Bad King David – 9 June 2024

Psalm 138
1 Samuel 8:4-20

Sudan and Darfur have been back in the news this past year, though stories of the atrocities there have sometimes been lost in the noise of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Hamas and Israel. All three conflicts have resulted in war crimes. In particular, the Sudanese conflict involves a re-branded Janjaweed, the Arab militia responsible for genocide in Darfur in the past.

In truth, we might not have paid that much attention to the civil war in Sudan even if we didn’t have the other two conflicts. We have become desensitized when it comes to coups and conflicts in the global south, especially in Africa. The coup d’etat of the week may be funded by Russia, but the face of the rebellion will be some officer in the nation’s military, and often not even a general. It is not at all shocking to hear that the new boss is a colonel, a major, sometimes even a lowly captain.

Today’s scripture reading from First Samuel records a pivotal moment in the history of the varied peoples of Palestine in the early Iron Age. As Christians, we tend to read backwards, seeing these events through the lens of Davidic propaganda and Messianic fulfillment, but I’d like to suggest we’d do better to think of modern coups and conflicts. 

The transformation from a loose confederation into a royal nation-state triggered a brief moment of glory, followed by a long and painful decline. There is a tension that runs through the Bible, the histories and the prophetic texts, that finds its way into the formation of Christian belief, that indeed still exists in our faith tradition and in our secular affairs. But let’s focus on the story and the character of David.

The Israelites were a loose confederation around 1000 B.C.E., a mix of native Canaanites and folks who had escaped slavery in Egypt. The culture was still forming, and was nowhere near the text-based ethical monotheism we’d come to associate with Judaism. There was no Temple, no king, and polytheism was the norm. We can still see this is in scripture, especially psalms that position Yahweh as the chief god in a pantheon of gods.

They were definitely moving toward some innovative beliefs. They rejected god-kings, something all too common in Egypt, Rome, and to Canaan’s east. They saw humans as being made in God’s image, but banned depictions of God as a human. And the reason they had no king is because God was their only proper ruler. Human leaders would rise up as needed, stories told in the Book of Judges, but otherwise they were expected to act as a community of mutuality and accountability.

A new group had settled on the coast in the region that is today called Gaza. The Israelite tribes saw the Philistines as a threat, and they may well have been. Tribal raids and expansion were the norm in any case, so there was always antagonism at the borders. When the people asked for a king, Samuel warned them that there is a cost, a literal cost, to having a king, and Yahweh revealed that their choice of a human king was a rejection of divine rule.

Sunday school flattens the story and hits the kid-friendly highlights, ignoring the sexual violence and the contradictions, for the accounts in 1^st Samuel come from two sources that do not always agree.

The Children’s Bible version lets us know that Saul was chosen as king, but fell out of God’s favor. Samuel then turned to the House of Jesse, anointing the youngest son, David, as the future king. David was present at a battle between the Israelites and the Philistines, though we have two different explanations. He is the only one brave enough to face the Philistine champion, the giant Goliath, who he kills. David then comes of age in Saul’s court, close to the king’s son, Jonathan. When David falls out of favor with Saul, he flees for his life. Saul and three of his sons are killed in combat with the Philistines, and David, who we remember has been chosen by God and anointed by Samuel, becomes king. The end, now let’s talk about David’s son, wise King Solomon.

Except, of course, that isn’t the whole story. The whole story is messy and definitely R-rated. There is a reason biblical scholar Baruch Halpern described David as the first fully realized character in world literature.

Some highlights in the unwinding of the Children’s Bible version: In 2^nd Samuel 21:19, Elhanan gets credit for killing Goliath. Even if David did so, it is remarkable, but not miraculous. Ancient warfare consisted of heavy infantry, light infantry, and cavalry. Like the game “rock, paper, scissors,” each had an advantage against one opponent and a disadvantage against another. David, mobile and using projectiles, had an advantage over the heavily armored Goliath, who was prepared for close combat.

When David fell out of favor with Saul, he became a bandit, in one account, or a traitor working for the Philistines in the other. Neither is a “good guy.” After Saul and three of his sons were killed in combat, David engaged in civil war against the surviving son, and eventually slaughtered all challengers from the House of Saul, claiming the throne for himself. 

He then conquered Jerusalem, an independent city, and unified the loose confederation as a kingdom, for even under Saul, some tribes had remained independent.

The text then tells us that Yahweh enters an exclusive covenant with the House of David. Just as God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, God promises David that a member of his house would always rule over the Israelites. This royalist propaganda turns out to be a problem, since the House of David collapses. It is also the reason the followers of Jesus go to such lengths to position him as a descendant of David.

Though it is definitely not in the Children’s Bible, many adults will have at least heard of the next story. While his army is off campaigning against the Ammonites, David, who is still in Jerusalem, sees the beautiful wife of his general, Uriah. He summons her to the palace. The text is not clear that the sex is consensual. In any case, the wife, Bathsheba, becomes pregnant. David, hoping to hide his indiscretion, summons Uriah back to the capital, hoping he will sleep with his wife and assume the child is his own. When that doesn’t happen, David arranges for Uriah’s death in combat, then marries Bathsheba. The child she is carrying dies, though she later gives birth to Solomon.

It gets worse, including a rebellion by one of his many sons, yet more sexual violence, and an attempt to usurp the throne by another son. It is enough to make Shakespeare’s Lear look like a Disney character. The authors try to give David a good death, but it is hard to ignore everything that went before. The man is at best a bandit, usurper, adulterer, and murderer, at worst, also a traitor and a rapist.

This is not “good” King David. This is “bad” King David.

Our engagement with our faith tradition, like our engagement with more recent history, matters because it influences how we engage with the world today. Anyone who has been paying any attention to the rise of authoritarianism today will inevitably think back to the exact same patterns almost a century ago. In the same way, a faith for our times must move beyond the Children’s Bible and find itself in the beautiful and grotesque, in the best and bravest of humanity, but also in the cravenness and failure.

The heretics of American Christian Nationalism have been supporting an extremist agenda in support of an Israeli ethno-state that replicates borders that were sort of true for about eighty years almost three thousand years ago because they have turned the pious fiction of the Revelation to John of Patmos and the propaganda around the Davidic monarchy into an action plan, which may also explain why they hate democracy so much.

The legitimacy of Jesus is no more dependent upon the promise of eternal rule by the House of David than it is upon the virginity of his mother. 

The legitimacy of Jesus is based on the power of his teaching, on the love he embodied that was so powerful that it could make broken people whole, on a community that experienced him as still real and present with them even after they saw him tortured and executed, and on the fact that we continue to draw inspiration from his teaching, the prophetic tradition he embodied, and the work of his followers, in that first generation of the Apostolic Age recorded in scripture, and down through the centuries, in music and in art, in schools and in hospitals, in the courageous witness for justice, love, and peace, from the PTSD-plagued Saint Francis to a nerdy theologian executed at Flossenbürg in the final weeks of World War II, to faithful Christians creating a safe space for members of the LGBTQI+ community in Elmira on a Saturday in June.

The story does not have to be clean and perfect. Creation is absolutely glorious, but it is messy by nature and does not fit into the tidy boxes we create. Our story at Park is messy at times, with a rebellion or two. Your story is going to be messy at times. Mine is too.We find meaning, hope, and inspiration, in prayer, in story, and in community. May that ever be so. Amen.