King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (42 page)

To the astonishment of the archaeologists who now peered at the stone under the summer sun of the Galilee, the inscription on that battered fragment of basalt appeared to include the three consonants that spell out a name that was deeply familiar but, until then, had been found only in the pages of the Bible—the name of David.

The hunk of stone was a portion of a stela—an upright stone slab bearing a written inscription—that had been fashioned out of native basalt, polished to take the inscription, and then incised with an iron stylus at some moment in distant antiquity, perhaps as long ago as the early eighth century
B.C.E.
The inscription memorialized an event that had once been regarded as worthy of celebration, but the stela had been broken up and put to use as building material not long after it was made. And, for the next three thousand years, it remained buried inside a forgotten town wall somewhere in the Galilee.

As the archaeologists pored over the fragment, they were able to make out a portion of the original inscription. The language was early Aramaic, a sister language of biblical Hebrew, and the
lettering style was dated to the ninth century
B.C.E.
Later, two more chunks of the same stela were found at the site, and more of the inscription was recovered. Archaeologists and biblical scholars were thrilled to discover that the inscription included a reference to David—or, more precisely, the
house
of David (
bet David
), a phrase that is interpreted to mean the royal dynasty founded by David.

Scholars cannot be entirely sure about any of the particulars of the stela from Tel Dan—when it was created, by whom, or for what reason. Even the reference to David is still obscure.
³⁵
But according to the archaeologists who found it at Tel Dan, the stela was a monument raised by a Bible-era Aramean king to commemorate his victory in battle over two kings, one from the northern kingdom of Israel and the other from the southern kingdom of Judah, where the house of David reigned. These kings have been identified as Jehoram and Ahaziahu, both of whom are mentioned in the Book of Kings (2 Kings 8:25–26), and the key lines of the inscription have been reconstructed to read as follows:

Strictly speaking, as we have noted, the inscription refers not to David himself but to the
house
of David. The phrase itself harks back to that famous promise of God to David in the “theological highlight” of the Book of Samuel: “And thy house and thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever before thee.” (2 Sam. 7:16) Now, for the very first time, the existence of the house of David seemed to be confirmed by an archaeological relic that one could read with one's own eyes and hold in one's own hands. And the relic could be plausibly dated all the way back to the early eighth century
B.C.E.
, a period only a century or so after the supposed lifetime of King David himself. Even though the stela recorded the
defeat
of a king from the house of David—and that's why it was broken up by the Israelites and used as building material—the antiquity of the Tel Dan inscription has been greeted with enthusiasm and even exultation.

“We have an ancient reference to King David,” assert Bible scholars David Noel Freedman and Jeffrey C. Geoghegan. “The Tel Dan inscription also underscores the general historicity of the Biblical narratives….”
³⁷

Not every Bible scholar is quite so convinced. Thomas L. Thompson, a revisionist who has challenged all the high hopes and conventional wisdom of “biblical archaeology,” declares himself unconvinced by the discoveries at Tel Dan. He complains of “problems” with “the reading of the text, its dating and interpretation.” His arguments, as always, are highly provocative. The dating of the stela is “optimistically early” and ought to be moved forward by a century or more. The missing words and letters make it impossible to prove that the stela makes a direct reference to King David. Indeed, he points out, the word that has been interpreted as “David” also appears on an important archaeological find from Jordan, the Mesha Stele of the ninth century
B.C.E.
, where it is used as the divine title for an ancient god called Yahweh, who may or may not be the same deity who is identified as the God of Israel in the Bible. Although Thompson allows that David himself may or may not have been the founder of a “patronate”—a primitive tribal chieftainship— he insists that the Tel Dan stela “tells us nothing, as such, of a person David as the founder of that patronate in an earlier period.”
³⁸

But the consensus of modern Bible scholarship holds that the Tel Dan inscription is important new evidence of the historicity of King David and the exploits described in the Bible. Indeed, the fragments of polished basalt and the intriguing inscription on them have taken on an almost religious significance in our irreligious era. At a talk I gave about my previous book,
Moses, A Life
, I was approached by a woman who was agitated and distressed to hear me report that no extra-biblical evidence of any kind confirms the historical existence of Moses. But she told me that she
was comforted by her own sure knowledge that the
other
hero of the Hebrew Bible had been a man of flesh and blood.

“At least we still have David,” she witnessed to me, “thanks to Tel Dan.”

Thus strengthened in our conviction that a king called David once lived, however, we are left with a troubling question that cannot be answered by the Tel Dan inscription or any other archaeological relic. Exactly what are we meant to learn from King David as he is depicted in the Bible? Once we have read his biblical life story with open eyes—and once we have witnessed the shocking excesses of which he was capable—some of us may be left with the idea that he does not really belong in a book that holds itself out as a source of moral instruction for humankind!

David, as depicted in the Bible, is essentially “value-neutral,” according to a chilling phrase now used as a term of praise. That is, David did not promulgate a code of moral conduct, nor did he exemplify one in his own tumultuous life and times. The biblical David was a warrior and a poet, but he was never a lawgiver or a teacher. Aside from a few passages where some later biblical author has put pious and ornate words into his mouth, David seemed to embrace only the thoroughly modern notion that nothing succeeds like success—or, when it came to satisfying his sexual appetite, the equally modern notion that nothing succeeds like excess.

