M.C. GARDNER
The remainder of 2nd Samuel is of a lesser order. David becomes a statesman not unlike Henry V in Shakespeare’s chronicle and sets about to unite his divided kingdom. The loss of Absalom seems to affect him in a more heart-felt way then the death of Falstaff affected the former Prince Hal. King Henry is compelled to reject his former friend and reject, as well, a sizable piece of humanity—his own, and that which the girth & mirth of Falstaff will forever command. The loss of Absalom greatly diminishes the Hebrew King. David, who would not lift his hand against King Saul, has seven of his male descendants put to death. The passage is worth citing because it is one of those moments when the older goddess faiths seem to rise from the deeper psyche of the Hebrews. There is a famine in the land and nothing will grow for three successive years. It is divined that an unpunished wrong is the cause. David grants the Gibeonite request for restitution:
He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed and exposed them on a hill before the Lord. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning. [i]
Following this, there is a paean to Yahweh. It is of such compelling bad faith that the King begins to forfeit our hard won sympathy:
…The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands he has rewarded me. For I have kept the ways of the Lord, I have not done evil by turning away from God. All his laws are before me; I have not turned away from his decrees. I have been blameless before him and have kept myself from sin… I pursued my enemies and crushed them; I did not turn back till they were destroyed. I crushed them completely, and they could not rise; they fell beneath my feet…They cried for help, but there was no one to save them to the Lord… I beat them as fine as the dust of the earth; I pounded and trampled them like mud in the streets… Therefore I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations…[ii]
2nd Samuel ends with a plague that cuts down 70,000 Israelites for an undisclosed sin of the King’s. Ostensibly it involves a census he takes of his soldiers. The punishment could have as justly companioned the claim: For… I have not done evil… and have kept myself from sin.
David gives his final decrees to Solomon in that same abysmal spirit. The passage is taken from the 2nd chapter of 1st Kings as King David approaches death. The edicts concern two loose ends from 2nd Samuel. Joab, who killed Absalom, is remembered for two other murders, but his murder of Absalom is not mentioned:
Deal with him according to your wisdom, but do not let his gray head go down to the grave in peace.[iii]
Earlier, during the war with Absalom, a man from Saul’s clan, Shimei, cursed the King and pelted him with stones. In a scene of great forbearance, David had forbidden his soldiers to harm the man in any way. David had deserved the insult:
Leave him alone; let him curse, for the Lord has told him to. It may be that the Lord will see my distress and repay me with good for the cursing I am receiving today. [iv]
This is a noble sentiment. It is reminiscent of Mussorgsky’s Gudonov. At his coronation, Czar Boris endures the taunts of a simpleton accusing him of murder. In the case of David, the offending Shimei later prostrates himself before the king and begs forgiveness, whereupon: …the king said to Shimei, You shall not die. And the king promised him on oath. [v]
One would suppose the King would be worthy his word. We are on occasion surprised by supposition:
And remember, you have with you Shimei son of Gera—who called down bitter curses on me… do not consider him innocent. You are a man of wisdom; you will know what to do with him. Bring his gray head down to the grave in blood. Then David rested with his father’s and was buried in the City of David. [vi]
These final words lay David’s gray head to the judgment of all who read his remarkable story. If we pause in our condemnation it is only to ponder how much better we might fare if our lives were subject to the same scrutiny. Of the many remarkable portraits in the Bible few are as perverse and none more tellingly human.
