When I was an adolescent, I saw “David: Giant Slayer,” an episode in the History Channel series Battles BC, which reimagines the rise and conquests of King David. It splices commentary from four scholars between stylized battle sequences shot on a backlot in front of a greenscreen. These scenes mimic 300, which came out three years beforehand, and which was the coolest film ever when I was seventeen. (That is a comment upon the venerable New York City “all-nerd high school” social experiment, in its Catholic version.) Those who have not had the pleasure can imagine sweaty, musclebound men with scimitars splattering blood around. Neither plate nor mail, neither historical accuracy nor common sense, gets in the way of their bulging abdominals. The documentary is similarly good, campy fun. Neighborhood boys called it something else at eight o’clock on summer nights when I would beg off the next pickup basketball game to watch the History Channel. Touché. The homoeroticism of the series is undeniable.
The scholars interviewed in “David: Giant Slayer” present a tight narrative about David as a self-interested and opportunistic “mafia don” with no moral scruples. David tries to manipulate Jonathan against Saul. When this plan fails, he turns traitor to his own people, raiding them on behalf of the Philistines. He eventually becomes the Philistines’ proxy ruler over Judah. David “whacks” all his enemies and rivals, like the Godfather. With Joab, his “consigliere,” he betrays the Philistines, beats them into submission, and with the help of their chariots conquers north to the Euphrates. Naturally, David’s lust for Bathsheba and mafia-like conspiracy to kill the loyal Uriah dominate the last third of the episode. Chapter eleven of the Second Book of Kings is drawn out for ten minutes of obvious commentary, in which we learn for example that mourning is “a standard cultural practice,” that cuts to steamy scenes that seem peeled from the covers of grocery-store romance novels.
David the bloodthirsty mobster also figures into more serious scholarly appraisals. I encountered the mafioso David for the first time in the commentary that accompanies Robert Alter’s wonderful translation of the first two books of Kings, The David Story. Alter is more attentive to the complexities of David’s character than the television commentators are. Yet even he cannot help himself from describing David’s deathbed advice that Solomon arrange for the murder of Joab as a last testament “worthy of a Mafia chieftain.”
Francesca Murphy quips that unmasking David the thug is “a preferred sport” of biblical scholars. Baruch Halpern holds the current world records. David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King presents the archaeological record and argues that David’s kingdom was pettier than the Bible tells. He calls Judah “a sort of mafia kingdom,” though it is not clear how this de rigueur comparison describes a proto-state, exactly. Halpern lacks Alter’s appreciation for the cohesiveness of Holy Writ and finds a patchwork of literary fragments pasted together as royal propaganda. Halpern thinks the Bible clearly exaggerates the extent of David’s conquests—to the Euphrates according to Chronicles. More importantly, its function is to whitewash the historical David, who we learn was in fact a “serial killer.”
Why are archaeologists ganging up with biblical scholars to disparage David with language that is hurtful to many Italian-Americans? As it turns out, three-thousand-year-old pottery has huge political implications, depending on where it is dug up. Zionism’s symbolic economy is invested in a David who conquers all the territory from the wadi of Egypt north to the Euphrates, as God promised to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis, as well as in a Jerusalem that was the splendid capital of a vast empire in the tenth century B.C. Immediately after the Second Intifada, using evidence from Kings as well as other sources, the late Eliat Mazar excavated the Large Stone Structure just south of the Temple Mount, at the northern end of the Jerusalem Walls National Park. The dig was supported by Roger Hertog, an American banker and philanthropist who supports a number of conservative and historical organizations, and Yoram Hazony, the Israeli political theorist and author of The Virtue of Nationalism who regards the Davidic kingdom of the Bible as the salutary model for Gallican patriots, Protestant nation-builders, and the whole Westphalian order of sovereignty-respecting nations. Mazar dated pottery she found at the site to the tenth century B.C. She suggests that the Large Stone Structure is likely the palace of King David, a much larger and impressive structure than any mafioso king could build. Mazar’s interpretation of her findings suggest that the biblical David is the historical David. Others, such as Halpern, disagree. Mazar says, “Let the stones speak for themselves.” (I seem to remember the Son of David suggesting that the stones of Jerusalem would speak of something else.)
