The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (47 page)

Bathsheba reenters the biblical narrative at a crucial point in the saga of King David—indeed, it is really
the
decisive moment of the Court History, which is also sometimes called the Succession Narrative because of what happens next. She implores David to anoint their son, Solomon, as his chosen successor to the throne of Israel. And she informs David that another one of his many sons, Adonijah, has already declared himself to be king and is running around Jerusalem even now with the same kind of entourage that Absalom once used to announce
his
kingship—a chariot and horses and fifty men.

“And now, behold, Adonijah reigneth,” says Bathsheba to the failing king, “and thou … knowest it not” (1 Kings 1:18).

While Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan are lobbying David in favor of Solomon, Adonijah is lining up his own allies, including the general who so often played the role of the royal hit man, the faithful Joab. But Bathsheba succeeds in extracting what she wants from David—“Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me,” says the weary old king, “and he shall sit upon my throne in my stead”—and Bathsheba bows to the floor in gratitude. “Let my lord king David live for ever,” she says.

Bathsheba’s words are to no avail. David lives only long enough to advise Solomon on whom he ought to trust and whom he ought to kill when David is gone. In a scene later artfully copied in
The Godfather
, David obliquely instructs Solomon to arrange for the murder of Joab,
just as Joab once arranged for the murder of Uriah and Absalom. “[L]et not his hoar head go down to the grave in peace,” says David. Then, after a bloody reign of forty years, the remarkable life of the old king is finally over: “And David slept with his fathers,” the incomparable storyteller of Samuel and Kings concludes (1 Kings 2:6, 10).

But Solomon is not quite yet secure on the throne of David, and the Succession Narrative is not yet over. Adonijah renews his bid for the throne by audaciously asking Bathsheba to petition King Solomon for one little souvenir of their father—David’s tempting but untouched concubine, Abishag. Readily if rather disingenuously, Bathsheba agrees to carry Adonijah’s message to Solomon, knowing full well that her son will not mistake the real intent behind Adonijah’s request. Just as Absalom had once staked his claim on David’s throne by sleeping with the king’s ten concubines on the roof of the palace, Adonijah is now asserting his own right to reign as king of Israel by seeking to wed the last of the king’s wives. Solomon listens to the message that his mother brings to him, marks Adonijah as a deadly enemy, and resolves not to let his hoar head go down to the grave in peace. “God do so to me, and more also,” vows Solomon, “if Adonijah have not spoken this word against his own life” (1 Kings 2:23).

The Succession Narrative ends on the same note of sexual irony that was struck at the very beginning. What appears to be one man’s lust for a beautiful woman—first David’s seduction of Bathsheba, then Amnon’s rape of Tamar, and finally Adonijah’s bid for Abishag—is shown to be an act with unmistakable political meanings and catastrophic political consequences. Solomon himself goes on to indulge his own gargantuan passions—he accumulates some seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines—and he is seduced into worshipping their pagan gods and goddesses, with further disastrous consequences for the Royal House of David. Solomon builds the Temple at Jerusalem, thus crowning the achievements of his father, but the united monarchy of Judah and Israel is already beginning to crack—and the mighty empire of King David will begin to fall apart upon the death of Solomon.

The frank descriptions of human passion
in extremis
that are preserved in the Book of Samuel are mostly overlooked by pious Bible readers, who seem to prefer David’s psalms to his sexual adventures. Even some Bible scholars are uncomfortable with the candor of the biblical author about what one commentator delicately calls David’s “failures in the area of moral restraint.”
²⁶
For example, Louis Ginzberg’s
The Legends of the Jews
, a vast anthology of rabbinical legend and lore that bulks up to seven fat volumes, spares only two dismissive sentences
*
for Tamar and her suffering at the hands of her half brother: “Tamar cannot be called one of the children of David, because she was born before her mother’s conversion to Judaism,” the rabbis argued. “Consequently, her relation to Amnon is not quite of the grave nature it would have been in the strict sense of the terms.”
²⁷

Then, too, the homoerotic overtones in David’s life story have been stubbornly ignored by Bible critics until very recently. Pious commentators have long celebrated the intimate friendship between David and Jonathan as “the ideal of male friendship,”
²⁸
for example, but they have refused to acknowledge the possibility that physical as well as spiritual intimacies passed between these two men. “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David,” the Bible tells us plainly enough, “and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Sam. 18:1). On the eve of battle, Jonathan strips off his own cloak and tunic, his armor and weaponry, and tenderly dresses David in his apparel as a pledge of friendship (1 Sam. 18:4). And when Jonathan is later slain, David’s oft-quoted and much-celebrated elegy speaks plainly enough of their bond. “Very pleasant hath thou been unto me,” sings David, the “sweet psalmist” of Israel. “Wonderful was thy love to me, passing the love of women” (2 Sam. 1:26).

