The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero. By Joel Baden. Video. Yale Divinity School, January 28, 2014. Livestream.
The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero. By Joel Baden. New York: HarperOne, 2013. Pp. 320. Amazon.com.
How King David predicted modern Judaism. By Joel Baden. CNN, October 12, 2013.
Baden:
Most
American Jews consider Judaism to be mainly a matter of culture and ancestry,
according to a recent poll. An even higher percentage describe themselves as
emotionally attached to Israel. For this we have one person to thank: King
David.
The
Israel we know today is a nation that David created virtually out of thin air.
Before David, there were two territories, Israel to the north, and Judah to the
south.
By
sheer force of personality—and, to be fair, substantial military strength—David
combined these two lands under a single crown (his). Not only had this never
happened before; no one had ever thought of it before.
Although
the Bible makes it sound as if everyone loved David, and were desperate to
follow him, this wasn’t really the case. David took power by force.
The
people of Israel and Judah became part of David’s kingdom because he conquered
them—they had no choice in the matter. Their only option was to abandon the
land that they had held for centuries. And in a tight real estate market—every
family believed that they had eternal rights to their property—moving was
pretty much out of the question.
We tend
to think of Israel in biblical terms: the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, the land of the 12 tribes. These concepts were created in the wake of
David’s reign.
Everywhere
that the Bible speaks of Judah and Israel together—the stories of the
patriarchs, the Exodus, the conquest—we encounter the ramifications of David’s
actions.
The
borders of the modern state of Israel today are, roughly, David’s borders, or
at least those attributed to him by the biblical authors. (For the record: the
West Bank was part of David’s kingdom; the Gaza Strip was not.)
And at
the center of Israel, both ancient and modern, is the holy city of Jerusalem.
This, too, is David’s doing. Before David, Jerusalem was a long-standing
independent city-state, belonging to a long-lost people called the Jebusites.
Recognizing
that its central location would be perfect for the capital of his newly united
state—the ancient equivalent of Washington—David conquered it and wiped out its
former inhabitants.
Because
David is credited with founding the Temple in Jerusalem—although Solomon built
the actual structure, David chose the site, set up an altar, and laid the
conceptual groundwork—it’s natural enough to assume that there was some
religious motivation at work.
But, in
fact, David’s aim in inaugurating a site of worship in his capital was more
economical than spiritual. Temples were sites of commerce—Jesus knew this—and
having a culturally significant relic, in the form of the Ark of the Covenant,
was sure to draw the people in.
Every
lamb sacrificed in Jerusalem meant profit for the sanctuary, and for the king
who controlled it. Every pilgrim meant a night’s stay in a local bed and
breakfast (all fully taxable, of course).
David
used belief as a lure to draw in the masses. But he didn’t care much what his
people believed. The creation of the unified kingdom of Israel wasn’t based on
shared religion.
The
inhabitants of the north had very different practices from those in the south.
And none of them was following Jewish law—the laws hadn’t been written yet, and
wouldn’t be for centuries.
What
united the people of David’s kingdom was, quite simply, that they lived there.
It was a political state, not a religious one.
Israel
then, like today, was primarily a political entity, and only secondarily a
religious one. Those who considered themselves attached to Israel believed and
practiced a whole range of things, or not; just like those who are attached to
Israel today.
A Pew
poll released earlier this month demonstrates the continuing pull of David’s
Israel. Millions of American Jews financially support the modern state of
Israel, either through donations or through tourism.
We feel
the pull of the land, the sanctity of the ancient streets of Jerusalem. We fly
El Al, we stay at the hotels, we eat at the restaurants, we pay to enter
various sites.
That
is: We’re still doing just what David wanted us to do. We are precisely the
Jews who David envisioned—believing whatever we want, just so long as we spend
our money in Israel.
King David: A Biography. By Steven L. McKenzie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Myth and Reality of King David’s Jerusalem. By Daniel Gavron. Jewish Virtual Library. Originally published in Hebrew in Ariel: The Israel Review of Arts and Letters, No. 102 (May 1996).
Remembering King David. By Jacob L. Wright. ASOR Blog, February 14, 2014.
How We Know When Solomon Ruled. By Kenneth A. Kitchen. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 27, No. 5 (September/October 2001).
David and Hazael: War, Peace, Stones and Memory. By Gershon Galil. Palestine Exploration Quarterly, Vol. 139, No. 2 (July 2007).
What Archaeology Tells Us About the Bible. By Christa Case Bryant. NJBR, October 15, 2013. With related articles.
Archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel Announces Discovery of King David’s Palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa. NJBR, July 20, 2013. With related articles.
My commentary:
Israel’s King Solomon, whose wealth and wisdom have become the stuff of legend (and in the judgment of some scholars greatly exaggerated), died in 922 BC after a reign according to the Bible of nearly forty years. The king’s death was a moment of grave crisis for the Israelite monarchy created by Solomon’s father King David some 80 years earlier. Through war, diplomacy, treachery, and occasional cruelty, David had succeeded in forging a disparate group of loosely confederated highland tribes, clans, independent villages and Canaanite city-states, under constant threat from their richer and more powerful Philistine neighbors, into a new bureaucratic dynastic state: Israel. David’s Israel, with its new royal capital Jerusalem, was the first independent territorial state under local leadership ever to emerge in the land then called Canaan, later to be called Eretz Yisrael or Palestine.
David, in the judgment of Joel Baden, his
most recent biographer, “was a successful monarch, but he was a vile human
being.” He is the pivotal figure of the Bible and the central political figure
in Jewish history: the founding father of the Israelite nation who established
Jerusalem as the focus of Jewish, and later Christian, religious faith,
achievements which reverberate to the present day. The historical David was a
masterful political leader and military strategist. He was also a cunning Near
Eastern warlord and despot in the mold of Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, who
was transformed over the course of several centuries into the ideal king of the
Judeo-Christian tradition, “a man after God’s own heart,” and the prototype of
the Messiah. This process began during Solomon’s reign with the writing of an
apology for David’s life and actions, a masterpiece of literature and
propaganda later incorporated into the biblical books of Samuel. The Israel
reborn in 1948 was the deliberate re-creation of David’s Israel in modern
guise. As Joel Baden writes, the founders of the Zionist state “chose the name
of David’s unified nation, linking the emergence of Israel in the twentieth
century CE with the emergence of Israel in the tenth century BCE. . . .
Geographically, politically, and ideologically, the Israel we know today is the
embodiment of David’s legacy.”
