God; for example, the Persian emperor Cyrus II, who defeated the Babylonians and allowed the exiled people of Judah to return to their homeland and rebuild their Temple, is identified as an “anointed one” by the prophet Isaiah. (Isa. 45:1) But now “the anointed one” began to take on more exalted meanings, and the Messiah became the spiritual focus for the yearnings of an oppressed, heartbroken people. “Messiah,” as the term came to be
understood, now identified the redeemer whom God would send one day to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.

“I saw in the night visions,” goes the apocalyptic prophesy of Daniel, perhaps the most elaborate expression of the messianic idea in the Hebrew Bible, and one that deeply influenced Christian theology. “And, behold, there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto a son of man.”

The yearning for the Messiah only grew sharper as the subsequent generations in the land of Judah tasted for themselves the bitter experience of foreign occupation and oppression, first under the Persians, then the Greeks, and finally—after a brief period of independence that followed the uprising of the Maccabees—the Romans. Now and then, the emperor of Rome might put a quisling on a throne somewhere in the land called Palestine as a matter of political convenience, but these “ethnarchs” and “tetrarchs” ruled only miniature fiefdoms. The last man to bear the title “King of the Jews” was Herod the Great, a Roman puppet-king from the neighboring Arab land of Idumea, a man whose family had only recently converted to Judaism as a matter of opportunism and who was generally loathed by the Jewish people.
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By 70
C.E.
, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and razed Jerusalem to the ground, the messianic idea was the focus of both Judaism and Christianity, although Jews and Christians had reached very different conclusions about the identity of
the Messiah. Christians, of course, believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah, and Jews were (and are) still awaiting him. On one thing, however, Christians and Jews agreed: the Messiah would be a direct descendant of King David, “a shoot out of the stock of Jesse.” (Isa. 11:1)

Thus was the mortal David, the man whom we have come to know so well, eclipsed by the spectral David. “If the Messiah-King comes from among the living, David will be his name,” goes the credo of the Talmudic sages. “If he comes from among the dead, it will be David himself.”
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And Paul affirms the very same credo from the Christian perspective, affirming that Jesus of Nazareth “was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God.” (Rom. 1:3, 4) Indeed, the genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke trace his human lineage all the way back to King David (Matt. 1:17, Luke 3:31), even though, strictly speaking, Christian theology does not regard Jesus as the son of a mortal father.
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On one article of faith, then, Christians and Jews were in agreement: the ancient promise of eternal kingship that God conveyed to David through the prophecy of Nathan would be fulfilled one day, and on that day, the blood of David would flow in the veins of a savior, a redeemer, a liberator—the Messiah.

The sacralization of David reaches its most exalted, if also its most poignant, expression in a passage of the Christian Bible where the royal bloodlines of King David are invoked to authenticate Jesus of Nazareth as the long-promised and long-delayed Messiah.

When the Gospel depicts the brutal legionnaires of Rome “bow[ing] the knee” to the scourged Jesus and hailing him as a king, it indicates that they meant only to mock him, and when they set a sign over his head as he hung on the cross—“This is Jesus the King of the Jews”—they meant only to accuse him of the political crime of insurrection for which he had been condemned
to death. (Matt.27:29, 37) (KJV)
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But the phrase that the Romans used to describe Jesus conveys a profound and powerful irony for any reader who knows that, according to the sacred traditions of both Judaism and Christianity, the blood of David will flow in the veins of the Messiah. That is why the genealogy of Jesus reaches all the way back to David, and Paul attests that Jesus was “made of the seed of David, according to his flesh.” (Rom. 1:3) (KJV)

History confirms the political power of what is essentially a matter of true belief. The Roman army of occupation in Judea understood the persistent idea that the Messiah would be the descendant of David—and took it as seriously as the Christians and the Jews did. During the first century
C.E.
, the Tenth Legion in Palestine remained under standing orders from four successive Roman emperors “to hunt out and execute any Jew who claimed to be a descendant of King David.”
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The order was given precisely because “political revolutionaries inevitably traced their right of governance back to King David.”
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And that statement remains true today. David, as we shall see, plays a crucial and perhaps decisive role in the current debate between Arabs and Israelis over the sovereignty of Jerusalem.

Thus, some three millennia after his death in Jerusalem, King David is still very much alive in the hearts and minds of mortal men and women in our own world, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. “David, King of Israel,” goes a passage of the Talmud that is still sung aloud as a song in the modern state of Israel and in Jewish communities throughout the world, “lives and endures.”

David is still invoked more often and more vividly than any other figure in the Hebrew Bible. Of course, aside from David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, and Moses on Mount Sinai, the Bible is not mentioned much in the arts and letters, the mass media and pop culture of postmodern America. But “David and Goliath,” as
we have already seen, survives as a convenient shorthand phrase in the vocabulary of newspaper headline writers and advertising copywriters, a glyph for the underdog who prevails against a much stronger adversary. Even as I was writing this book, I saw several different billboards and television commercials that depicted a young David in battle with Goliath in order to hawk computer chips, Internet services, frozen pizza, and fast-food restaurants.

Elsewhere in the world, however, David is conjured up with far greater passion and for matters of far greater consequence.

“Eshkol, you have the best army since King David,” said Ezer Weizman, a founder of the Israeli Air Force and future president of Israel, to the prime minister of Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967. “If you don't attack, you will never be forgiven. If you do attack, you will be the conquering hero.”
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After the victory in 1967, which restored the Old City of Jerusalem to Israeli sovereignty, a government minister was asked to comment on the conflicting claims of Arabs and Jews to the site where the City of David once stood and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, two of the most sacred sites in Islam, now stand. The minister asserted that the modern state of Israel enjoyed the legal right to clear the Temple Mount, as the site is known in Jewish tradition, because King David had purchased it from Araunah the Jebusite for fifty pieces of silver!
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