The biblical tradition struggles mightily with the apparent excesses of YHWH’s commitment to David and his city.
It is unlike the Mosaic tradition to make promises without outlining the responsibilities that accrue to divine generosity. Yet one or two of the classic ‘Davidic’ or ‘Zion’ covenantal statements do just that. In my judgement, the largest theological errors lie by the side of the road where one attempts to restrict divine liberty. Still, we ought to consider the possibility that an implicit conditionality inhabits even the most absolute YHWH-promises to David and his offspring. At the end of the day, YHWH is in the biblical drama a master at the creative rescuing of situations placed in peril by human weakness, stubbornness, or both.
If these caveats sound obtuse and at some remove from the text that lies before us, they are not unlinked to it. The tradition’s very struggle suggests that angles of view that we might label as ‘theological’ emerge from the content of the YHWH-promises themselves.
Leave it the the psalms—arguably one of the less cautious genres when it comes to articulating things that really matter—to juxtapose YHWH’s sure oath to David to an outsized if that towers above Zion and its royal/religious edifices:
The LORD swore to David a sure oath
from which he will not turn back:
‘One of the sons of your body
I will set on your throne.
If your sons keep my covenant
and my decrees that I shall teach them,
their sons also, forevermore,
shall sit on your throne.’ (Psalm 132:11-12 NRSV)
Though a pedantic logician might swallow hard at the appearance of naive contradiction, the tradition that is here inscripted is conscious of two realities. First, the poetic legacy is well aware of YHWH’s inscrutable decisiveness. Second, it will not disavow the deeply rooted responsibility that YHWH’s uncanny way with those upon whom his love falls presses into the lives of those who seem rarely to have reached out to him. More often such people—David chief among them—become ensnared in the web of divine amour. They find it difficult—if, in theory, not impossible—to break free from the tenacious, enwrapping netting that has found their feet, their legs, their arms, then all of them.
YHWH promises. Human beings more or less screw up the postlude. YHWH finds a way.
On such a dialectic redemption, this world, and the next appear somewhat safely—if not without tragedy—to hang.
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