Glorifying David has seismic ramifications that rumble along the West Bank barrier, but exposé of the tyrannical David is not simply a fashion of modern anti-Zionism. Machiavelli invented the scholarly sport of unmasking David, but plays it with more subtlety than the modern game requires. The Prince treats David alongside the infamous Cesare Borgia and Hiero of Syracuse, the tyrant of antiquity known to us from the odes of Pindar and the dialogue of Xenophon. The shrewd lesson that Machiavelli adduces from Cesare Borgia, Hiero, and David alike is that they rely upon their own arms rather than the soldiers and weapons of others. David’s concealed knife is the true lesson of the story of David and Goliath. Machiavelli is undeterred by the fact that in Kings, David is armed only with a sling. He brings his own arms to the story.
The obvious problem with “David: Giant Slayer” and David’s Secret Demons is that they deliver neither giants nor demons. Without the promised main attractions, the scurrilous fun is only so entertaining, and for all they impeach David’s character and might, they fail to live up to the expectations generated by their titles. At this point, the disappointed viewer or reader might read Cliff Graham’s contemporary soldier’s-eye-view of David’s army in Day of War, where the mighty men trade off-color jokes and discuss battlefield tactics, but unlike the scholars in the documentary, stand in awe of David’s divine berserkergang, which is called “the covering.” There are one or two giants. Better yet, one can tune into the seventh episode of The Lord of Spirits, a podcast hosted by two Orthodox priests. Here be giants. Here be secret demons. The nephilim of Genesis are given a longer postdiluvian career than casual readings of the Bible suggest. Stephen De Young and Andrew Stephen Damick bring in the Book of Enoch for this purpose. This first-century Jewish apocalyptic text concerns demons and nephilim at some length. The hosts are careful to underline that the Book of Enoch is not a canonical part of Scripture, except where it is referenced in the Epistle of Jude, perhaps the First and Second Epistles of Peter, and perhaps the Epistle to the Hebrews. This is where the camel’s nose comes under the tent.
The Lord of Spirits presents the conquest of Canaan in the Book of Josue as a literal history of gigantomachy. According to De Young and Damick, the Hebrews engage in spiritual warfare against tribes whose kings have ritualistic dalliances with temple prostitutes that are popularly believed to be ménages à trois with a god. The products are the people reckoned as rephaim, or giants, in Deuteronomy. Suddenly the fact that Deuteronomy describes the iron bed of King Og (one of the rephaim) as almost fifteen feet long seems significant. We learn from the podcast that these so-called “giants” are the rulers of technologically advanced societies who idolize their priest-kings who engage in ritualistic sex with false gods. De Young draws on his knowledge of Ugaritic religious texts to argue that these ritual practices would have been obvious features of the ancient Hebrews’ cultural context. Yet unlike many contextual studies of the ancient Near East, the emphasis falls on the Hebrews’ uniqueness.
While the Book of Genesis describes a technologically superior pre-flood civilization that features in many myths from the ancient Near East, De Young and Damick argue the Hebrews are unique in their hostility to this predecessor culture. Other peoples revered the great antediluvian civilizations as a golden age, but for the Hebrews these were wicked cities and fallen angels who deserved to be destroyed by God. Some of their adversaries in the Negev and Canaan went further, believing their kings had intercourse with the old gods. The real source of these kings’ power is not gigantism (though our hosts can be cagey about this), but that they preserve the ironworking knowledge of more advanced and earlier civilizations. God’s ban on Amalek, the command in Deuteronomy that Israel exterminate the Amalekites, blot out their memory under heaven, and never forget their crimes, would then task the Hebrews to finish the work of the flood. Darren Aronofsky’s Noah was made too soon. If you are going to include the angelic Watchers of the Book of Enoch in your flood movie, you should really give the bad Watchers some leading roles.
The ban on Amalek, that most sanguinary command of the Old Testament, is part of the gigantomachy described in The Lord of Spirits. God’s wrath towards Amalek is retributive; no sooner than the Israelites receive manna and quail for their sojourn in the Wilderness of Sin do the Amalekites attack them. But De Young and Damick speculate that Amalek strikes first in a spiritual war against God that began before the flood. Amalek is Esau’s grandson, sired by his son Eliphaz and a Horite concubine, Timna. Timna is “literally the sister of Leviathan,” our hosts breathlessly inform us. Since the Horites are mentioned alongside the rephaim in Deuteronomy, they conclude that the liaison between Eliphaz and Timna is an idolatrous sex ritual that produces a giant in the land: Amalek. One admits that this is not very sex-positive, but those interminably boring genealogies of the Book of Genesis have never been more interesting. The ban on Amalek is still in force centuries later, when Saul fails to exterminate the Amalekites’ king and cattle.
