Canter Bridge

Having dispatched Solomon and his tarnished glories, the book of Kings now turns to that assessment of Israelite and Judahite kings that has made it the bane of Bible readers uninstructed in the subterranean hope and tragedy that fuel the biblical telling of history. Seemingly dry and disapproving, this intersecting list of two people’s kings is in fact a prophetic coming-to-terms with the human conduct of leaders and its tragicomic effect upon lives, blood, and national destination.

David is the unseen guest at this tabular table. His shadow is long. Either his legacy has experienced a rehabilitation of Stalin-esque proportions or the Israelite historian is shrewdly abbreviating his chequered life in terms of what matters most. A sympathetic—not to say naive—reading adopts the latter as its assumption. We learn that David was a paradigmatic figure in that his heart was ‘complete’ before the Lord. We read further that David …

… did what was just in the sight of the Yahweh and did not deviate from all that Yahweh had commanded him except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite Continue Reading »

The man of God from Judah travels to neighboring Israel at a time when traffic of seers and oracles between the divided legacies of Solomon’s briefly (U)nited (K)ingdom would have been politically charged. It is not difficult to reduce this story to a political allegory tossed off to inculcate the moral superiority of Judah over the shrine-filled paganism of Israel.

It is no doubt more than that.

The monarchy’s ‘men of God’ are enigmatic figures. Their often strange appearance and their toggling back and forth between taciturn silence and confrontational declaration combine to paint the picture of unpredictable figures whose arrival would have unsettled a place. Continue Reading »

If audacity drives the human side of temple-building, a kind of fiction shapes the divine response. The biblical texts of temple-building know this and work expertly with the multiple points of view that must be sustained if building a house for god is to be anything more than pious nonsense.

Solomon and YHWH understand that the temple is a concession. ‘The God of heaven and earth’, as YHWH seems to have become known both to Israel and to her neighbors in their moments of disposition cannot in fact live in a hewn-stone, cedar-embellished Levantine shrine. Yet the reality of God being present with his people in that modest construction is no less genuine for this impasse of transcendence and concreteness.

He is not really there. Yet he is really there. Continue Reading »

Building God a house is an audacious adventure, as even Solomon the temple-building king recognizes in his dedicatory prayer. Yet the space-time complications of housing a transcendent God are not enough to halt the project.

Solomon’s Temple is known to us only by literary description and is often called Israel’s ‘First Temple’. It was all about keeping ‘God with us’. YHWH’s wish to have such a place built for him is expressed in his determination that …

I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.

Viability seems to be the operative concept. In the language of dwelling with Israel, as in the careful description of the temple’s measurements and accoutrements, lines are drawn both to the underlying divine habit of covenanting with Israel and to the earlier, non-permanent dwelling known as the tabernacle. Continue Reading »

If human history consists of the struggle to survive and to live out the vocation that one perceives in one’s people, then history can end in one of two ways. Both know the scent of evil.

In the first, a people fulfills its historical ambition. Struggle ceases and, with it, the identity that one discovers too late to have been fueled by struggle itself. In the second, pettiness and other corrosive villainies wear down—or shout down—the noblest essence of national vocation.

Perhaps we are more defined by our struggle than we knew. Continue Reading »

David did not conquer and rule alone. It is perhaps more than a curiosity that his last words are followed—and not anticlimactically—by a list of those thirty-seven men who had watched his back.

Largely unnamed prior to this moment, the Three, the Thirty, and the anomalous but heroic others who appear here distill decades of companionship with this absurd and large-hearted king. David’s often quixotic ways inspired others who found the safety of convention uncompelling. If these are gibborim—‘mighty men’—they found in David a gibbor worth their pledge. Continue Reading »

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.
Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

Fittingly, the young David makes his debut in a pose that is both small and audacious. A strong instinct visible among Jewish interpreters sees in such personalities the story of Israel writ tiny and personalized yet with suggestive prescience.

Little Israel is at it again, rank to rank arrayed against the mighty Philistines who seem in every way to tower head and shoulders, invincible and mocking, over Israel the dwarf people. Perhaps the giant Goliath, too, is a nation’s story writ personalized—large this time—and with remarkable prescience.

Israel has no hope in the normal calculus of things. She will be overrun by the land’s strong denizens who have more than once before been tagged as invincible, outsized, the stuff of legend. Continue Reading »