David’s son Solomon is remembered for his fabled wisdom; a remarkable collection of wives; the expansion of the empire; and the building of the Temple. With his many wives came their many gods. In the manner of the later Romans he was not averse to burning incense only to his own. Since he had only to deal with Yahweh on two occasions but with his wives every night, one might think this wise and most certainly prudent—Yahweh, however, did not:
Since this is your attitude and you have not kept my covenant and my decrees. 1 will certainly tear the kingdom away from you… Nevertheless, for the sake of David your father I will not do it in your lifetime. [vii]
That tearing asunder was enacted during the reign of his less judicious son, Rehoboam. During Solomon’s extravagant building programs many of the Israelites began to resent the aggrandizement of the court. After Solomon’s death representatives from these groups approached the King with their plight only to be told:
My father made your yoke heavy; I will make it heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions. [viii]
His diplomacy aside, the Kingdom of Israel became divided into two kingdoms. The books of 1st and 2nd Kings deal concurrently with the kings of each until Israel’s dispersal by Assyria in 722 BC. And Judah’s exile to Babylon in 586 BC. The main themes of these monarchical stories concern the sea-saw battle of the Kings and their people to walk straight in the ways of the Lord, or in their more oblique return to the pagan gods. Their propensity for the latter is the argued cause for the exile of each. Elijah does battle with Ahab and Jezebel and the priests of Baal. Elijah is victorious. The dogs lick the blood of Ahab and Jezebel. The priests of Baal come to a decidedly bad end. Elijah ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot to the edification of all.
Of Israel’s many kings (19 between 922 BC and 722 BC) most did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Their reigns are of short duration and usually concluded by assassination. The last king of this ill-fated group was Hosea. He made the mistake of curtailing his tribute to Shalmaneser, King of Assyria while attempting an alliance with Egypt—neither sat well with Shalmaneser. After a three year siege the Assyrians were victorious.
To insure the defeated would so remain, Shalmaneser deportsed ten of the twelve tribes of Israel and carelessly lost them on his way back to Assyria. In Judah the monarchy is far more stable. The lineage of David takes Yahweh at his word. Its survival for seven centuries is one of the most impressive in the world’s history of monarchy. Yahweh’s unqualified covenant of an eternal unbroken line was a source of strength through many encounters with the immensely more powerful empires of the day.
Yahweh’s word becomes less certain with Judah’s defeat and exile to Babylon. The Deuteronomist then modifies his earlier work. It had initially concluded with the triumph of Josiah. His optimism changes as he records the history of the last 4 kings. His lamentations for his country’s travails will be written between the Tigris and Euphrates and on the banks of the Nile.
A generation later, King Cyrus would allow the Jews to return to their homeland as a provision of his victory over Babylon. No less remarkable than that return has been their return to Palestine 1900 years after the Romans put it to the torch and sword. The Hebrews who escaped from the earlier deportation to Assyria flee south to Judah. It is during the following century that the E document of Israel is fused to the J document of Judah. Having two separate records of divine history could be a source of confrontation and result in a diminishment of both. The only problem that arose by the fusion was a diminishment of the authority of the Aaronite priests in Judah. Solomon had selected the Aaronites to be his official clerics. Rival priests of Shiloh had lost their power because of the centralization of the temple and the Ark in Jerusalem. The P document is thought to be a priestly addition to enhance the memory of Aaron, from whom the priests of Aaron claimed descent. When P mentions an edict from Moses it is usually an Edict from Moses and Aaron. The J & E compilation has more to say about prophets than priests plus it shows Aaron in an often unfavorable light.
There is critical conjecture [ix] that the P document was written as a separate Torah. By these lights, it is thought, as well, that the Dueteronomial history was composed to enhance the prestige of non-Aaronite priests. The Levites, wished to emphasize their claim to priestly authority.
The great irony is that each of these vested interests was combined into a unified Torah binding and blending each of the respective groups. The books of Chronicles seem to be related to the P documents in much the same way that Samuel and Kings are related to the separate Torah of Deuteronomy.
In Chronicles we have those maddening lists of genealogy that the P writer was so fond of in Numbers. Chronicles records only the Kings of Judah where the Aaronites were in control. There is almost nothing, therein, of the foibles of David and Solomon that make the same history in the books of Samuel among the most vividly rich of the Bible. Solomon gave the authority of the priesthood to the Aaronite faction because they were disposed to show him and his father in a favorable light.
The later prophets are more distinct voices than those of Chronicles. Interpolations have been introduced to make them more relevant to the eras before canonization. It was not uncommon for additions of the highest rank to find their way into the collection of an earlier prophet to give the additions greater authority.