Zero demons and giants figure into Battles BC There are no giants in “Joshua: Epic Slaughter,” where the Israelites send “special ops guys” up Rahab’s red rope as their trumpets distract the defenders of Jericho. There are no giants in “Moses: Death Chase,” where we learn that the Hebrews were never really slaves in Egypt but a heavily armed mercenary force of Habiru partially subjected to corvée labor. Instead of giants, there are only bearded men with frowns in leather jerkins, who bludgeon each other and yell, “Argh!” After listening to The Lord of Spirits, this is very disappointing. It is a failure of genre expectations. Fans will remember that in 300, there is a nine-foot-tall, heavily scarred “Uber Immortal” who is led to the battlefield in chains, the one whom Leonidas stabs through the bicep. One can only hope that a Hollywood studio consults De Young and Damick if ever again they green-light a big studio picture about the Exodus or the conquest of Canaan.
In The Lord of Spirits version of the first chapter of Kings, Goliath is of the Anakim, the descendants of the nephilim according to Numbers. At the end of Josue’s campaign of conquest, some of the remnant of the Anakim flee to Gath, we learn in Josue. Goliath, being a giant from Gath, suffers some racial profiling in the podcast. He is conspicuous in his bronze shirt and bronze greaves, the hosts argue, since the Philistines’ technological advantage over the Hebrews is otherwise to control ironworking. But, of course, Goliath is a vestige from an earlier age when giants roamed Canaan, and is still a member of some Semitic sex cult among the Indo-European Philistine latecomers. Unlike the prevaricating Saul, then, David fulfills God’s command to annihilate the demon-worshiping giants from Canaan. David the giant slayer is more fun than David the mafioso. And more edifying. One cannot help learning the neglected corners of the Bible better by weighing the sensational claims made in The Lord of Spirits.
Everyone knows that David refuses Saul’s armor, walks into the ravine of the Valley of the Terebinth with only a sling (pace Machiavelli), picks up five stones, and strikes Goliath with one in the forehead. Ostensibly his forehead was not covered by his helmet. The stone penetrates Goliath’s front (mitschô), and he falls forwards. It is odd to imagine Goliath falling forwards if he were struck in the forehead, rather than stumbling and falling backwards. An alternate possibility is that mitschô is the singular of mitschôt, which refers to the greaves covering his shins in verse seventeen. David’s stone does not sink into Goliath’s forehead, but into the knee-joint of his armor, immobilizing it and causing him to trip. His momentum carries him forward to fall on his face, prostrate before God just like the Philistine god Dagon. He is trapped under the weight of his five-thousand-shekel bronze armor. Then David swiftly picks up Goliath’s sword and decapitates the giant. This stunning possibility was suggested by Ariella Deem in 1978 in an article that credits the interpretation to her late father, the rabbi Samuel Deem. It fits the theme of the story very well. The stature and armor that is believed by all—Saul included—to confer invulnerability actually renders Goliath vulnerable. The Deems’ theory that David’s stone strikes the knee, not the forehead, resonates with the unambiguous moral of the story. In Caravaggio’s painting David with the Head of Goliath, the sword bears the appropriate inscription H-AS OS: humilitas occidit superbiam. Humility slays pride.
With this most famous David story in mind, and freshly reminded of its lesson, we may allow that all of these clever reconsiderations of David suffer from an urge to get behind the text. It is not a matter of the highest importance that the Large Stone Structure was David’s grand palace complex, or that he built an empire north to modern-day Raqqa. More important is David’s character, and here all the complexity is on the surface of the Books of Samuel. The moral significance of the David story for us is not exhausted by holding up the pious shepherd-boy as a model of humility. David’s cunning is undeniable. “David: Giant Slayer” points out how at the beginning of the third Book of Kings, he has gone cold. The ruthless and calculating David is most apparent in the Bathsheba story, where he conspires with Joab to arrange for the death of Uriah, so that he can conceal his adulterous affair and steal his loyal soldier’s wife. This hardly seems like Davidic propaganda.
Whenever we see David’s ruthless streak, we can all the more understand Saul’s anxiety: if Saul does not hold onto the throne he never wanted in the first place, then his life and the lives of his children are forfeit. After all, if David usurps his kingship, Saul knows—or he thinks he knows—he is not likely to allow his friend Jonathan, heir to the House of Saul, to remain alive. Saul lives in fear and in the silence of God, but his fear is not unfounded. Saul sees David with no depth perception. The turbaned Saul who stares wildly with only one eye in Rembrandt’s Saul and David is an apt image. Yet the David whom Saul sees, or the David whom Machiavelli and his successors purport to show us, flattens out the fascinating and complex figure that is the biblical David.
