Canter Bridge

One portion of David’s enduring enigma lies in his subjects’ recorded penchant for presenting him with his own inconvenient truth by means of trumped-up case studies. Rarely has a king have to ferret out his people’s intention by deciphering parables.

It can be assumed with some degree of confidence that there is more in this than a complicated convention for talking with royalty. It likely says something about David.

But just what does it say?

Mere thickheadedness seems too simple a trait to attribute to this complex character. Nor does he come off as particularly inaccessible, such that those requiring an audience should have to create a spectacular ruse for getting one.

The prophet Nathan and the old woman from Tekoa may in fact be appealing to David’s poetic, almost romantic habit of outrage. Whether against a parabled rich man or—as we glimpse it in the fifty-first Psalm, attributed to this king—the nobler emotions seem to flow in David like a swollen river even when he abandons the concrete tasks of, say, capable fatherhood.

Indeed, 2 Samuel presents a king with an absurdly large heart, capable of heroic symbolism and ludicrous contradiction. How else would an assassin with an overgrown libido have endeared himself to millennia of readers as this Hebrew king has done?

At the risk of lurching towards platitude, David is both unique and every man possessed of a keen sense of justice and high moral ambitions for himself. When David crashes to the ground spectacularly, it is not difficult for many of his readers to hear the echo in their own experience.

His can be a vile man, as much by way of negligence as by calculation. Yet he is also capable of deep love and a passionate thirst for just deeds over self-aggrandizement and the enrichment that was the accepted domain of Levantine royalty then, as of those privileged to bear power in our day.

This romantic impulse in David touches even his response to grief. He grieves outrageously, loudly, throwing his whole body into the theater of publicly enacted loss. He dares even to weep his way into the heavens to see if his son by Uriah’s woman might be saved from his mortal decline, then abandoning the attempt in an instant when the child has secured his fate by dying. David’s entourage looks on in astonishment at the contradictions chiseled into their king’s character. But perhaps not without affection.

David is large. His virtue towers, his failures throw themselves wide for all to see. His enemies had no trouble broadcasting his weaknesses, nor his friends attaching themselves unto death to his generous heart.

Imagine if the evil could be bread out of this David in some son of his. Imagine the rule of a Davidide in which there pulsed no guile.