David the King: The Sons of Goliath

In the final chapters of Second Samuel a lot of energy is spent simply putting David's house in order, both to sweep up after the decades of civil discord and to prepare for David's fast approaching exit. It becomes especially clear in Chapter 21 that, despite David's successes, his country is still a mess. There are so many problems, so many improprieties accrued over the years that David and his ever-shifting cadre of advisors seem to just lose track. The fatigue in David that begins around the time of his scandalous relationship with Bath-Sheba comes to full fruition in the last few chapters of his story.

Chapter 21 opens with a three-year famine that strikes Israel in the winter of David's life. When David finally consults God, he learns that it is the delayed retribution for one of Saul's own crimes. During his last wrathful years on the throne, Saul ordered the extermination of a group of people called the Gibeonites, a fairly harmless faction of the formerly glorious Amorites. The long relationship between Hebrews and Amorites is important to remember and it is no mistake that they come up in this story. Back when the Israelites were first coming into the Promised Land after wandering the desert with Moses, the Amorites were considered their most formidable foe. They were described as being unusually tall and especially adept in battle. Though the Israelites swept across the lands leading into Canaan with relative ease, they were advised to avoid the Amorites until the very last battle before establishing their nation. In the time of David, the last Amoritic people, the Gibeonites, have a holy peace treaty with Israel that is broken by Saul out of sheer paranoia.

The fall of giants is the central theme of Chapter 21. Some are giants who fell for their needless assaults on the peaceful, others who fell out of hubris or simply as a matter of course. At the end of the chapter the physical giants descended from Goliath all die one by one in battle against Israel when the Philistines resume their war, though the entire chapter is dotted with the fall of figurative giants in royalty as well. The descendants of Saul, excepting Mephibosheth who is protected by covenant, hang for Saul's crime against the Gibeonites while we are reminded of Saul's own defeat when his and Jonathan's bones are finally rescued from their tomb in the foreign land of Jabesh-gilead.

Chapter 21 even has the beginning of the fall of David himself. As the wars with the Philistines drag on, the aged David can no longer perform in battle. He nearly dies in a fight against the first of Goliath's sons, at which point his captains refuse to let David return to war. This one thing that was always David's strong suit, war, leaves him and he almost falls to a considerably less threatening version of the enemy whose defeat made him famous in the first place.

The lesson here is that no individual is immune to time. Israel is so dependent on David's leadership, yet it is obvious at this point in the story that he no longer possesses the full faculties to lead. As always, the tasks of defense and law fall to the next generation, though that generation lacks any one individual who can do as David did in his youth. There is a warrior strong enough to kill a giant, but not all the giants who threaten the land. Even then, those warriors are not posited as great leaders or arbiters of law. The society, in a sense, returns to delegating special tasks because the truly great, the Davids of the world, are few, far between and not even all that consistent.

Maus: Part One

In the modern Jewish community, there is often talk of what will happen when there are no more living Holocaust survivors. Will those stories be lost? Will the world forget the full intensity of pain, degradation and atrocity of that dark period in history? With that very worry in mind, several writers have endeavored to record the stories of survivors so future generations will never forget what happened to the millions who suffered under Nazi oppression during the Second World War. There is at least one great story of the Holocaust in every medium. In film there is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, in literature there is Elie Wiesel's Night and even in comic books there is Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Maus is Art Spiegelman's way of committing his father Vladek's experience in WWII era Poland to memory. Based on several conversations Art had with his father in the 1970's, the comic first appeared in the underground comic Funny Aminals in 1972. A few years later when Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly created the highly influential pop art magazine RAW, he decided to expand the Maus comic into a full-length story that was serialized over the course of eleven years in RAW and then compiled into two trade paperbacks in the early 1990's. The series eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for its unique depiction of the events leading up to and during the Holocaust.