In Isaiah it is clear that two minds of the highest order were compiling some of the world’s most highly venerated poetic morality. The Isaiah we associate with the 8th century is not the Isaiah who wrote the celebrated final 3rd of the book. It is clear that this 2nd Isaiah is addressing historical concerns during the exile two centuries later. Each of their writings is among the loftiest in the world’s literature. It is not a major concern that they are combined under one name.
In the early history of the Hebrews a prophet was much like the shamans of any ancient culture. They were diviners and soothsayers who were happier reading fortunes in the stars than in the self. Even as late as Samuel we find the old prophet approached by the young Saul in an effort to divine the location of some wayward donkeys. Either by accident or design the Prophetical writings of the Old Testament are flung hither and yon across the expanse of the canon. This is of little consequence if you have no interest in tying them to the time in which they preach. Their message speaks specifically to events of a given era and is only enhanced when placed in an historical context.
Before the coming of the Hebrews the religions of the area were aligned with goddess cults. The priesthood (the province of male Levites) was earlier controlled by women. In the early days in Canaan the judges that ruled in lieu of kings could, on occasion, be women. The 4th chapter of Judges details the drama of Deborah. Deborah was also a prophetess. The word of God comes to her to avenge the enslavement of the Hebrews by Jabin, a King of Canaan. The men who hear her counsel are afraid to implement it unless she comes with them. She therefore decrees the honor of their freedom will fall to a woman and employs the wiles of Jael to lure Jabin’s commander to her tent where:
…Jael, Hebers wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died. [x]
The song of Deborah in chapter 5records this brief celebration of feminine ascendancy. Women who later read oracles can be burned as witches. This is evinced in the fear attendant to Saul and the “Witch” of Endor who he consults.
The first major prophet is Samuel—two centuries after Moses. Following Samuel is the prophet Nathan. In the 9th century in the northern kingdom of Israel, Elijah and Elisha kick butt with the priests of Baal. In Elijah’s conversation with the Obadiah, we learn that Jezebel has been murdering prophets by the score. Obadiah had hidden 100 prophets in a pair of caves. It is unclear if the prophets as we know them were always as numerous. Friedman suggests they may have constituted an alternative priesthood for the common man. God can give (and often prefers to give) his word to someone other than anointed priests. This perception moves us closer to the universalism that is the prophets’ greatest legacy. We love them most when they proclaim the social injustice of their day and note the inequities between rich and poor. Their writings are as diverse as their personalities. One will find a full serving of fire and brimstone directed at the powerful and the corrupt. Some of their imprecations would be off-putting if their sturm und drang weren’t so marvelously rendered.
At the behest of Elisha’s protégé, King Jehu; Jezebel is flung from a palace window and trampled by horses. 2nd Kings reports that the dogs drink her blood and make a short-order meal of her remains:
…and they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet and the palms of her hands.
And lest we think that such wrath is reserved only for Jezebels there is that oddly nightmarish episode seemingly pulled from the pages of the brothers’ Grimm. It appears at the end of chapter 2 in this same chronicle. The prophet Elisha is walking through a wood. He doubts his ability to fill the sandals of the heroically departed Elijah. A group of children pick this unfortunate moment to make fun of his bald head:
…as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children Out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him. Go up, thou bald head; go up thou bald head.
As one imagines this was more of a drubbing than any bald man could endure and Elisha, perhaps less so: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.
One hopes this massacre was not exclusively malicious and that the she bears’ cubs were able to make use of those rascals less fleet of foot. The tone, thankfully, changes in the writings of the 2nd Isaiah. The fearful Yahweh metamorphoses into a God of loving-kindness—more of wisdom than of war. The complexity of the Bible reveals more about its diverse readers than any single pronouncement reveals of its whole. The Word of God is rather the words of God. It is a record of God’s manifests in the minds of his chosen and those that choose to make them their own. It is, as in Shakespeare—a mingled yarn, both good and ill together. [xi]
The oldest written book of the Bible is the book of Amos. It dates from the middle of the 8th century. His book is short but sets much of the tone for the prophets that follow:
Because they sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes; that pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the meek… Seek the Lord, and ye shall live… Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, And turneth the shadow of death into the morning, And maketh the day dark with night; That calleth for the waters of the sea, And poureth them out upon the face of the earth; the Lord is his name. [xii]
He continues his portents in Israel at a festival in Beth-el. Not wishing to spoil the party he tells the cleric that he is only a shepherd to whom the word of God has come. When asked what those good words might be he is only too happy to oblige:
Therefore thus saith the lord: Thy wife shall be a harlot in the city, And thy sons and daughters shall fall by the sword, And thy land shall be divided by line; And thou shalt die in a polluted land; And Israel shall surely go into captivity forth of his land. [xiii]
It is not known if further invitations were extended.
