Canter Bridge

Readers raised on a hermeneutic of suspicion find it difficult to trace honor in David’s bloody treatment of a rival king’s assassins. David’s words are high-minded, yet the consequences of his judicial murdering—if that’s what it is—are transparently beneficial.

Perhaps suspicion is the right prima facie response. What is patently false is the assumption that the text’s compilers were too dim to glimpse the same suspicious potentialities. That they do not resolve David’s self-described honorable actions into a moral flatline of good or evil is not oversight. It is profound awareness of the human drama, the mixed motives that usually fuel it, and the burden of the recorder not to distort this complexity in the service of clarity.

Maybe David did act out of a keen sense of honor, just as he said. This too is a plausible and intelligent reading, if carried out with awareness of its opposite, which lurks at the door with teeth bared to undo Heroic David and seat Dissembling, Bloody David on his still-warm throne.

David marches, in due course, on the Jebusite city that would become Jerusalem the Golden, thought in this moment it is a well-watered Canaanite fortress with little else to say for itself. David’s warriors respond to this challenge on the man’s behalf as they would to so many others, providing narrative evidence more powerful than any monarchical decree that something in this enigmatic shepherd-king roused a noble spirit in those who took to him.

Jesus marched too, in his way, upon Jerusalem. In Jericho, en route, he heals a blind mendicant who won’t stop his embarrassing discernment that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’—the text describes him so—is the blessed ‘son of David’. One might suppose that bystanders hush the blind man for the awkward disqualification of his useless eyes, but the text’s insistence on the content of his shouting lead one to believe that the more cringe-worthy element was his wordy and unrefined royalism.

Jesus gives him his sight back, crediting not his healing technique but the man’s faith. That quality allowed him to see what the well-sighted could not.

One might almost conclude that both David and his Nazarene ‘son’ were more than they appeared to be on the surface, and that the discerning reader will trouble herself to take a second, unhurried look.