Canter Bridge

David did not conquer and rule alone. It is perhaps more than a curiosity that his last words are followed—and not anticlimactically—by a list of those thirty-seven men who had watched his back.

Largely unnamed prior to this moment, the Three, the Thirty, and the anomalous but heroic others who appear here distill decades of companionship with this absurd and large-hearted king. David’s often quixotic ways inspired others who found the safety of convention uncompelling. If these are gibborim—‘mighty men’—they found in David a gibbor worth their pledge.

It is safe to assume that with regard to both his literary and historical trajectories—however these might have aligned and interwoven—David would not have been David without his thirty-seven men and those unnamed souls whose lives were privileged and complicated by these men’s friendship with their remarkable warrior-king.

Heroism is not an individual achievement. Nor governance, nor rarely villainy. We believe sometimes in the naiveté that comes with life’s velocity that we act alone. We do not.

David’s genius lay in part in that he recognized—and inspired those who traced his life’s trail to do the same—those gibborim whose shoulders jostled with his in the fast forty years of his rule and the complex prelude that led to them. When he failed them, he lamented loudly, embarrassing courtiers but no doubt moistening the eyes of some who loved him for it.

Solomon, his royal heir, was a better administrator. One doubts that he wept. He died less loved, it seems, less lamented. The memory of him has no thirty-seven great men, only an apparatus that ran smoothly for a while, then choked a nation’s heart and severed its will in two.

David danced loudly, his manhood swinging vigorously under his cloak and even beyond its protective shroud. Saul’s daughter scoffed at this most unroyal behavior. A handful of the thirty-seven no doubt toasted him that evening for his balls, for his vigor, for being their David no matter what.

There is irony in this list of great men. Jonathan, whose love was to David ‘better than the love of women’, is not there. He perished too young to serve David as his king, breathing his last breath as the rightful Saulide heir but long having pledged his heart to a future that David would rule. The reader of this list misses Jonathan here in literary microcosm of what his absence must have meant to a king to whom his company might have meant much during late-night reflection upon Israelites who had died at Philistine hands for decisions David had made but could not explain.

Jonathan’s loyal reason would not assuage that silent, leaderly anguish, just as his name will not grace this list. Premature death steals too much that cannot be replaced.

Jonathan’s place, one might imagine, is taken up by perhaps an ironic king’s greatest irony. One reads the list, guessing at the exploits that are remembered, abbreviated, guarded, shrouded by mere names. Unrecognized names.

Then, at the last, a familiar name. A remembered story. A starkly Davidide moment.

Uriah the Hittite is there.

There were thirty-seven in all.