King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (47 page)

51.
Gilead was a region on the east bank of the Jordan River, and Geshur was located in the vicinity of the Golan Heights. The Jezreel Valley lies near Mount Gilboa between the hill-country of Samaria and the Galilee. Benjamin was the smallest of the twelve tribes of Israel, and the one to which King Saul and his sons belonged. Ephraim was another Israelite tribe whose homeland was centered in the hill-country around the city of Shechem.

1.
Jabesh-Gilead was the frontier town on the far side of the Jordan River that Saul saved from the Ammonites at the very outset of his kingship, and now the townsfolk were repaying a debt of honor to their dead savior. See chapter 2.

2.
Adapted from JPS.

3.
Gibeon was located a few miles northwest of Jerusalem, and the pool mentioned in the Bible is identified with a deep pit cut into the native rock, eighty-two feet deep and thirty-seven feet wide, which was excavated in modern times.

4.
Joab, Abishai, and Asahel were the sons of Zeruiah (2 Sam. 2:18), a woman who is identified as David's sister. (1 Chron. 2:16) Abner was the son of Ner (2 Sam. 2:12), a man who is identified as Saul's uncle. (1 Sam. 14:50).

5.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

6.
Josephus,
Jewish Antiquities, Books V-VIII
, vol. 5, 365.

7.
Yigael Yadin,
The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), vol. 2, 266, 267. “The ‘game’ they played was no game but a group of serious duels in the full technical sense of the term…. It shows that this form of military engagement, possibly under the Philistine influence, had been taken over as an accepted practice by the professional soldiers, the picked men of valor of both royal households.”

8.
New JPS, 472, n. f.

9.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

10.
Clinton Bailey, “How Desert Culture Helps Us Understand the Bible,”
Bible Review
7, no. 4 (August 1991): 20.

11.
Abishai, like his brothers, is depicted as a man with a rash nature and a taste for rough justice. For example, when David and Abishai came upon the slumbering Saul, it was Abishai who proposed to assassinate him in his sleep. “Let me strike him and pin him to the ground with one thrust of the spear,” Abishai implored David. “I will not have to strike twice.” (1 Sam. 26:8) (NEB) David refused to allow the assassination of King Saul, but he would be forced to contend with the impulsive “sons of Zeruiah”— Joab and Abishai—yet again.

12.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

13.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

14.
Anson Rainey, “Concubine,” in
Encyclopedia Judaica
, corrected ed. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, n.d.), vol. 5, 862.

15.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

16.
The fact that David would be forbidden to remarry his wife under biblical law (Deut. 24:1–4) apparently does not occur to him or the biblical author, perhaps because, as some scholars propose, the Book of Deuteronomy was not yet in existence.

17.
Adapted from JPS.

18.
J. Cheryl Exum,
Fragmented Women
, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, supplement series 163 (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1993): 22.

19.
Adapted from JPS.

20.
Adapted from New JPS and NEB.

21.
Adapted from JPS and AB.

22.
Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 166–167; Alter,
Art of Biblical Narrative
, 102.

23.
Bright,
History of Israel
, 192; McCarter,
II Samuel
, 122.

1.
Ginzberg,
Legends of the Jews
, vol. 1, 285, citing, inter alia, Targum Yerushalmi, MHG I, and Tehillim 76.

2.
Weisfeld,
David the King
, 167, citing Pirke Rabbi Eliezer 36.

3.
A very different tale is told in the Book of Judges, where it is reported that, shortly after the death of Joshua, “the children of Judah fought against Jerusalem, and took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and set the city on fire.” (Judges 1:8) Amihai Mazar, one of the leading excavators of Jerusalem, shrugs off the inconsistent report in Judges as either “fictional” or perhaps a distorted memory of an assault by non-Israelites. Amihai Mazar,
Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000–586 B.C.E.
(New York: Doubleday, 1990), 333.

4.
Bright,
History of Israel
, 195.

5.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 134–135.

6.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 140. David was expressing a distaste for the disabled that pervades the Bible, whose authors regarded a person with certain physical imperfections as ritually impure and unfit to participate in ceremonies of worship and sacrifice. (Lev. 21:16–23, Deut. 23:1–2) Thus, the Bible links David's hatred for “the lame and the blind” to the laws of ritual purity. “That is why they say: ‘No one who is blind or lame shall come into the Lord's house.’ ” (2 Sam. 5:8) (NEB)

7.
The excavation of a vertical shaft beneath the walls of Jerusalem in the nineteenth century by the British army engineer Charles Warren prompted a flurry of enthusiasm among Bible scholars, who identified the so-called Warren Shaft with the watercourse that is apparently mentioned in the biblical account of David's assault on the city. More recent and more temperate archaeologists are no longer convinced that the Warren Shaft dates as far back as the events described in the Bible.

8.
The eyesight of the patriarch Isaac was impaired in his old age (Gen. 27:1), and the patriarch Jacob suffered an injury to his thigh during his wrestling match with God. (Gen. 32:26)

9.
McCarter,
II Samuel
, 138–139, citing, inter alia, A. Finklestein, Pirke Rabbi Eliezer 36, Josephus, and J. Heller.

10.
Karen Armstrong,
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 37.

11.
Adapted from JPS and NEB.

12.
Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
, 165.

