A deep sleep falls on King Saul and his entire camp, snoring around him in circles, out in the hills, a sleep so deep, created by God, so that neither he nor any of his guards notice that David and his boys are able to come right up to the sleeping king, steal his spear and water bowl, and slink away untouched.
Is it the same spear that Saul has flung at David multiple times? The rare iron tool reserved in those days only for the top brass? What must it have felt like for David to hold its shaft and resist the urge to use it on the man who took him in then chased him out?
Is David already feeling the royal rush - and the responsibility that will come with it?
Like the cut coat in the cave story, two chapters ago, the same spectacle follows, as David is portrayed as the cunning and generous spirit that spares the king’s life and makes good publicity of it. In another moving speech, across the valley, delivered to Saul, his general Abner and the entire army, David once again repeats his veiled threats woven with deep regard for the king’s wellbeing as ‘the anointed one’ - the political, military - and religiously ordained leader:
וַיֹּאמֶר֩ דָּוִ֨ד אֶל־אַבְנֵ֜ר הֲלוֹא־אִ֣ישׁ אַתָּ֗ה וּמִ֤י כָמ֙וֹךָ֙ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְלָ֙מָּה֙ לֹ֣א שָׁמַ֔רְתָּ אֶל־אֲדֹנֶ֖יךָ הַמֶּ֑לֶךְ כִּי־בָא֙ אַחַ֣ד הָעָ֔ם לְהַשְׁחִ֖ית אֶת־הַמֶּ֥לֶךְ אֲדֹנֶֽיךָ׃
“And David called out to Abner, “You are a man, aren’t you? And there is no one like you in Israel! So why didn’t you keep watch over your lord the king? For just one of the people came to do violence to your lord the king.”
David minimized his own identity here by calling himself ‘just one of the people’ - while knowing well that he too is anointed, and ready to take over the throne. Is he sincere in his regard for the king’s sacred status or is this politics at play?
Halbertal and Holme comment that “Being himself one of God’s anointed, David carefully instructed his loyalists that the anointed are hedged with divinity and must never be injured in any way. To illustrate David’s respect for this political-theological prohibition, Saul was allowed to exit the cave alive, and survive the night-raid... One question posed by these verses is the degree to which genuine moral and religious beliefs, including a pious expectation that God alone will judge and depose Saul, motivated David’s decision to refrain from taking the king’s life... Did he view the regicide taboo as a genuine norm to be religiously obeyed or as a hollow slogan to be publicly eulogized and privately ignored?
Or were moral and instrumental ways of thinking conjoined in his mind? It is impossible to say. What is clear is that David wanted his personal horror at regicide to be publicly notorious, to be dramatized in a much talked about public spectacle.”
As scholars probe these chapters for the historical layers and perspectives that were later edited to be one narrative, there is a residue here of authorial intent to make David look like the righteous heir to a throne that will topple - but not with his help at all.
Saul’s crown was removed from him by a furious Samuel, acting on YHWH’s command partly because Saul chose to offer sacrifices instead of Samuel - acting as both military leader and sacred priest. The author's choice of having David publicly name Saul - twice - ‘the anointed one’, thus linking him to the sacred vessels and priests is particularly interesting -- is David setting the stage for his own future as a leader who will try to claim both political and religious crown? Is the text sincere in telling us that the Kings of Israel and Judah are sacred and off limits to those who may want to replace them as the generations go on?
Long after the House of David is longer ruling Israel, the notion of a leader both anointed for power and crowned by God will linger in our world. Jesus, who is linked to David, will hand down his crown of thorns to popes who still hold dual roles. Even the soon to be crowned King of England will at least in theory be anointed with the oil of Davidic lineage as both head of church and state.
This elevated status is at odds with the expression David uses here to indicate not just humble roots but also some sort of open ended attitude to popular access to power - any of us can do it.
The term he uses ‘just one of the people’ indicates humility and an almost democratic notion of participation in public life. For the author of this book, those words in David’s mouth become another ambivalent trope in the argument for or anti monarchy, and perhaps a suspicion of too much power in the hands of one man or family.
The term will be picked up many centuries later by one of the wisest Jewish thought leaders of modern times, who would adopt it as his pen name “Because by choosing this new name I want to establish that I’m not an author and never will be, and just happen to be a person with opinions, like all of us, who cares about the public affairs of our people.”
Asher Ginbzurg, who was born in Russia and died in Tel Aviv in 1927, is better known for this chosen name Ahad Ha'Am. As a major literary figure the father of cultural Zionism he was not a fan of Theodore Herzl’s political approach to settling the land (too fast, too harsh) and was concerned that the spirit of Jewish life would be corrupted by power that would fuse too fiercely the religious and the civic dimensions of Jewish moral and spiritual life. Already in 1891, following a lengthy visit to the land that he will soon call home, he was worried that the Jewish settlers’ attitude towards the Arab population of Palestine would lead to trouble:
“if things continue the way they are...this society will have to begin to create itself in the midst of fuss, noisiness and panic, and will have to face the prospects of both internal and external war... History teaches that the Kings of Israel following Herod ruled a ‘Jewish state’ but the national culture was depraved and misguided.. Such a Jewish state will be poisonous to our people..”
What would he have said to the young David who is slowly making his ways to the throne, eager to wear both crowns of king and prophet, anointed for glory and getting there by very questionable means? What would he say to Israel’s leaders today, as ‘just one of the people’, and what would he advise us today?
Our journey continues, history and myth, leadership shift in slow motion. A plot twist ahead will take us one step further towards the shocking and tragic fall of the House of Saul - almost — but not by David’s hand.
Image: Warsaw, Poland 1893: Ahad Ha’am with members of the Ahiasaf Hebrew Publishing House
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