Canter Bridge

Having dispatched Solomon and his tarnished glories, the book of Kings now turns to that assessment of Israelite and Judahite kings that has made it the bane of Bible readers uninstructed in the subterranean hope and tragedy that fuel the biblical telling of history. Seemingly dry and disapproving, this intersecting list of two people’s kings is in fact a prophetic coming-to-terms with the human conduct of leaders and its tragicomic effect upon lives, blood, and national destination.

David is the unseen guest at this tabular table. His shadow is long. Either his legacy has experienced a rehabilitation of Stalin-esque proportions or the Israelite historian is shrewdly abbreviating his chequered life in terms of what matters most. A sympathetic—not to say naive—reading adopts the latter as its assumption. We learn that David was a paradigmatic figure in that his heart was ‘complete’ before the Lord. We read further that David …

… did what was just in the sight of the Yahweh and did not deviate from all that Yahweh had commanded him except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite

Stupendous as this seems in the light of the narrative’s prior lingering over David’s foibles, it is right to understand this as an evaluation proffered by a writer who had himself pondered the whole of David’s legacy as we have it and probably more. David’s legacy as it comes to us in this history is neither a whitewashing of his less honorable moments nor a hodge-podge of contradictory motifs that the assembler of them was incapable of recalling as he let his positive Davidic bias flow.

Rather, something is being said about David, about David’s heart, and about YHWH’s pleasure in the company of this multi-faceted human being. Probably we are to take David’s honor, his heroism, and his transparent acknowledgement of his own failure as precisely the kind of behavior that YHWH seeks in a king.

David cast his shadow over lesser monarchs not because his vita is unstained and theirs pockmarked with error. Rather, David’s vigorous intent to please YHWH by accomplishing justice is, quite literally, praise-worthy. When this pursuit of YHWH’s justice in the concrete circumstances of a people’s life is joined to his no-excuses acknowledgement of his own penchant for failure—even for evil—then the historian feels he has happened upon a model worthy of emulation as the standard by which the lives of subsequent kings must be accounted.

This is something better than cheap apotheosis. It gets to the heart of the matter of Israelite history.

Indeed, it points forward, for David’s shadow is even longer than we at first imagine.

We have too little of Jesus’ post-resurrection teaching in the gospels, and only precious shards of it in the rest of the New Testament documents. Yet history has bequeathed to us a kernel solid enough to understand that Jesus’ teaching during the forty days that are put down to his meanderings with his disciples prior to his ascent into heaven was critical for the biblical understanding that oriented his earliest followers. By one account, they would ‘turn the world upside down’.

The final chapter of the gospel of Luke, among others, shows us Jesus ‘opening their minds to understand the scriptures’. His instruction is full of historical inevitability, of a divinely woven necessity that things were to happen in a certain way. His remarkable life and death, he teaches them, were not the random outcome of chaotic circumstances, indeed his life and death were in some way purposed by God. ‘It was necessary’, we hear him say, ‘that the Christ—the messiah, the anointed leader—should suffer, die, and then be raised.’

We know by inference from glimpses of this teaching that his attention fell often upon the figure of David, the anointed leader par excellence, whose shadow fell across the generations of kings. We know that some called him ‘the son of David’.

One wonders then, in what sense, the historical auditor of 1 Kings wears his disappointment on his sleeve in mute anticipation of what the prophets would call ‘a new David’.

One sees so much of Jesse’s son in this Galilean.