Maus is so named because Spiegelman depicts the various ethnicities in the book as various animals, the Jews being mice. Many of the ethnicity/animal pairings have symbolic meaning. Jews are depicted as mice because, as far as Nazi propaganda and larger society was concerned during the Holocaust, Jews were considered vermin that were meant to be exterminated. Appropriately, the Nazis who attempted to kill such vermin are depicted as cats, whereas the Polish people who played host to so many concentration camps are depicted as pigs.

The first few chapters of Maus find a rodent version of Art Spiegelman visiting his elderly father to pry stories of his wartime experience out of him. It is a familiar story to anyone who has listened to the trials of those who lived through the atrocity in Europe. Vladek describes a comfortable, if simple middle-class life of honest work and marriage prospects punctuated with strange, often second-hand news of new laws restricting the lives of Jews in Germany, Austria and, after the German invasion, Poland. All of these preliminary prejudices are interspliced with the mundane details of Vladek's attempts to have something like a normal life as an all-consuming war loomed on the horizon.

The most striking part of these early chapters is how Vladek's experience in the Polish army explains the first shots of World War II. A young Vladek fights in a woefully under-trained, ill-equipped army that can't hope to stand up to the German war machine that all too easily divides Poland into a "Reich" and a "Protectorate", just two chunks of land that will soon experience the same laws even though they are called something different. Spiegelman shows us the precursors to the concentration camps that have since become iconic of the Holocaust, the draconian rules that pull a noose ever tighter around not just a people, but a whole continent. But the POW camps where Vladek spends the early part of the war will soon look like paradise compared to the likes of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

David the King: Judah, Israel and the Assyrian Empire

In chapter 20 of Second Samuel, the House of David goes to great lengths to quell any further civil unrest between the people of Judah and the rebelling elements of Israel. David isolates his ten concubines in the very definition of a gilded cage, a clear indication of some perceived taint caused by Absalom and a meaningful reference to David's own disastrous romantic decisions. David also sends Joab, his most trusted lieutenant, to deal with any betrayers who would replace Absalom as a new champion of the kingdom of Israel. Directly following Absalom's defeat in the forest of Ephraim, the people of Israel maintain a vocal opposition to the rule of Judah, though they don't take up arms. Sensing a new rebellion in the making when Amasa, one of David's advisors, fails to organize the leaders of Judah following the rise of a popular dissident named Sheba, David orders the death of Amasa and the pursuit of Sheba before further trouble can arise. In this chapter, David's justice is swift, brutal and designed to shock the Israelites into submission.

When such large political maneuvers show up in biblical texts, it is valuable to look into the factual history surrounding them. The Bible is not meant to be a 100% true historical document, but as a catch-all text of a culture it often combines the recording of history with the moral lessons at its core. If we are to appreciate the full extent of what the book has to offer, we must compare and contrast the sentiments therein with the hard evidence provided by archaeology.

As far as the Books of Samuel are concerned, the central conflict of Israel and Judah began as a unification effort against Philistine invaders, then evolved into an internal dispute between two Jewish cultures that considered themselves ethnically distinct. The time scale of the true Iron Age societies of Israel and Judah suggests something else entirely. It's not likely that two equally matched kingdoms coexisted in the region, but that the southern Judah resulted from the conquest of the northern Israel by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th Century BCE. The Assyrians made it a habit to repatriate conquered peoples and replace them with populations that were more immediately sympathetic to Assyrian culture. The Israelite population migrated south to Judah where its large numbers allowed villages like Jerusalem to flourish, developing into major cities.

The biggest difference between the cultures of Israel and Judah was the comparative lack of social cohesion in the former. The pre-Assyrian society of Israel was not particularly unified and it didn't practice a standardized form of Judaism. The southern kingdom of Judah was a bit more centralized and considerably more concerned with monotheistic purity. The conflict described in the Torah is first and foremost a war of competing ideologies. That the version of the story that eventually got recorded described a victory for the holy contingent suggests that the real internal conflict between Israel and Judah was a cultural one, not a war of swords.

