King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (44 page)

1.
Robert Polzin,
Samuel and the Deuteronomist
, pt. 2,
1 Samuel
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 156.

2.
Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, eds.,
The David Myth in Western Literature
(West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1980), 5.

3.
Abram Leon Sachar,
A History of the Jews
, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 34.

4.
G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren, eds.,
Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament
, trans. John T. Willis, Geoffrey W. Bromley, and David E. Green (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1978), vol. 3, 158.

5.
Peter R. Ackroyd, “The Succession Narrative (So-called),”
Interpretation
35, no. 4 (October 1981): 385.

6.
Cited in Ralph Klein, “Chronicles, Book of, 1–2,” in
The Anchor Bible Dictionary
, ed. David Noel Freedman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 1, 725.

7.
Jan Wojcik, “Discriminations against David's Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature,” in Frontain and Wojcik,
David Myth
, 27, citing Rabbi Samuel ben Nahmani in Talmud Shabbath.

8.
Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg,
The Book of J
(Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 40–41, referring to the work of Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad.

9.
Martin Noth,
The Old Testament World
, trans. Victor I. Gruhn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press: 1966), 376–381.

10.
Cited in Donald Harman Akenson,
Surpassing Wonder
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 363–364.

11.
1 Sam. 13:14. The Hebrew text includes a pronoun rather than a direct reference. “[T]he Lord hath sought a man after His own heart,” Saul tells Samuel, “and the Lord hath appointed him to be prince over His people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee.” The reference is to David.

12.
2 Sam. 16:7. According to most English translations of the text, including the JPS, David is condemned by a man called Shimei as a “man of blood, and base fellow.” P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., however, renders the same phrase as “bloodstained fiend of hell” in his translation of 2 Samuel in the Anchor Bible series.

13.
Albrecht Alt,
Essays on Old Testament History and Religion
, trans. R. A. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 178.

14.
Quoted in Evan Thomas and Matthew Cooper, “Extracting a Confession,”
Newsweek
, August 31, 1998, p. 34.

15.
Bloom and Rosenberg,
Book of J
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 242.

16.
Some scholars, most recently Richard Elliott Friedman in
The Hidden Book in the Bible
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), suggest that “J” was the source for much of the text that we find in the Book of Samuel.

17.
Walter Brueggemann, “David and His Theologian,”
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
30, no. 2 (April 1968): 156, crediting Gerhard von Rad for the argument that chapters 2–11 of Genesis “are intended to be and indeed are an extremely sophisticated statement by one of Israel's earliest, most profound theologians.”

18.
David Rosenberg,
The Book of David
(New York: Harmony Books, 1997), 2.

1.
P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., trans., intro., and commentary,
I Samuel
, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 62.

2.
Samuel was obliged by his mother's promise to Yahweh to take the so-called Nazirite vow, which required him to abstain from wine, “strong drink,” and any other products made from the grape (including vinegar) and to leave his hair unshorn. (Num. 6:1–21) Another famous Nazirite was Samson, whose long hair was a sign of the sacred vow that was the real source of his strength: “For I have been a Nazirite unto God from my mother's womb,” as Samson explained to the treacherous Delilah. (Judges 13:3–5, 7; 16:17)

3.
Strictly speaking, God is here referring to the destruction of the priestly dynasty of Eli in Shiloh and its replacement by the house of Zadok at Jerusalem during the reign of David. (1 Sam. 3:14, 25) But the divine oracle can be understood to prefigure a revolution in the political and spiritual life of ancient Israel that reaches its highest expression in the accession of David to the throne.

4.
McCarter,
I Samuel
, 18 ff. (“The middle stage in the growth of the First Book of Samuel … is prophetic in perspective and suspicious of the institution of monarchy.”)

5.
According to the Bible, the Philistines were the archetypal enemy of the Israelites. Scholarship suggests that they originated in the Aegean, and they were among
the waves of so-called Sea Peoples who began to migrate to the ancient Near East in the twelfth century
B.C.E.
The Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III defeated the Philistines in battle in 1190
B.C.E.
and settled them as mercenaries in Canaan, where they later established themselves in five independent cities, including Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gaza, and Gath. The geographical place name Palestine is derived from the Philistines.

6.
Adapted from JPS. (The phrase “Adapted from …” is used in
King David
to indicate that I have taken the liberty of changing the punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as they appear in the cited source and omitting some words and phrases that do not change the meaning of the quoted material. See “A Note on Bibles and Biblical Usage” on page 347.)

7.
Goyim
is an Akkadian loan-word that means “nations” and is generally used in the Bible as a collective term of reference for non-Israelites. The KJV sometimes translates the word as “heathen,” and it has come to be used as a lighthearted, but also slightly offensive, term for non-Jews.

8.
Adapted from JPS. The complete text of Samuel's oration is found at 1 Sam. 8:10–22.

9.
Paul Johnson,
A History of the Jews
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 49.

10.
Jan Wojcik, “Discriminations against David's Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature,” in Frontain and Wojcik,
David Myth
, 1980, 14.

