The Evils of King David

 

Midweek Worship

The Fourth Week After the Pentecost

Semicontinuous Reading 1: 1 Samuel 17: 1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49

Semicontinuous Reading 2: 1 Samuel 17:57—18:5, 18:10-16

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

David!—the shepherd boy who made good. A real rags-to-riches tale, David went from nothing to a throne; and from the dynasty that he established would in the fullness of time arise the Savior of everything and everyone who has ever lived or will. Had there been no David, there would be no Kingdom of Judah, no cult of Yahweh established in Jerusalem, no Temple of Solomon, no unification of the Tribes of Israel, no shared identity to preserve the Jewish people in their Exile, and thus neither a Diaspora nor the Return. Thus would be no Jesus as we know Him.

The Bible is, in ways we often fail to appreciate, David’s book. It was the understanding that his royal line was eternal which led the Prophets to prepare for the Messiah. The very word Messiah, or Christ, means “anointed”—anointed as David was anointed, the inheritor of his crown, so that in the Gospels crowds call Jesus “Son of David,” despite the fact that David died some thousand years before.

The truth is that there are two Davids in the Bible: the David of history and the David of faith; that is, the man as he was, and the man as we would prefer him to have been. And the man as he was, was a killer, violent and vengeful. His enemies had a nasty habit of dying so that he could marry their wives and inherit their property. And we kind of gloss over those bits when in his youth he was an outlaw running a protection racket, sometimes serving the enemies of Israel.

The life of David as a young man reminds me of nothing so much as Billy the Kid in those old Young Guns movies—neither hero nor villain but antihero, someone whose exploits we eagerly devour while hoping never to encounter him ourselves. And like I said, this is all there in the Bible, in the grand narrative of Judges through Kings. You can see how the story is spun. You can see how it changes over time. We can witness together, firsthand, as it were, how the David of history becomes the David of faith.

Dr Joel Baden, Professor of Hebrew Bible at a little school called Yale, has a lovely book on this topic entitled The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero. He argues that the Books of Samuel, or at least parts of them, bear the hallmarks of a contemporary account, eyewitnesses to the life of David. He further argues that the original account of David’s life was written later in his rule, in response to the first real challenge to his power that he ever had to face: namely, the rebellion of his son Absalom, whom many people supported to succeed his aging father. Absalom is another of those murders for which David dodges blame.

David’s people needed to produce an apologia, a sympathetic account and defense of his coming to the throne. And to their credit, they include the story of David warts and all. How could they not? They were writing of things within living memory. Of course, they were spin doctors; of course they painted David’s actions in the most positive possible light. But there’s only so much you can whitewash when your king is an Ancient Near Eastern monarch. None of them had their hands clean. None of them were innocent in their power. The very thing that made them good kings of the early Iron Age also made them reprehensible people. And while Pharaohs and Emperors had power to deny it, at least the Kings of Israel acknowledged their regrets.

Later versions of David’s story—Chronicles, for instance—omit all the nasty bits and play him up as the ideal king and founder of the nation. Few of us, after all, care to admit that our country is built upon blood spilled by our forebears. A good comparison might be King Arthur. There was, I think it safe to say, some historical Arthur: a Romanized Christian Celtic war leader, who fought to a standstill the invading Anglo-Saxons of what would one day be England.

From that kernel of fact has grown a veritable thicket of legend, so that all the stories we know of Arthur probably are not true, or at least were not him. The tales of dozens of heroes have been attributed to this one man, so that Arthur as we have him is an amalgam of idealized virtue obscuring whoever he was underneath. “Arthur” probably wasn’t even his name. It means “bear,” and likely a war title.

The classic story we read today of David and Goliath is truly such a tale. David almost certainly did not slay Goliath, and we know this because of the Bible itself, this very same book in fact! 2 Samuel 21:19 records that Elhanan, one of David’s mighty men, slew Goliath. And this is clearly the older tradition. What’s more, it was Elhanan’s brother Eleazar, also one of David’s men, also from the city of Bethlehem, who single-handedly stood up to the Philistines at this battle, at Ephes Dammim, and thus won the great victory.

The exploits of these brothers have been added to their king. David gets credit for his men, facing down the Philistines, cutting down the giant. And again, this isn’t criticism of the Bible because both versions of the story are in the Bible itself. Multiple witnesses, multiple versions, and it’s pretty clear which one came first. It’s not like someone abbreviated the story of David slaying Goliath and passed it off to one of his underlings who barely merits a footnote in the corpus of Scripture.

The Bible over time builds David up. His real life, his historical life, is astounding. He really did accomplish astonishing things, founding a kingdom, writing a story, that continues to shape our world even today, 3000 years after his death. But he got his hands dirty while he did it. It made his own contemporaries uncomfortable, necessitating those spin doctors. And later generations of biblical authors thought it necessary to avoid the bad bits altogether. No murders, no extortion.  No David and Bathsheba.

And believe it or not, this is a good thing. It is the sign of a maturing society. It means that 1000 years, 2000 years, 3000 years after David, we live in a very different world. Our notions of justice and compassion have expanded, have evolved. If we were to look back on the legacy of David and say, “Hey, that’s great. Nothing wrong here. He did what he had to have done,” then our tradition would be dead. We wouldn’t have grown at all in three millennia. We would be just as brutal as our Bronze Age forebears. And where’s the religion in that?

Americans are going through this even now, on our own smaller scale. The Founding Fathers were men, just men. But we spent a couple centuries spinning them into gods, into philosopher warrior kings, so that the painting in the dome of the Capitol today is “The Apotheosis of George Washington,” assuming his deity. But we’re taking a harder look at our own history now, aren’t we? We’re beginning to acknowledge the flaws of the Founders, and the true depths of the original sin of slavery, which we’ve tried and failed to whitewash away.

But again, we should be ambivalent. We should recognize what the great men of the past have accomplished while rejecting what we find abhorrent. It means we’re growing, we’re maturing, we’re alive. David was a human and a sinner and a king. The legacy he left behind has shaped the modern world. And every generation has had to edit his image so that we can look upon his grandeur while still being able to sleep at night. Ah, the ambiguity of greatness: great in virtue, great in vice.

Yet here’s the thing. David might not have been perfect. He might not even have been good. But somebody slayed Goliath, and the story became a paradigm for faith, a parable of the favor God grants to the weak, the small, the humble, the faithful. The God of Israel does not care for power, strength, warhorses, chariots, an iron spear like a weaver’s rod. Militaries do not impress Him. Bravery, compassion, and kindness do: the selfless heroism of the slight and the small. We would do well to remember that.

Remember, Christians, we do not worship David, and we do not worship a book. We are all of us sinners, in need of forgiveness. And we are all of us saved, by the Blood of Jesus Christ. He is the true Son of David. He is the true heir of God. Every king who’s ever lived has failed us—save only for Him. Only One is heroic. Only One is the Lord. And that same One will defend you from all the giants in the earth. David was a sinner. Thank God we have a King who came sinners to save.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.