Isaiah comes after Hosea and is contemporary with Micah in the later part of the 8th century. In his original voice and in the exiled verse of 2nd Isaiah, two centuries later we have the rapture of the Bible’s greatest poetry written by two of its greatest prophets.
Hear the word of the Lord, To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of Lambs, or he goats… Bring me no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them. And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: Your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make yourselves clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do well; Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow… Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land… [xiv]
Isaiah preached in Judah and counseled King Ahaz. They both watched the devouring horror of the Assyrians destroy the northern kingdom. He envisions the might of the Assyrians to be an instrument in Yahweh’s hands and not the pride of Israel’s conquerors:
Shall the ax boast itself against him that heweth therewith? Or shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it? As if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up, or as if the staff should lift up itself, as if it were no wood. Therefore shall the Lord of hosts, send among his fat ones leanness; and under his glory he shall kindle a burning,
Like the burning of a fire; and the Light of Israel shall be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame; and it shall bum and devour his thorns, and his briers in one day; and shall consume the glory of his forest, and of fruitful field, both soul and body; and they shall be as when a standard-bearer fainteth; and the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, that a child might write them. [xv]
Isaiah is the first prophet to expound the vision of a messiah. Even after Hezekiah wards off Sennacherib and his hordes it doesn’t take a prophet to read the writing on the wall. If the Hebrews as a whole have any hope in reestablishing their kingdom it will be at the deliverance from a savior who:
… shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, And a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, The spirit of wisdom and understanding… And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears; But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth; And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked….
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, And the leopard shall lie down with the kid; And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; Their young ones shall lie down together. And the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, And the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrices den. They shall not hurt nor destroy In all my holy mountain: For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, As the waters cover the sea.[xvi]
Jeremiah is the Bible’s greatest preacher and darkest of the great prophets. He shares with the writer of Job the belief in a god who is good in the face of a world which is evil. The prophets after the fall of Israel knew that tiny Judah was a small fish in a far from tranquil sea. His writing shows an intense familiarity with the written heritage of his people. There is a good possibility that his father is the Hilkiah who found the scroll of Moses during the reign of King Josiah and scholarship[xvii] suggests that same scroll may have been the work of his own pen. If this is accurate then Jeremiah is the Deuteronomial Historian responsible for compiling Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1st & 2nd Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings. When we add to this the book which bears his own name and the Lamentations that are traditionally attributed to him, we find an author who labored on 25% of the books of the Hebrew canon.
Even if we grant him only studious attention to these same books we can sympathize with a soul that was not anxious to add to his labors the prophetical preaching that Yahweh had commanded of him. Jeremiah opens with this decree:
The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak; for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak…
For, behold, I have made thee this day a defended city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judab, against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee. [xviii]
Jeremiah didn’t need the word of the Lord to inform him that Babylon would soon be at the gates of Jerusalem. This was already evident to the whole of the middle east that had witnessed the fall of Ninevah. But that the Lord had pitted him against the kings of Judah and their princes, as well as the priests and the people of his native land, was not the happy assurance of a tranquil future. It is in this somber realization that he develops a personal covenant with a god that needs not temple, priest, or country, to make his benefaction known to the longings of the human heart.