It's startling to realize that, had the solidly monotheistic society of pro-Davidian Jews not dominated Judah, Jewish culture may very well not exist. When the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, the Hebrews in captivity wrote much of what we know today as the Torah. It was their attempt to preserve the culture they had established in Judah, a culture that would one day evolve into international Judaism.

David the King: The Death of Absalom

As the story of David approaches its end, there is a sense of weariness throughout the text. Though David had never been a particularly wrathful figure throughout his life, in those final years when his leadership was constantly in question he was particularly unwilling to exact vengeance of any sort regardless of how egregious his enemies were. David's sympathy and fairness are why, despite his failings, we still talk about him as if he was an admirable figure. Unlike Saul, David is never entirely consumed by the cruelty of the world or the disturbing ease of destruction afforded to him by his throne. David's early years are all about elevating him from his low, unassuming origins and his later years are all about humbling him. The admirable thing about David isn't that he's an unbeatable warrior, a singular poet or even a favorite of God. His greatest quality is his tenderness, his ability to find mercy and justice when he has every reason to bring down the full force of his crown.

With the killing of Absalom, it becomes strikingly apparent that there are no good deaths in the Books of Samuel save for those that are barely mentioned. In fact, throughout the Torah there are no real descriptions of glorious deaths. There are no heroes who fall valiantly in battle or bravely in martyrdom. All stories of respectable, violent deaths in Jewish culture come much later with moments like the Bar Kokhbah Rebellion or the heroes of the War of Israeli Independence. In the roundly moral document that is the Mishnah, the only good death is a quiet, natural one that is treated with little mention beyond a figure's passing and the requisite mourning of those around him or her. This is because Judaism does not value death. At best, it is merely a natural stage of existence that is never meant to slow down or preoccupy life. Even the Jewish period of mourning is only eight days long. In the Torah, only terrible, unnecessary deaths are drawn out, and always for a reason.

Absalom dies not in battle, but by a combination of fate and cruelty. The final battle between the Judean forces supporting David and the Israel-backed contingent of Absalom takes place in the forest of Ephraim, likely not a coincidence since Samuel himself was of the House of Ephraim. The text states "For the battle was there spread over the face of all the country; and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword devoured." Through one means or another, nature claimed the lives of the combatants for the country, an oblique but not opaque reference to the overall disapproval of God. The very country, in the forest named for the house of its most trusted prophet, killed those who would rend the nation that had already shed so much blood to achieve unification. Absalom gets caught in the branches of a terebinth, or tiferet, tree, a symbol that would later be used as a great symbol in Jewish mysticism. It should also be noted that David fought Goliath in a place called "The Valley of the Terebinth". While hanging, Absalom is found by David's advisor Joab. Going strictly against David's orders, Joab and his men kill and bury Absalom. It is a slow, cruel and utterly dishonorable death, simultaneously to be pitied and mourned.

And David does indeed mourn, just as he mourned for Saul and all of his other enemies. After all, Absalom was still David's son. David was gifted in battle, but he never loved battle. Every kill was pain to him. As with every death over which he presided, David has to be convinced to assume his kingly duties during his mourning. When it comes time to put his country in order, David judges those that come before him with more mercy than would have seemed prudent. There is no place for wrath in David's heart, which is one of the most frequent lessons of leadership in the Torah. All of the great leaders, from Abraham to the end of the Mishnah, are either punished for their wrath or show no stomach for it. These moments of mercy are David's finest and they serve as the example of his great contribution to our written tradition.

Jews, Jazz and Civil Rights

In the first half of the 20th century, American Jews participated in what can be called the first fully integrated cultural movement in the history of the United States. That movement was jazz music, the beginning of nationwide pop and an artistic playing field that invited people from all walks of life to join in. Together with other American minorities, Jewish musicians contributed to the most influential genre of music in history and the culture it helped create.

