King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Jonathan Kirsch Read Free Book Online Page A

authors?—may have decorated the life story of King David with fairy tales and folktales, if only to fill in the blanks in an otherwise rich biographical record. The human imagination abhors a vacuum, after all, and seeks to fill in the blanks in a life or a history. The same impulse appears to be at work, for example, in the biblical life story of Moses, whose miraculous survival in a little boat of reeds may have been borrowed intact from a far more ancient tale told about an Akkadian king of the third millennium B.C.E . All of these tales— the ones told about Moses and David and much else besides—were preserved and embellished by the authors and editors who compiled the law, legend, and lore of ancient Israel into the patchwork that we have learned to call
the
Bible.
    This simple notion of how the Bible was composed, which encapsulates the consensus of the last hundred years or so of biblical scholarship, helps us to resolve the other flaws and contradictionsin the story of David and Goliath. One of the traditional tales of ancient Israel suggested that Saul and David first encountered each other on the day the young man arrived at the royal household to serve as court musician. Another tale suggested that their first meeting took place on the field of battle on the day when David fought Goliath. And the biblical source who compiled the various tales of ancient Israel chose to include
both
versions in the sacred history of Israel.
    Intriguingly, the very fact that the Bible preserves multiple and contradictory versions of the same incident has been cited by scholars as evidence that the Bible accurately and reliably preserves the oldest folk traditions of ancient Israel—the priests and scribes who compiled and edited the sacred texts of ancient Israel felt obliged to include
all
of the oldest traditions even when they conflicted with one another. Even more intriguing, however, is the suggestion that the inclusion of two inconsistent versions of the same story is really a wink and a nod from the biblical author, a way of signaling the reader that
both
versions may be purely fanciful. The biblical author generally provides a single version of an incident when he is confident that it happened just that way, or so goes one theory of the function of doublets in the biblical text. When two or three versions of the same incident are included, the author means to signal us that he is not quite sure how it happened or whether it happened at all.

AND DAVID HIS TEN THOUSANDS
    King Saul, we are told, elevated young David to a position of command over his “men of war,” and David was no less competent and effective in his campaigns against the Philistines than he had been in single combat against Goliath. “Whithersoever Saul sent him, he had good success,” the Bible emphasizes, “and it was good in the sight of all the people, and also in the sight of Saul's servants.” (1 Sam. 18:5) From the first moment of his new military career, David was hailed by the people of Israel as a war hero on the strength of his victory over Goliath.
    And it came to pass as they came, when David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet the king, with timbrels, with joy, and with three-stringed instruments.
    (1 Sam. 18:6)
     
    The same words and phrases are used earlier in the Bible to describe how the prophetess Miriam and the women of Israel celebrated the victory of the Israelites over the army of Pharaoh at the Red Sea. “Sing ye to Yahweh, for he is highly exalted,” called Miriam in a transport of ecstasy, and the women responded as they danced around her: “The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.” (Exod. 15:20–21) 42 Perhaps the parallels between the two passages should be understood as evidence that circle dances and call-and-response songs were the traditional way of celebrating avictory in ancient Israel. Or, more