Jeremiah assembled a record of the dark accords of a people and their God. If that same God calls you to be his prophet, well might you write:
Cursed be the day wherein I was born: Let not the day wherein my mother bore me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, “A man child is born unto thee,” making him very glad. And let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew and repented not. And let him hear the cry in the morning and the shouting at noontide because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? [xix]
From such sensitivity it is not difficult to envision a wasteland that is always the recognition of the distance from our loftiest ideals to the world in which we imagine them.
For thus hath the Lord said: The whole land shall be desolate; yet will I not make a full end. For this shall the earth mourn, and the heavens above be black: Because I have spoken it, I have purposed it, and will not repent,
neither will I turn back from it. The whole city shall flee, From the noise of the horsemen and bowmen; they shall go into thickets, and climb upon the rocks: Every city shall be forsaken and not a man dwell therein. And when thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do? Though thou clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckest thee with ornament of gold, though thou rentest thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair; thy lovers will despise thee, they will see thy life…
For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringeth forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, that bewailth herself, that spreadeth her hands, saying: Woe is me now! For my soul is wearied because of Murderers.[xx]
In the service of such a god one cannot help but wonder:
Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: Yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are they happy that deal very treacherously? Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: They grow, yea, they bring forth fruit: Thou art near their mouth, and far from their reins… But thou, O Lord, knowest me, Thou hast seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee: Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter. How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein? [xxi]
The Old Testament provides rich and ornate detail of the consequence of sin. The most horrific is detailed in the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy:
Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her own womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities. [xxii]
Even Dante will have a hard time conjuring as dour a spectacle when he wanders through the labyrinth of his sordid inferno. Yahweh isn’t speaking of an after-life, but of an inferno as vividly alive as any that visited humanity during the course and closing of the 2nd world war. These frightful images weighed upon the man who might have written them. Jeremiah may have personally witnessed the blinding of Zedekiah. That horror was a portent not unlike the blinding of Gloucester in the apocalypse of Shakespeare’s Lear. Jeremiah envisions the same horror in 19th chapter of the book that bears his name:
And I will make this city desolate, and a hissing; every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss because of all the plagues thereof and I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege… [xxiii]
Shakespeare’s, Ulysses envisions a similar end in Troilus and Cressida:
Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark! What discord follows; each thing meets In mere oppugnancy. . the rude son should strike the father dead…Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite. An universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up itself. [xxiv]
Jeremiah’s countrymen suspect him of siding with the Babylonians. They have little use for Yahweh’s spokesmen. We find thereafter, the gloomy prophet envisioning a god who speaks inwardly:
I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.
The necessity of preaching and priests will one day cease:
I will put my law in there inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor and every man his brother saying, know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no more.[xxv]
It is in that sustaining faith that the prophet watches Jerusalem fall and finds himself encountering the last of the curses in Deuteronomy:
… the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say: If only it were evening! And in the evening you will say: If only it were morning, because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see. The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you will never make again.[xxvi]
And so it is there by the flowing Nile that Jeremiah finds his journey’s end.
[i] 2 Samuel 21:9
[ii] 2 Samuel 22:21-50
[iii] 1 Kings 2:6
[iv] 2 Samuel 16: 11-12
[v] 2 Samuel 19:23
[vi] 1 Kings 2: 9-10
[vii] 1 Kings 11: 11-12
[viii] 1 Kings 12:4
[ix] R.E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
[x] Judges 4:21
[xi] Shakespeare; Alls Well That Ends Well
[xii] Amos 2:6-7 5:8
[xiii] Amos 7: 17
[xiv] Isaiah 1: 10-19
[xv] Isaiah 10:15
[xvi] Isaiah 11: 1-9
[xvii] R.E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
[xviii] Jeramiah 1: 4-7
[xix] Jeramiah 20: 14-18
[xx] Jeramiah 4: 27-31
[xxi] Jeramiah 12: 1-4
[xxii] Deuteronomy 28: 52-57
[xxiii] Jeramiah 19: 9
[xxiv] Shakespeare, Trolius and Cressida; Act 1 Scene 3
[xxv] Jeramiah 31: 33-34
[xxvi] Deuteronomy 28:68