Like so much of American society in the early 1900's, music was mostly segregated. White musicians only played with other white musicians, likewise with musicians from black, Irish and other ethnic minority communities. But there was something about jazz that allowed people to overcome that social barrier. As the popular mythology goes, jazz has been depicted as the controversial music of its time, which was true to an extent. Jazz didn't receive nearly as much public animosity as its successors in rock and other pop styles. It's less likely that the wild, youthful nature of jazz or the seedy corners of its subculture drew in such a variety of people as it is that the sheer difficulty of playing jazz music required bands to pull from several different communities. Jazz arrangements require exceptional talent to play properly and there's more than a little uncommon intuition involved with the improvisation and embellishment that are hallmarks of the style. If a jazz band limited itself to musicians based solely on ethnicity, it would miss out on the extraordinary performers from other parts of town.

Though the multicultural jazz bands of the 1930's and 40's were the results of rare talent as much as a general sense of progressive politics, that doesn't mean the integrated bands of Benny Goodman and Stan Getz, as well as the work of contemporary composers like Irvin Berlin, weren't still very important to the growing social change of the era. It's not enough that the ethnically different musicians played together. The real power came in their willingness to perform together in public. The smoky clubs and recording studios of WWII era America were as instrumental in forming the modern civil rights movement as the protests and charismatic leaders of the 1960's. The jazz scene was populated by black musicians who moved north away from Jim Crow laws and Jews who had to change their names just to be accepted as more than second-class citizens. The mutual desire for change, for respect, brought people from oppressed minorities together to make a positive contribution to society.

David the King: Shimei of Bahurim

The war between King David and his son Absalom is a particularly personal conflict. Aside from the fact that it's a war between a father and son, most of the major tactical maneuvers on both sides rely upon the shifting loyalties of trusted friends and family, some of whom have histories with the House of David stretching back several generations. It's at this point in the story that it becomes apparent just how complex the drama has become. Small slights and minor mercies from previous chapters end up manifesting as life-or-death political decisions, though this isn't really depicted as being a good thing.

The theme I've maintained throughout this feature is the idea that the Books of Samuel aim to dissuade people from ever asking for monarchs in the first place. I believe that it accomplishes this by appealing to certain sensibilities that have always been a part of Judaism. It would have been considerably easier to simply depict kings as selfish monsters than to create the complicated, melodramatic narrative we have before us. Biblical texts certainly aren't above simplifying individuals and indeed whole nations for the sake of a simple story. So, why are these destructive, often sinful kings not just depicted with the same reductive antagonism as, say, the heartless foreigner stereotypes of Amalek?

The layered narrative of the kings of Israel is a story of human frailty. It's not enough to just posit a king as a one-dimensional villain. It is far more effective to portray him as he is, describing him as a real person who bears all of the same flaws as his more common neighbors. David's story is a Jewish story, so it latches onto the dramatic structure of family. As much as this faith values family, it doesn't romanticize the idea of family. When love, intimacy and expectation are ever-present, as they are in one form or another with family, life gets messy. Families grow, change and have internal conflict. These are all things that cause a government to suffer and fail.

So, as Absalom's uprising seeks out David's defending contingent, it's not the might of armies or even the sway of public opinion that makes the difference, it's the confidence of family relations. Some of David's old allies advise Absalom against him while some of Absalom's most trusted tacticians are actually spies for his father. The whole thing plays out as its own miniature tragedy. The messy court intrigue results in a lot of things, from the suicide of Ahithophel to the criminal exile of Ahimaaz and a descendant of Jonathan. However, it doesn't result in any political momentum for either David or Absalom.

Tucked away in this drama is a curious episode during David's march away from Jerusalem. In a place called Bahurim, David's party is accosted by a man name Shimei (or Shimi), a cousin of Saul's. Shimei casts curses and stones at David and his supporters, but David chooses to ignore the man when he could easily have him killed. David's excuse is that perhaps God compelled Shimei to act this way so it would be improper to punish him, but the tone of the scene suggests that there's nothing divine at work. Rather, David acts in resignation. It would be pointless and cruel to punish Shimei. He's no real threat, he's just an angry, pathetic man with nothing to lose. Given all the recent discord in David's life, how he loses family and friends with such ease, he just doesn't have the heart to make any more enemies in the world.

