Canter Bridge

The biblical histories do not linger over the rift that separated the families of Saul and David. For them, the superiority and durability of the Davidic monarchy over the false start that was Saul are self-evident.

Yet life on the ground was more complex, a fact that is recognized in the brief, stone-throwing cameo of Shimei. What this Saulide partisan lacked in self-preservation skills he made up for in valor or, perhaps, daring. He nearly pays with his head the satisfaction of cursing David the Saul-killer—for surely David was seen as such by Shimei’s people—as the king and his entourage flee Absalom’s conspiracy.

David responds memorably, one of his abiding qualities and sufficient by itself to place him among the named figures of biblical history even if his lineage had never acquired the dynastic and messianic resonance that cling to it still.

David allows and then affirms that YHWH himself might have ordered Shimei to curse him. Not a very kingly notion, it no doubt gets recorded precisely for its unconventional approach to political enmity. David was not always good, but there is an attractive nobility in that he is rarely predictable.

There may also be a coming to terms with David’s own role in the events that led to Absalom’s conspiratorial adventurism. The book of Samuel has not set out to make of David’s life a morality play and ends up evading the simplicities of canonizing or vilifying him. Yet it can be said with full respect for the text’s sinews that David has been a bad father and a worse father-king. He has not honored even the minimalist obligations embedded in Israelite family and royal norms. Critically, he looked the other way, though it strains credulity that he could have done so, during the rape of Tamar.

Morally compromised men often do, a matter of character deformation and opaque leadership that it is convenient though eminently costly to ignore.

As David trudges into temporary exile, he—like a portion of Israel under prophetic instruction would one day do as well—accepts the loss of and privilege as YHWH’s own cursing, not to be gainsaid.

In a crisis, David’s perception often became acute. Israel’s too. Let Shimei have his day of cursing.