What’s hiding in David’s bed? Not just his proxy but also the local gods and an attack on his family’s religious choices.
Here’s how we get there:
Saul’s psychotic violence against David gets worse - another spear thrown by the king at his no longer favored court musician, followed by soldiers sent at night to surround David’s house and bring him to the King, dead or alive.
David’s wife, Michal, betrays her father by producing David’s Hollywood worthy escape, giving the world the ever popular trope of a hidden dummy/decoy in bed:
וַתִּקַּ֨ח מִיכַ֜ל אֶת־הַתְּרָפִ֗ים וַתָּ֙שֶׂם֙ אֶל־הַמִּטָּ֔ה וְאֵת֙ כְּבִ֣יר הָעִזִּ֔ים שָׂ֖מָה מְרַאֲשֹׁתָ֑יו וַתְּכַ֖ס בַּבָּֽגֶד׃
Michal took the household idols, laid them on the bed, and covered them with garments; and at its head she put a net of goat’s hair.
Once the diversion is set up Michal helps David slip through the window and then tells her enraged father that David forced her to help him escape. David makes it to Ramah, where he finds refuge with Samuel. Michal stays behind with her furious father.
What’s the story with the household idols that she uses? Readers have been fascinated by this story for generations, the more traditional ones uncomfortable with the plain fact that whatever the ancient Israelite religion practiced in Saul's household it seems to have included idols that resembled human figures - full human size, full on pagan style.
The Hebrew word used here is ‘Teraphim’, showing up through the Hebrew Bible to indicate idols or tools of divination. When Samuel rebuked Saul a few chapters back for not following YHWH’s command to the letter in his war against Amalek, he uses the word ‘Teraphim’ and divination as parallel terms. Way ahead, the prophet Ezekiel describes the King of Babylon using Teraphim, along with other objects, to divine whether he should attack Judah and Jerusalem.
But the most interesting link is to the story in Genesis, involving yet another daughter who lies to her father, protects her husband, and covers up her private idols with fabric and fabrication.
In his commentary on this chapter, Robert Alter references research suggesting that “the idiom here deliberately echoes a phrase used in the Jacob story (Genesis 29:21) and signals a whole network of allusions to the Jacob narrative: in both stories the young man is a candidate to marry two sisters and gets the one not at first intended; in both stories he must provide a bride price he cannot pay for from material resources; in both stories he must “count out” payment to a devious father-in-law; eventually each man flees his father-in-law, aided and abetted by his wife; and in each instance, as we shall see, household idols (teraphim) are involved..
The household gods (teraphim) are what Rachel stole and hid from her father when Jacob fled from him. Like Rachel, who pleads her period and does not get up from the cushions under which the teraphim are hidden, Michal also invokes “illness” to put off the searchers. Both stories feature a daughter loyal to her husband and rebelling against a hostile father. Finally, the cloth or garment (beged) used to cover the dummy recalls the repeated association of garments with deception in the Jacob story. Laban, of course, never finds his teraphim, whereas Saul’s emissaries, to their chagrin, find the teraphim instead of the man they are looking for.”
What’s the significance of the links between these two stories?
It’s possible that whoever wrote or edited this text - most likely in the Davidic loyal Judean courts of Jerusalem, some centuries later, had an agenda that frames the House of Saul, and along with it the Northern Kingdom of Israel, as an evil heathen state, unlike the more pious Southern Kingdom of Judah, and the House of David, loyal to YHWH.
One of the defining moment of this enduring battle between different ways of being Jewish - or Judean - or Israelites - was the religious purge of King Josiah, David’s descendent, mentioned in the Book of Kings. Teraphim are specifically mentioned as devious dangers that are destroyed:
“Josiah also did away with the necromancers and the mediums and the teraphim, the idols and the fetishes—all the detestable things that were to be seen in the land of Judah and Jerusalem…” Kgs 23:24
Prof.Erin D. Darby makes the link between Rachel, Michal, and Josiah’s iconoclastic rampage:
“Teraphim functioned as a predominantly northern divinatory object, and were considered problematic in the south; that is why the righteous King Josiah destroyed them...I would argue that the story of Rachel stealing her father’s teraphim should be understood similarly. Rachel is the mother of Benjamin, Ephraim, and Manasseh, which form the core of the northern polity of Israel..Thus, the story of her taking the teraphim is meant to explain the origin of this cultic item in the north. The teraphim being northern may also explain why Michal has teraphim; as she is the daughter of Saul, the Benjaminite king of Israel.
We can see the same approach with divinatory objects. The overall thrust of the Bible is anti-divination, yet it makes exceptions for the Urim ve-Tummim, the ephod, and consultation of prophets: these were considered legitimate practices. In contrast, the teraphim, used primarily in the north, are grouped with the forbidden forms of divination, such as necromancy and consultation with spirits.
Part of the Bible’s polemical dismissal of the north’s beloved teraphim was insulting them by calling them gods. The account of Rachel’s theft is meant to poke fun at the north and explain their connection to this problematic ritual practice of consulting teraphim, which began, the story goes, when Rachel, the mother of the north, stole her pagan father’s gods and brought them into the land.”
What makes this claim even more fascinating is the end of the chapter in which Saul chases David to Ramah, finding him among the young prophets who are trained by Samuel. Saul, like the soldiers that he sends before to try and capture David, falls into a prophetic trance and ends up naked and in some sort of an ecstatic stupor, his royal robe removed, for a full day. The contrast between Michal’s use of idols and her father’s inability to resist the prophetic power of YHWH indicates a further probe at the Northern king’s eventual demise.
“Is Saul among the prophets?” it is asked again as this chapter ends, echoing the earlier time when young Saul, full of promise, got high on God. This time, it’s not exalted.
The House of Saul is doomed, its fate foretold by what’s present and absent in the next king’s empty bed.
Image: Marc Chagall, Michal saves David from Saul, 1960
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