David the King: Absalom's Betrayal

Judaism is a very old faith and as such it is very concerned with cycles. The philosophies of antiquity saw a world that both constantly changed and also fell into patterns. The seasons move in a cycle, the structure of a family is nothing if not a series of rotating roles and even the biggest things in nature, like the moon and stars, seem to move in a pattern. The main thrust of Judaism is to decide which cycles to perpetuate and which ones to end. The earliest iteration of the faith grew out of a desire to end the cycle of warring civilizations toppling one god only to replace it with another. In time, this philosophy came to encompass a universal application of law rather than the caprice of powerful individuals. The Books of Samuel are a treatise on this belief of law above kings. Rather than strictly depicting a society that is made better by a proper adherence to the law, it tells the story of the cycle of destruction brought about by monarchs.

The pattern of monarchy's chaos is this: The people, choosing to shirk their responsibilities as a collective of law, invest a disproportionate amount of power in one individual because he is seen as being strong, wise or otherwise favored. That man rises to his throne by currying favor with his neighbors and defeating all opposition. Before long, he abuses his power and becomes detached from his people, creating an opportunity for dissent. New, younger, more charismatic individuals rise to oppose the sitting leader and the society is once again divided.

This is what happens when David's son Absalom returns from his self-imposed exile several years after the execution of his brother Amnon. The reasons for Absalom's decision to leave the kingdom are not explicit, but his sentiments upon his return suggest that he no longer trusts his father's judgment. When David's advisor Joab uses the kind of theatrical philosophy that usually sway's David's opinions to convince him to invite Absalom back to Jerusalem, Absalom returns and almost immediately begins undermining David's authority. He posits himself as an alternative judge, convincing people to come to him with their disputes rather than to the king. Between his good looks and his tack of coddling his would-be subjects, Absalom builds a popular base of supporters for what soon becomes a clear bid for the crown. At the slightest insult he shows incredible wrath and he devises a vast conspiracy to usurp his father's throne.

For us readers, Absalom looks unquestionably evil. But what about his people? Do they see a wicked man? For those who don't have the luxury of knowing who has divine favor, one popular leader looks very much like another. David came to power by being a charismatic political entity in opposition to the establishment twice in Israel alone. He won the popularity contest against Saul and later he won the war against Avner. In the cycle of popular monarchy, Absalom's betrayal of David is just another stage. Without an abstract constant like law, the cult of personality creates violence and treachery. This was true for those in Samuel's time and it is true for us today. When we invest too much power in individuals, it becomes next to impossible to discern who will be a good leader and who is just another careerist.

David the King: The Tragedies of David

The family unit is perhaps the most frequently recurring motif in the Torah. From the first story of Genesis to the most recent supplementary texts of the Mishnah, everything comes down to fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. At every turn, the greatest joys are those that focus on the simple triumphs of kin while the darkest tragedies are stories of when families fall apart. For King David, the loss of his crown or his country would not hurt as much as the systematic destruction of his family. Following his sin with Bath-Sheba, his punishments all revolve around losses within his own house.

Chapter 12 of Second Samuel begins with the prophet Nathan visiting David. Nathan tells David a sort of fable about two men, one rich and one poor. The rich man has a large flock to his name while the poor man has only one ewe he tends lovingly. When a traveler comes through town, the rich man opts to use the poor man's ewe to feed and clothe his guest rather than provide from his own sizable assets. David, being so completely trapped in the mindset of a leader, takes the story literally and demands justice. Nathan then explains that, as far as God is concerned, David is like the rich man. He had more than any man in his nation, but he greedily snatched another man's meager portion, if only because he could. For killing Uriah and taking Bath-Sheba to be his wife, for destroying the sanctity of family, David calls down ruin on his own family.