13.
Joel Rosenberg,
King and Kin
, 166–167, citing Hannelis Schulte (biblical citations omitted).

14.
Gerhard von Rad,
Old Testament Theology
, vol. 1,
The Theology of Israel's Historical Traditions
, trans. D.M.G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 39.

15.
Frank Moore Cross,
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 230.

16.
Adapted from New JPS.

17.
The Millo is believed to have been an earthwork, perhaps a ravine filled and packed with soil and debris, which was used to create building sites on the slope of the peak where the original Jebusite citadel and the City of David were located. The Chronicler, by the way, adds an intriguing detail that is missing from the Book of Samuel: “Joab restored the remainder of the city.” (1 Chron. 11:8) (AB)

18.
Tyre was the capital of ancient Phoenicia, which was located on the northern frontier of Israel in what is now Lebanon. According to the Bible, King Hiram was still on the throne several decades later and provided cedar and craftsmen to King Solomon to build the Temple at Jerusalem. (1 Kings 5:15–26) The cedars of lebanon were valued as building materials in the ancient world and were used in the construction of temples and palaces as far away as Egypt in the fourth millennium
B.C.E.
and Mesopotamia in the third millennium
B.C.E.

19.
A concubine, as the term is used in the Bible, was
not
merely a mistress or a sex slave. Rather, she was a “secondary wife” who enjoyed some, if not all, of the legal protection afforded to a wife whose marriage had been ritually consecrated. Crucially, the offspring of a man's concubine were recognized as his children for purposes of inheritance and succession. The fussy author of Chronicles, apparently sensitive to the unsavory associations of concubinage, refers only to David's
wives
. (1 Chron. 14:3)

The head count of David's children varies from eleven to seventeen in the ancient versions of the Hebrew Bible.

20.
Adapted from AB. Other translations of the “troubled” text of 2 Sam. 5:24 are far less lucid. What the Anchor Bible renders as “the sound of the wind in the asherahs” is translated in the JPS as “the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees” and in the NEB as “a rustling sound in the tree-tops.”

21.
Adapted from JPS and AB. McCarter points out that “Geba” appears in place of “Gibeon” in the Masoretic Text, but he favors “Gibeon,” which appears in the Septuagint. “Gibeon” also appears in 1 Chronicles 14:16 in the Masoretic Text.

22.
The site of Kiriath-jearim, sometimes also called Baalah and Kiriatbaal in the Bible, is believed to be located fourteen miles northwest of Jerusalem. (Josh 15:9, 1 Chron 13:5)

23.
Yahweh Sabaoth
is conventionally translated as “Lord of Hosts,” a phrase that does not convey the martial splendor that the biblical author intended.

24.
The mice are mentioned in the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text, which refers only to the tumors. Some Bible commentators, including Martin Luther, have suggested that the Bible preserves the memory of an outbreak of bubonic plague that originated with diseased rodents from ships calling at the ports of the seafaring Philistines. Others propose that the tumors were symptoms of hemorrhoids or dysentery.

25.
R. A. Carlson,
David, the Chosen King
(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1964), 59, citing but criticizing W. R. Arnold and W. Caspari.

26.
The Hebrew word customarily rendered as “thousand” (
elep
) in various translations of the Bible may refer to a military unit rather than an actual head count. Thus, rather than a vast army of thirty thousand soldiers, David may have been accompanied by thirty units of infantry, each one consisting of only a dozen or so men.

27.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

Obed-edom is described in the Bible as a Gittite (2 Sam. 6:10), that is, a man from the Philistine territory of Gath, whose king David had once served as a mercenary. Israel under King David, as we shall see, was multiculturally diverse, and even Philistines were admitted to the inner circles of his court. Remarkably, the Philistine from Gath was able to safely cohabit with the Ark even though a native-born Israelite died when he merely touched it.

28.
The words attributed to David (“I'll bring the blessing back to my own house!”) appear in the so-called Lucianic recension of the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text. “In view of the light it casts on David's motives,” observes P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “it
might have been deleted in MT by a scribe who wanted to protect David.” McCarter,
II Samuel
, 165–166.

29.
Adapted from New JPS and AB.

30.
Adapted from JPS.

31.
Adapted from JPS and New JPS.

32.
Adapted from AB and New JPS.

33.
Adapted from AB and New JPS.

34.
Adapted from AB and New JPS.

35.
David M. Howard Jr., “David (Person),” in
Anchor Bible Dictionary
, vol. 2, 44.

36.
Carlson,
David, the Chosen King
, 61, citing but criticizing W. R. Arnold. “The ideology and composition of 2 Sam. could hardly be more profoundly misjudged.”

37.
Matitiahu Tsevat, “Studies in the Book of Samuel, III,”
Hebrew Union College Annual
34 (1963): 73.

38.
Cross,
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
, 251.

39.
See Cross,
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
, 73.

40.
Elias Auerbach,
Moses
, trans. J. S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), 155.

Also see my
Moses
, chapter 9, “God of the Mountain, God of the Way.”

41.
Deuteronomy may have been the “book of the Law” that was mysteriously discovered in the Temple at Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah in the late seventh century
B.C.E.
(2 Kings 22:8) Josiah was an ardent religious reformer who insisted on the centralization of worship in Jerusalem, and the newly discovered laws of Deuteronomy validated his reforms—a fact that leads some Bible scholars to suspect that the Book of Deuteronomy is a “pious fraud” that was composed at Josiah's direction!