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.

One advantage of the blogosphere is the world that it opens up to one without lots of peers to dialogue with. And the peers in the blogosphere come in many more sizes and shapes than one would likely find in a faculty dining room anyhow. This makes for an (usually) enjoyable experience of education, with less of the formality that one sees in books and journals. When it’s not necessarily enjoyable is when one reads the slams by educated, otherwise respectable, individuals. I have “learned” that I must be a complete idiot to believe the Bible is a reliable historical record. And I have “learned” that I clearly have no idea how to interpret Scripture if I hold to a pre-tribulational, pre-millennial view of the end times. Of course these things are not new and fill many volumes of books. But one is more likely to be confronted with these “truths” on a daily basis in the blogosphere.

Ultimately there is a single reason for why I hold to both inerrancy and dispensationalism: I believe the Bible means what it says. You don’t have to hold to inerrancy, but you cannot deny that Scripture presents itself as a factual, accurate, and detailed account of history. You don’t have to hold to dispensationalism (how I hate that word), but you cannot deny that on the face of it, Scripture describes a complex record of God’s dealings with Israel and the church and future, yet unfulfilled, promises for the ethnic descendants of Abraham. You don’t have to believe it, but you have to admit that this is the most natural reading of all of the texts.

Let me say it another way: if you reject either of the above, you do so because of external factors. If you reject inerrancy, it is because you believe that something outside the text shows that it cannot be true. If you reject what is known as the dispensationalist view, it is because you believe that a few texts should externally control and re-define many other texts.

I believe I am consistent, then, in taking the text literally. Many scholars reject both inerrancy and a dispensational eschatology and they are consistent also, I believe. I don’t deny that there are difficulties in believing that the Bible means what it says. But they are not troublesome. And compared with the massive difficulties that one encounters in the other approaches, I am quite happy to wrestle with them.