The first strike against David is the loss of the child he conceived with Bath-Sheba. Only seven days after birth, the child dies of illness. There's a very interesting turn in these passages. While the child is sick, David fasts and sleeps on the ground, but when the child dies he resumes eating and returns to his house. He explains to his advisors that the penance was an attempt to appease God. Now that the child is dead, he has no reason to suffer. This paints David both as a pragmatist and as a man who has a surprisingly conversational relationship with God. There's an emotional emptiness to him after this episode, a sense that he is a man who shifts between agony and numbness.

It is that same numbness that compels David to order the murder of one of his own sons in chapter 13. Amnon, David's oldest son, conspires to rape his half-sister Tamar. After the deed is done, word gets back to David and he sets events in motion to end in Amnon's death. Following the killing, David receives false word that all of his sons have been killed. The symbolism of this tragedy is clear. Amnon is the heir to David's now-tainted throne. Like his father, Amnon gives in to the basest of his sexual proclivities and causes irreparable harm to his family in the process. All the same, by condemning one of his sons, David symbolically condemns them all. Like Saul before him, David attempts to do God's job. Though Amnon deserved death under the law, he never even stood trial. He was cut down, alone in the wilderness. A strand of that old chaos from the previous throne is in this episode. Order gives way to the caprice of kings, brothers set upon brothers and the lines between right and wrong blur until they lose all meaning.

David the King: Bath-Sheba

Given the detached, matter-of-fact language of Old Testament scripture, it's easy to overlook the humanity of the individuals in the stories. We are so quick to derive morals and explanations from the text that we skip some of the most important elements of Torah. As the sage Nachmanides encouraged, it is essential to interpret not just the law of Torah, but the heart as well. In the telling and re-telling of King David's rise and fall, his inexplicably selfish pursuit of Bath-Sheba (or Bat Sheva as the Hebrew reads) is a favorite passage. It is often taught as a moment of weakness, hubris or outright corruption, but there's so much more to it than that. While David's seduction of Bath-Sheba and the indirect killing of her husband are indeed David's greatest sins, they don't come out of nowhere. In fact, looking at David's entire history, such an episode seems practically inevitable.

Ever since he was very young, David had a habit of losing himself in ill-advised romances and friendships. He took several wives he probably should have left alone, such as the the former wife of the treacherous Naval, or Saul's daughter Michal. He also more than once entered into partnerships with the sons of his enemies, first with Jonathan and then with the son of a Philistine king. David's greatest weakness, perhaps his only weakness, is his desire to be loved by all of the wrong people.

Without fail, all of David's dangerous, complicated relationships lead to tragedy and disappointment. Whether it's an immediate problem or the seeds of something awful many years down the line, David's troubled social life leads to death, destruction and very nearly the end of his kingdom. In the tenth chapter of Second Samuel, we get a fitting precursor to the state of mind that drove David to pursue Bath-Sheba. When the Ammonite King Nahash, an old friend of David's, passes away, David sends emissaries to convey condolences and support for Hanun, the new king. Being ambitious and paranoid, Hanun decides that David's messengers are actually spies, so he humiliates them as a gesture of hostility. Before long, the Ammonites ally themselves with some of the lesser enemies of David's throne and they wage war against Judah.

As every one of David's military conflicts before it, the war with the Ammonites goes in David's favor, his reputation and battle prowess pushing the invading nations back. From the outside, this may look like just another victory for the great soldier king, but there's more tragedy here than the text overtly expresses. David isn't just fighting another enemy, he's being forced to kill his friends and the sons of his friends. As with the Philistines early in his reign, David faces betrayal and the dissolve of yet more human connections. He can't even send good wishes to friends anymore without his political station tainting the affair.

So, when David sees Bath-Sheba bathing on her roof, it doesn't seem so random and out of character for him to take her so crassly and send her husband to his death in battle. The David we have in chapter eleven of Second Samuel is a man who has spent the better part of his life being abandoned, betrayed and assaulted by even the best of his friends. Is it really so hard to believe that he would become jaded and misanthropic? The truth is that Uriah, Bath-Sheba's husband, is a lot like David was in his younger years. He's noble, honest and acutely aware of propriety. For David to doom him is as much an attack on his younger, happier self as it is a convenient way to oust the husband of his latest crush.