11.
Polzin,
Samuel and the Deuteronomist
, pt. 2;
1 Samuel
, 224, referring specifically to “the particular manner in which Saul dies” and attributing the passage to the biblical source known as the Deuteronomist.

12.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

13.
Adapted from KJV, NEB, and AB.

14.
McCarter,
I Samuel
, 180.

15.
According to a tale preserved in the Talmud (Horayot 11b and 12a), Moses himself prepared a supply of the stuff that lasted until the reformer-king Josiah ended the practice of anointing kings and high priests in the seventh century
B.C.E.

16.
The Masoretic Text omits the second and third sentences of Samuel's speech, which appear in translations based on the Septuagint. According to the JPS, Saul says: “Is it not that the Lord hath anointed thee to be prince over His inheritance?” (1 Sam. 10:1)

17.
R. E. Clements,
Abraham and David
(London: S.C.M. Press, 1967), 49.

18.
Adapted from JPS.

19.
“Though the word ‘lot’ (
goral
) is not used here, the technical terminology of lot casting may be discerned…. The outcome of the lottery was believed to be divinely determined.” McCarter,
I Samuel
, 192.

20.
Strictly speaking, Saul was not raised to kingship when Samuel first anointed him. In the passages that describe the secret anointment (1 Sam. 10:1), Saul is described as a
nagid
—“prince,” “leader,” or “commander”—rather than as a
melek
—“king.” The term may refer to a “king-designate” or, as we might put it, a crown prince (Mc-Carter,
I Samuel
, 178–179). Elsewhere in the biblical account, however, Saul is presented as a king by Samuel and acclaimed as a king by the general populace.

21.
The Ammonites were a Semitic people of the ancient Near East whose language was related to Hebrew and whose homeland was the eastern bank of the Jordan River. The site of its royal capital, Rabbah Ammon (or Rabbathammon), is identified with Ammon in what is now the modern state of Jordan. According to the Bible, Israel
and Ammon long disputed with each other for sovereignty over the east bank of the Jordan.

22.
The Hebrew word translated in the Anchor Bible as “holocaust” (
olah
) is usually rendered in English-language Bibles as “burnt-offering” or “whole-offering” and identifies an offering that is burnt whole on the altar. Precisely because the word “holocaust” refers to a sacrificial offering to the God of Israel, some historians and critics prefer the Hebrew word
shoah
(“catastrophe”) over “Holocaust” to describe the mass murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children by Nazi Germany and its allies.

23.
Moab was located on a sixty-mile-long plateau along the eastern and northeastern shore of the Dead Sea, bordering on Ammon to the north, Edom to the south, and the land of Israel to the west. The Moabites, like the Ammonites, are described in the Bible as the descendants of Lot, nephew of the patriarch Abraham, and it is suggested that the Edomites are the descendants of Esau, brother of the patriarch Jacob. Thus, ironically, all three of these nations are regarded in the Bible as both the bitter enemies
and
the distant relations of the Israelites. (Gen. 19:37–38, 25:30) See my
The Harlot by the Side of the Road
(New York, Ballantine Books, 1997), chapter 3, “Life Against Death.”

24.
McCarter,
I Samuel
, 265.

25.
A close reading of the Bible reveals that the in-laws of Moses are sometimes described as Midianites (Exod. 3:1) and sometimes as Kenites (Judg. 1:16, 4:11), and the two tribes may have been related. According to the so-called Kenite hypothesis, the Kenites may have been the first worshippers of Yahweh, and “Moses is supposed to have learned from his Kenite relatives both the name of God and the location of his holy mountain.” Moshe Greenberg,
Understanding Exodus
(New York: Behrman House for Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969), 48–49. Also see my
Moses, A Life
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), chapter 8, “The Sorcerer and the Sorcerer's Apprentice.”

26.
Adapted from NEB and New JPS.

27.
See McCarter,
I Samuel
, 222, and text of the Revised English Bible in
The Complete Parallel Bible
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 592.

28.
The New Jerusalem Bible in
Complete Parallel Bible
, 593.

29.
John Bright,
A History of Israel
, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 186.

30.
“Such was Saul's unselfish devotion to the national interests that he retained not only the respect but also the affection of his subjects to the day of his death. He was never confronted, like David, with serious rebellions against his rule.” Robert H. Pfeiffer,
Introduction to the Old Testament
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 347.

31.
William Cowper, “Light Shining Out of Darkness,” in
Treasury of Religious Quotations
, ed. Gerald Tomlinson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 165.

32.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

1.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

2.
Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.

3.
Adapted from JPS, NEB, and AB.

4.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

5.
Ginzberg,
Legends of the Jews
, vol. 6, 247, citing the Septuagint.

6.
Tom Horner,
Jonathan Loved David
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), 26.

7.
Robert Alter,
The Art of Biblical Narrative
(New York: Basic Books, 1981), 35.

8.
McCarter,
I Samuel
, 277.

9.
Pfeiffer,
Introduction to the Old Testament
, 345, 363.

10.
Oliver Taplin, “Homer,” in
The Oxford History of the Classical World
, eds. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 50.