Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [81]
Was David a traitor?
On two occasions, the biblical account reports how David spared Saul’s life when he could have killed him. Reduced to bandit status, David rides with a few hundred loyal men who “take no prisoners.” While in this “Jesse James” phase of his career, David takes time to acquire two new wives, and the account reports without comment that David’s first wife, Michal, was given to another man by her father, Saul. This regal muscle-flexing is a move to diminish David’s stature. While married to the king’s daughter, David had a claim to the throne. David’s new wives are the result of politically astute marriages, made in an attempt to shore up loyalty to him among some of the tribes. All of these wives being taken and given with little thought for the women paints a very clear picture of a woman’s role at the time.
Convinced that Saul is still after his skin, David does the seemingly unthinkable; he joins the Philistines. The biblical account leaves no doubt: David is a mercenary in the Philistine employ. There is no word as to how God views this shift in loyalty.
At about the same time, in a scene rivaling the three witches of the heaths in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Saul visits a medium at En-dor, a practice forbidden by Mosaic Law. She summons up the spirit of the dead Samuel, who has bad news for Saul; he and his sons and the Israelites will fall to the Philistines in battle. In the meantime, some of the Philistines have second thoughts about David and his loyalties, although their leader thinks David is doing a fine job. So David and his men leave the Philistine camp, just as the Philistines march out to battle Saul at Mount Gilboa. It is a matter of some conjecture as to whether David actually left the Philistines when they fought Saul or the later writers amended the history to keep David’s involvement in Saul’s defeat out of the biblical picture. In a total rout, Jonathan and two of Saul’s other sons are killed and the first king of Israel commits suicide with the help of his armor-bearer—the equivalent of the Roman tradition of falling on one’s sword to avoid disgrace. When found by the Philistines, Saul and his sons are stripped of their armor, decapitated, and their bodies hung on a wall.
In The Bible and the Ancient Near East, Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg have drawn fascinating parallels between the epics of Homer and the biblical accounts of the Philistine-Israelite wars. They write:
David has more in common with the heroes of the Iliad than with Ezra and Nehemiah. His command of a band of rough men, his impetuousness, his winning of a princess by slaying Philistines…his amours—all of these and other features fit rather into the milieu of Homer’s heroic age than the framework of synagogue and church…. The historic context leaves no doubt as to what happened: Saul was killed by the Philistines, who were of the same East Mediterranean origin as the Myceneans in the Trojan War.…The early histories of the Hebrews and Greeks were intricately interrelated, and neither can be understood in isolation from the other. (pp. 107-108)
BIBLICAL VOICES
How the mighty have fallen
in the midst of the battle!
Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
I am distressed for you, my
brother Jonathan;
greatly beloved were you to me:
your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women. (2 Sam. 1:25-26)
Were David and Jonathan more than just friends?
This elegy and other verses concerning the friendship of Jonathan and David (“And Jonathan…loved him [David] as he loved his own soul” 1 Sam. 20:17) have led to more than raised eyebrows. Some modern commentators state outright that Jonathan and David were homosexual lovers. While the ancient Israelite writers condemned homosexuality, other nearby cultures accepted it. Even among warriors, homosexuality was condoned because of the bond it created between men. Traditionalists like Rabbi Joseph