David's sin is not just his adultery and his condemnation of Uriah, but the abandonment of the hope he exhibited as a youth. This will lead to his downfall, but perhaps that was on purpose. In chapter eleven, David's disconnection from his humanity is made complete, and thus his ability to be an effective leader.

David the King: Mercy to Mephiboshet

When the people of Judah first demanded a king, it was out of desperation. There was a sense that everything was chaotic and that the entire civilization was on the brink of extinction. Foreign powers constantly assaulted the country with impunity, the fundamental laws of the society were being ignored or circumvented by the privileged and it seemed that even God had abandoned those who considered themselves chosen. Even for us readers, the disorder of this period becomes so commonplace that we forget just how savage everything was. Saul's reign did little to fix this state of perpetual decline. In chapters eight and nine of Second Samuel, it becomes increasingly clear that David's time on the throne isn't about improvement so much as it's about returning his nation to a livable condition.

Chapter eight of the book is dedicated to David's many conquests after the establishment of his kingship. In addition to routing the Philistines, he also takes on a number of other nearby enemies, going as far as Damascus. As with just about any ancient text, the extent of David's military prowess and the numbers involved with the individual wars are quite inflated. At one point the chapter claims some 22,000 infantry soldiers in David's army, which was something of a physical impossibility during that period and in that location. Ancient Israel simply didn't have the population or raw resources to create, outfit and feed such a massive army.

Once again, we have a biblical passage that diverges from reality, so we have to ask why. The clearest motivation for this hyperbole of martial might is simply an attempt to instill pride in the people who read the book. It's a moment in which exiled Jews can say, "We weren't always a meek minority". Taking this from a different angle, there's another lesson about the nature of nationhood and civilization in general. Just like last week's passages and their ironic claim of the perpetuity of David's throne, there's a warning implicit in David's supposedly massive army. If one kingdom's military was once an unstoppable juggernaut and now no longer exists, does that not imply that there is no such thing as an army that cannot be defeated? For Jews in exile, there's a kind of comfort in this sentiment. Whether it's David's 22,000-deep infantry, the Third Reich's 18.1 million total servicemen during its decade-long existence, or even the United States' current 2 million individuals in active and reserve duty, no military is so large or elite that it will exist forever. For the small cultures of the world, this is reassuring. For the large, it's humbling.

Though David's conquests in chapter eight are meant to paint him as a strong, proficient ruler, there's yet another element to his military campaign. David isn't assaulting other nations for glory, profit or malice, he's simply setting his house in order. At least according to the book, David dedicates the spoils to religious ends and not to his own treasury, and the enemies he fights are those who attacked Israel and Judah many times in the past. However grand and violent this period is, its purpose is the re-establishment of stability and law. David is mostly cleaning up bands of raiders, not toppling sovereign nations for the sake of empire.

As depicted in chapter nine, David isn't exactly wrathful. When the time comes to face the many internal problems of his country, David inquires after the remaining members of Saul's fallen house. The only living heir to Saul's line is the crippled son of Jonathan, Mephiboshet. He has been living in the country with someone named Machir, unable to have much of a life because of his physical disability. David calls Mephiboshet to his court and grants him the remainder of Saul's familial land, also inviting him to live among the nobility under David's own patronage. This isn't so much an act of extraordinary kindness as it is a recognition of established law. According to the Torah, one generation is not automatically supposed to bear the guilt of their parents' sins. Mephiboshet is two whole generations removed from any wrongdoing and he never challenged David's rule. He is considered therefore without sin and is entitled to the inheritance that should have been passed down to him after the death of his father and grandfather. This is David's way, at least for most of his rule. He attempts to create order through a combination of national security and unwavering interpretation of the law. This is why he is considered a great king.

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