Remarkably, a certain squeamishness is
still
displayed by some contemporary scholars toward the sexual excesses in the Bible and, especially, the story of David. For example, the Bible shows Bathsheba as a
seductress who seeks to catch the king’s eye, and at least one scholar speculates that “more than one Bathsheba in the neighborhood of the royal residence … hopefully took a bath where she could be seen from the roof of the King’s house.” But feminist critic J. Cheryl Exum complains that she is put off by the story of David and Bathsheba and similar “pornographic elements” in the biblical accounts of the Gibeah Outrage and the rape of Tamar. According to Exum, Bathsheba—not unlike Tamar—is “raped by the pen” because Bible readers are invited to put themselves “in the position of voyeurs” and watch what happens to Bathsheba when she catches the eye of the king while bathing on the rooftop. “This is no love story,” Exum concludes. “[T]he scene is the biblical equivalent of ‘wham bam, thank you, ma’am’: he sent, he took, she came, he lay, she returned.”
²⁹

In fact, some of the biblical authors themselves were clearly uncomfortable with the candor displayed in Samuel and Kings. So we are given a
second
version of the lives of David and Solomon in First and Second Chronicles, which appear as a kind of afterthought at the very end of the Hebrew Bible. David’s love for Jonathan, his adulterous and murderous affair with Bathsheba, the rape of Tamar, and the insurrection of Absalom are never mentioned by the author of Chronicles, and other incidents in the reign of King David are boldly revised and rewritten to serve the author’s theological agenda—the legitimacy and longevity of the Davidic line. For example, it is plainly reported in the Second Book of Samuel that David is ordered by
God
to conduct a census of the Israelites, something regarded as odious by ancient Israelites because a census was the first step toward taxation and conscription—and then, rather perversely, God turns around and punishes David and the Israelites when the king complies! (2 Sam. 24:1, 15). But the propagandist who composed Chronicles simply erases the name of God and writes in the name of Satan when retelling the very same story: “And
Satan
stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel” (1 Chron. 21:1).

Of course, it is precisely because the forbidden tales of the Bible have always made so many people so uncomfortable that they have come to be censored or suppressed or simply ignored. But if we read the Bible—and especially the story of David—with open eyes, we can readily see that the biblical authors regard even a human being who is
as deeply flawed as David to be worthy of the loftiest blessings of the Almighty. And so it turns out that David, a man of war, will be the fore’ bear of the Prince of Peace.

Four fateful covenants between God and humankind are described in the Hebrew Bible. The first deal is struck with Noah: “Never again shall the waters become a flood to destroy all living creatures,” promises a remorseful God (Gen. 9:11 NEB). The second covenant is the one between God and Abraham, who is destined to become “the father of a multitude of nations” and whose descendants will be given the Promised Land “for an everlasting possession” (Gen. 17:4, 8). The third covenant is God’s vow to Moses to make the Israelites “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:5–6) if they will agree to observe his commandments, which add up to 613 by the closing pages of the Five Books of Moses. And the fourth covenant is the one between God and David, a promise that has come to be understood by Jews and Christians alike as God’s solemn commitment to redeem our own world from suffering once and for all.

“When thy days are fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee … and I will establish his kingdom,” God tells David. “My mercy shall not depart from him …, [a]nd thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam. 7:12, 15-16).

In fact, the royal house of David ruled the ancient kingdom of Judah for some four hundred years
³⁰
—a dynasty of unprecedented length and stability in the ancient world and, especially, the ancient Near East. The Almighty’s promise to David was recalled each time one of his descendants ascended to the throne of Judah: “And thy house and thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever” (2 Sam. 7:16). And, according to ancient tradition, each new king in the Davidic line was anointed with holy oil during the ritual of coronation. For that reason, each new king in the line of David was regarded as an “anointed one”—the Hebrew word is
mashiach
, but we are more familiar with the Greek rendering of the same word:
Messiah.

But the divine promise to David was not kept. The Davidic line of kings finally ran out in 587-586
B.C.E
., when the Babylonians conquered the southern kingdom of Judah and destroyed the temple that Solomon had built at Jerusalem. According to the Book of Kings, the last heir of David to actually sit on the throne of Israel in Jerusalem is Zedekiah, a young man who serves at first as a quisling king appointed by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, but later rises up against his overlord. Zedekiah’s rebellion fails, and the last sight he is allowed to see is the slaying of his children. Then his eyes are put out, and he is carried off in chains to Babylon, where he is put to work as a slave in a mill (2 Kings 25:7). No heir of David ever takes the throne in Jerusalem again.

To explain why God apparently reneges on his solemn promise to David, a later biblical author argues that God’s promise of kingship to David and his “royal seed” is conditioned on the strict observance of divine law by the monarchs and their people. The fact that the Davidic kings, starting with Solomon and continuing through Zedekiah, engaged in pagan worship and other “abominations” explains why God does not regard himself as obliged to live up to his end of the bargain with David. Indeed, the Book of Kings gives us a scene in which David explains to Solomon that God’s covenant comes with a big “if.”

So it is the faithlessness of Israel, and not a breach of contract by God, that leads to the destruction of Israel, according to the revisionist version of the covenant between God and David. Indeed, the prophets work themselves into a frenzy of blame in their efforts to convince the Israelites that their long ordeal of conquest, occupation, and dispersion is their own fault. “[T]he rulers transgressed against Me,” God complains to the prophet Jeremiah, and “all the families of the house of Israel,” too (Jer. 2:4, 8).

The theological revisionism that we find within the pages of the Bible is probably the work of priests and scribes who lived around the time of King Josiah, a distant descendant of David and a fierce religious reformer of ancient Israel. In 622
B.C.E
., a book of sacred law mysteriously turned up in the Temple at Jerusalem; it was the Book of Deuteronomy, according to recent Bible scholarship, or at least a significant chunk of it. Deuteronomy embodied a new and stern theology that blames all of the woes of ancient Israel on the breach of God’s covenant with Moses. By worshipping strange gods and goddesses, thereby defying the “statutes and ordinances” of divine law, the author of Deuteronomy declares, the Israelites will forfeit the blessings that God promised to his Chosen People and, instead, call down upon themselves the curses that are set forth at length and in bloodcurdling detail in the Book of Deuteronomy.

“I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse,” says Moses in Deuteronomy. “Therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed” (Deut. 30:19).