David is twice described as a man after God’s own heart, because he is capable of wholehearted commitment to others. He trusts God completely in the Valley of the Terebinth opposite Goliath. This David does not weigh risks and count costs. This David is the Psalmist who lives to make beautiful music, who dances with abandon before the Ark in his moment of triumph. In John Berryman’s poem “King David Dances,” the very ambiguity of David’s desire seems to make his ecstasy more impressive: a first-personal David is aware of “mine one gross desire against His sight.” David’s beautiful charisma causes Jonathan, Michal, and even Saul to fall in love with him. His music soothes the fearful king and allays his paranoia, at least until Saul hears disturbing notes in the celebrant women’s praise song for David. This is the David of Michelangelo’s sculpture, who, when you look closely, has hearts in his eyes. Michelangelo’s David is also uncircumcised; somehow the elderly, God-weary, and extremely tiresome David in Joseph Heller’s God Knows has future knowledge of this fact, to his considerable annoyance.
David is the greatest friend in the Bible because he passes a test of loyalty to Jonathan. After Saul attempts to murder him, David weeps before Jonathan, for he knows they must now be separated from one another. Although we never read that David loves Jonathan—only Jonathan professes love explicitly for David—I doubt very much these are crocodile tears. David remains loyal to a friendship that should be near-impossible given the dynastic politics that entangle them. My friend Steve Knepper points out that it is no accident that the first real friendship in the Bible appears in this first story of Hebrew tyranny. The first Book of Kings shows us what Plato and Aristotle tell us, that a tyrant’s suspicion is contagious, that tyranny is a climate of fear that excludes friendship and trust. And still David remains true to his friend Jonathan. To honor his promise to Jonathan, David spares Saul when the king is relieving himself in the caves of En-gedi, and again spares the sleeping Saul in the desert of Ziph.
David is also just and capable of sincere repentance. In chapter eight of the second Book of Kings, this David is concerned to provide justice to all his people. After abusing his power to woo Bathsheba and arrange the death of the loyal Uriah, the prophet Nathan rebukes him. Nathan does not seem to have an independent power base, like Samuel had, and he does not threaten David with force. The prophet tells a story of a rich man who is the dark counterfeit of the Good Shepherd, because he prefers to steal his poor neighbor’s one ewe lamb to feed a traveler than any from his vast flocks. David understands and accepts Nathan’s rebuke, and repents. Sometimes David seems so accustomed to God’s favor that he takes God for granted. He sends his men to retrieve the Ark without the carrying poles prescribed in Exodus. His servant Uzzah is smitten as a result of this presumptive familiarity. One must acknowledge the craftiness, lust, and presumptiveness that account for David’s great sins, but also his humility and ability to repent.
A clever reader with a preconception of human self-interest who dismisses these stories as propaganda faces more problems than the presence of the Bathsheba narrative. Consider the way that Joab attempts to manipulate David. David’s nephew Joab is the most cunning, ruthless, and self-interested character in the whole story. Yet when he wishes for David to reconcile with Absalom, he does not appeal to David’s self-interest. Instead, he sends the wise woman of Tekoa to tell the king a sob story about her own fratricidal son. No doubt Joab has heard about the success of Nathan’s story. David is wily, of course, and sniffs out Joab’s plot straightaway. Yet what the reader must consider is how the also crafty Joab calculates that the way to control David is to pull on his heartstrings, manipulating his receptivity to others rather than his self-interest.
After Nathan’s powerful rebuke, which includes a prophecy that the sword will not depart from the royal house, David’s ruthless guile is no longer on display. If anything, his overindulgence towards his sons and a new retiring tendency seems more dangerous to Israel than his aggrandizement. Nathan seems to overcorrect David. When his son Amnon rapes his daughter Tamar, he does nothing. When his son Absalom revolts in response to this injustice to his sister, David cannot finish him off—Joab must do the dirty work in the Wood of Ephraim. Later, David even allows his son Adonijah to occupy Jerusalem before he mounts a counter-offensive and this second major revolt falls apart.