“The one indisputable point about King David is that he is one hard case,” writes Donald Harman Akenson. “He does what he has to do to preserve his power at all costs: just ask his seven brothers whom he jumped in the quest for the family's patrimony; King Saul whom he undercut as a monarch; Ahimelech, the priest whom he gulled out of Goliath's sword; Uriah, whom David arranged to have killed so that he could sleep with Uriah's wife, Bathsheba; and the tens of thousands of dead he left strewn about Palestine as he conquered his various neighbours, aggressive and
pacific alike.” And if we overlook these “hard” facts, as preachers and teachers have tended to do, we miss the whole point of the biblical life story of David. “That is exactly how a monarch should act,” Akenson concludes. “He preserves his honour and his power; everything else is secondary.”
³⁹

The Talmudic rabbis were so troubled by the plain facts of David's life—the cunning, cynicism, and carnality that he displays unapologetically in the pages of the Bible—that they simply dreamed up a new and improved David. “Whatever leisure time his royal duties afforded him, he spent in study and prayer,” they imagined. “David's thinking and planning were wholly given to what is good and noble.” Indeed, they were even capable of asserting, against all evidence in the Bible, that “he is one of the few pious men over whom the evil inclination had no power.”
⁴⁰
The kinder and gentler David of rabbinic fantasy, however, is plausible only to someone who has never opened the Bible or who ignores what the Bible actually says of David.

Other Bible readers may prefer the vision of David that we encounter in the prophetic writings of the Bible—a wholly celestial messiah-king who is no longer a “man of war,” no longer a “man of blood,” no longer a man at all. “A son is given unto us,” exults the prophet Isaiah, and he offers a vision of heaven on earth that only grows more sublime as our experience of the real world grows more horrific. “And of peace there be no end,” writes Isaiah, “upon the throne of David.” (Isa. 9:5–6) Here he becomes the child-king who reigns in a utopia that resembles nothing in the life experience of the fleshly David.

Such images still exert a powerful tug on the hearts and minds of men and women who are aghast at the world in which we find
ourselves nowadays, a world that tolerates and even encourages “ethnic cleansing,” child pornography, biological warfare, “squash” videos, and the miscellaneous horrors of modernity. Indeed, some corners of the Bible still offer a comfortable refuge for those who find themselves battered and bruised by what confronts us in newspapers and motion pictures, and on television and the Internet.

But more often the Bible is
not
a comforting book. If we are courageous enough to read it with open eyes and with an open mind, we discover that the Bible is provocative and challenging, unsettling and off-putting, sometimes even shocking and scandalous. And nowhere in the Bible are we confronted more forcefully with what it means to be a human being than in the biblical life story of David. The deepest of all the mysteries that confront us in the Hebrew Bible is the mystery of how a man as flawed as David can be a man after God's own heart.

One clue to the mystery is the very word that the Bible uses to describe David: he is, first and always, a
man—
or, if you prefer a gender-neutral translation of the Hebrew text, a human being. Even though the Bible insists on praising God above all, the deeply humanistic notion that man is the measure of all things is spoken out loud by David himself in Psalm 8, where he asks God a crucial question—“What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”—and then answers it in a way that affirms the primacy of humankind on earth.

Indeed, the theology of the Hebrew Bible can be—and must be!—reduced to a human scale, if only to allow us to understand the moral instruction that it embodies. The venerable Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad, for example, discerns the undercurrents of “Solomonic humanism” in the story of David—and, crucially, he defines it as nothing less than “a wholly new departure in spirituality, a kind of ‘enlightenment,’ an awakening of spiritual self-consciousness.”
⁴¹
Similarly, when the prophet Micah wonders out loud what God demands of us, his answer is a simple moral credo that can be understood and acted upon in the here and now: “Only to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” (Mic. 6:8) Even the prophet Isaiah, whose messianic visions are so sublime and yet so impossibly grand, wakes up to a much more urgent reality when he answers Micah's provocative question: What does God want of us?

David, of course, cannot readily be credited with the profound compassion or the fierce sense of social justice that inspired the prophets. But if we look beyond the brutal deathbed instructions that he issued to Solomon, his last charge to his beloved son seems to strike something of the same note. “Be thou strong,” said David to Solomon, “and show thyself a man.” (1 Kings 2:2) If we render the same phrase with a bit of Yiddish, we may come closer to understanding what God expected of David, what God expects of all of us—or, at least, what we ought to expect of ourselves. “Be a
mensch
!”

By almost any measure, David is the most commanding figure in the Hebrew Bible. His name is mentioned more than a thousand times, and more space is devoted to him than to any other biblical figure. Although the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and Moses are crucial to both biblical narrative and biblical theology, it is David who may have inspired the writing of the Bible in the first place. Indeed, David is present in the Bible even in passages where his name is never mentioned.

The life story of David sprawls across several books of the Hebrew Bible, and a great many different biblical sources can be identified in those books, or so modern Bible scholarship proposes.
^*
The fundamental questions of authorship—the time, place, purpose, and identity of the biblical sources—are still hotly
debated. For that reason, the discussion that follows is only an overview of a complex, controversial, and ever-changing body of scholarship.