Canter Bridge

It is a moving thing to observe the heart of a people turning to a leader-in-waiting or gathering to him in force after events have lined up behind him. Such is the story of David’s rise to sovereignty over the whole of Israel and Judah. The story is studded with vignettes about heroes, heroism, and the remarkable loyalty that bound an increasing number of rebels, outcasts, and—eventually—societal pillars to the fate and person of this David.

Wherever David’s tale is told, it seems, one discovers profound, emotionally wrought, covenantal bounds between those who chose to follow him and the king-in-waiting himself. When he becomes the nation’s monarch, the same astonishing depth of feeling on the part of those he leads flavors the narrative.

Even the ill-fated Saul’s kinsmen trickle over to David:

Some Benjaminites and Judahites came to the stronghold to David. David went out to meet them and said to them, ‘If you have come to me in friendship, to help me, then my heart will be knit to you; but if you have come to betray me to my adversaries, though my hands have done no wrong, then may the God of our ancestors see and give judgment.’ Then the spirit came upon Amasai, chief of the Thirty, and he said,

‘We are yours, O David;
and with you, O son of Jesse!
Peace, peace to you,
and peace to the one who helps you!
For your God is the one who helps you.’

Then David received them, and made them officers of his troops.

Sometimes this swelling stream is fed by the emerging certainty that God ‘is with’ a leader. The abbreviation is characteristically biblical. When filled out, it often takes the form of the language of blessing, as is true of Obed-edom in this same passage when the ‘ark of the Lord’ makes an unscheduled, unhurried layover in his home.

Nearly always the palpable presence of God with a leader is depicted as inscrutable, though the Deuteronomistic Historian will sometimes allow himself to link it with a king’s determination to ‘walk in the ways of David his father’.

In the text before us, YHWH’s affiliation with the erstwhile bandit whom Saul feared with a fervor as deep as its irrationality grows irrefutable by the day. Heroic men—and presumably the women who hung with them—are drawn to the man with expressions of love so patently emotional that modern and post-modern readers have a hard time not connecting the dots that suggest to them homosexual love, no matter how remote that notion lie from the Sitz im Leben of such texts.

‘We are yours, o David’, this Amasai, this warrior, this men of men sings in prophetic frenzy to David, ‘… for God is the one who helps you.’

Inscrutable, undeniable clouds gather over the head of this man. Even when he breaks under the strain and privilege of monarchy, men and women will prove unable not to love him. God helps him. God help him.