The first two Books of Kings offer a complex David. They place him opposite Saul, who turns tyrannical in a completely different way. At his best, David is a folk hero who offers principled resistance to tyranny, within limits, and becomes a just king. But at his worst, David is the erotic tyrant who rhymes with Socrates’ description of tyrants as voluptuaries with voracious appetites, the dominant Greek tradition of figuring tyranny that we find in the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon. Saul, on the other hand, is a reluctant tyrant, who becomes increasingly hardhearted, desirous only of consolidating what is his, jealous rather than envious. Saul is a tyrant not because his desires are inordinate but because he becomes deaf to God. His tendency towards tyranny, in other words, is the opposite of David’s. I doubt there is the like of this juxtaposition in Western literature as a study of tyranny.
The protagonists of the narrative—Samuel, Saul, Abner, David, Joab—appear with great complexity and in vivid scenes. Fully the first half of the David story is the career of Saul. The David story is an integrated literary unit structured by three poems at the beginning, the middle, and the end. The first is Hannah’s canticle. Jan Fokkelman points out that the exact middle is David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan. The end is David’s song of thanksgiving in the twenty-second chapter of the second Book of Kings. One does not need to read the dissertations on ring composition to understand this is the Bible’s great integral literary masterpiece. The larger structure, pillared by poems of Hannah and David, draws us into its profound lessons about the effects of power upon our ambiguous desires.
We are brought into the story of kingship between Hannah’s desires and Samuel’s caution, which have an obvious tension. Hannah, lowly and scorned for her barrenness, gives thanks to the Lord when she becomes pregnant with Samuel. She prophesies the coming of a messianic king who will raise the lowly and cast down the mighty in Israel. Years later, Samuel anoints a king, but only grudgingly, warning the elders of the people the king will enslave them to make war on the nations. In other words, he warns them that what Hannah prays for, the undoing of the rich, will come to pass. Samuel strikes me like a scholarship kid who wishes to put his working-class roots behind him, and who comes to see his mother’s left-wing politics as naïve. The high drama is set before Saul even appears: will the king be Hannah’s messiah or Samuel’s tyrant?
The Hebrew tradition shows us a different side of tyranny first: a cautious figure, increasingly convinced everyone around him is self-interested and ruthless. When Saul’s kingship degenerates into tyranny, he is nothing like David at his most tyrannical moments. Watching the indecisive and diffident Saul slowly descend into paranoia, we yearn for a David. Then, of course, David’s powerful eroticism leads to a different kind of misrule: too easily carried away by others, too familiar with God, too indulgent towards his sons. Power corrupts in two ways, inflaming our worst desires, and inhibiting noblest ones. The upshot of the Books of Samuel is that there are two fundamentally different kinds of tyranny, a lesson that does not sit well with the Machiavellian heritage in political philosophy. I would argue it fits the Bible’s more complex picture of human nature, where we are not only individuals with purposes and projects but also individuals who are receptive to others and to God.
The would-be tyrant of our own time, I expect, tends to be attracted by the finance major. He might conceal gross desires, like Jeffrey Epstein, and wish to move easily across borders and blackmail officials to inflict these the bodies of willing and unwilling slaves. Or he may become hardhearted over time, a skinflint with a fortune he never really desired, but gradually comes to see as his right. Studies show this is the practical effect of taking economics courses in college. Even without a scepter, it would be wrong to describe him as a micro-tyrant. The Curé de Torcy in The Diary of a Country Priest reasons that industrial millionaires held many more souls in their power than the rulers of antiquity. Hiero would be all agog at Epstein’s power. The most spectacular tyrannies in history are probably contemporary, their latter-day tyrants caught between the Saulide motivation of consolidating their gains and lifestyles and the Davidic motivation of indulging desires. We can relate.
David is a great hero, not because of his slyest sins, but because he repents from them. The Bark of the Bog Owl is a wonderful calque of his story. Jonathan Rogers sets it closer to home, in the fantasy world of a settler colonial people who enjoy an uncertain independence, and in a fantasy landscape resembling the American South. Instead of fairies or elves, there are the smelly and raucous feechiefolk, who are like Cajun hobbits in turtle shell helmets, and whom the disenchanted “civilizers” regard as no more than bedtime stories. The physical comedy and Southern dialect draw peals of laughter from my kids. It drew us all into the David story. Rogers’s protagonist becomes a man after God’s own heart, and never falls for some feechie Bathsheba, like the aging, toothless beauty of God Knows. I hope my children are even more fascinated by the David story as they begin to understand its complexities, which make the first two Books of Kings an edifying story of politics, friendship, and love. The story brims with fun but also runs deep with wisdom that seems unfathomable to the inveterate modern adult.
When we glimpse the greatness of David’s soul, we perhaps begin to understand why the kingdom of the Son of David is not of this world.
