I’m preparing for two lectures this week (and one next) on David and in the process I read my friend Danny Frese’s paper dealing with some recent theories on David’s rule. One work that he deals with more extensively is the 2001 work by Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King. Halpern is widely regarded as a first-rate biblical scholar, and I had previously considered him to be on the more conservative side (given the widest spectrum of views). Danny summarizes the book:
In David’s own time, he was suspected of (and was therefore likely to be directly responsible for or at least complicit in) killing all the people that the text acquits him of killing: Nabal, Saul and sons at Gilboa, Ishbaal, Abner, seven other male descendants of Saul, Amnon, Absalom, and Amasa. On the other hand, the two crimes for which the text clearly indicts him-namely, Uriah’s murder and the adultery with Bathsheba-were made up, and David was framed for them. Moreover, David was not an Israelite but a Gibeonite, who remained loyal to Philistine overlords, and imported a foreign icon (the Ark of the Covenant) as his state symbol. He was known by his inside men to be a lawless thug, and was opposed in his rule by almost the entire population of the Cisjordan. Solomon wasn’t his son, but was in fact the son of Uriah the Hittite, and the story of the dead baby from the Bathsheba affair is also false and was invented to deflect suspicion from this fact. Finally, Bathsheba, a member of David’s harem, somehow mustered the influence among David’s foreign mercenaries to mastermind a coup against Adonijah, David’s legitimate heir, and thrust her own Hittite son to the throne. Everything in the text that says other than the above is ‘political spin’ made up by (probably) Bathsheba or someone else loyal to Solomon, and was widely disseminated as propaganda in the early years of Solomon’s reign in order to defend his legitimacy. On the other hand, the very fact that there were contemporary voices making accusations against David means that David has to have been a historical figure.
Isn’t this just so amazing as to be laugh-out-loud funny?! Of course you realize that the key to good scholarship is creativity. The more outlandish, the more preposterous, and the more unique, the better. Here are a few of Halpern’s quotes (lifted from Danny’s paper) that are worthy of further reflection, though time does not allow me today.
“In the absence of a competing narrative from antiquity, it falls to us to construct one based on [David’s] dynasty’s narrative. In so doing, we allow the silent to speak. We permit the people unable to express their own views in the text to do so in our imagination. We recover a perspective that has otherwise vanished from our record” (xv-xvi).
“Historians, if they exercise their imaginations at all…can invert the obvious implications of textual data…and history without imagination is dead history, or, to be explicit, is philology masquerading as history” (72).
“The text, like the artifact, encodes intention. But the intention of the text is to lead the reader in a particular direction. So contemplation of the alternative possibilities demands that a historian invert the values and claims of the text and propose alternative scenarios, for which there is no other evidence” (100-101).
Amazing! Truly amazing.
“We permit the people unable to express their own views in the text to do so in our imagination.”
How considerate of us. His method, though unusual, is not without precedent.
1 Sam 28:11 Then the woman said, “Whom shall I bring up for you?” And he said, “Bring up Samuel for me.”
That didn’t work out so well for Saul though. It was perhaps, more historically effective than Halpern’s approach.