David

A Man after God's Own Heart

Benjamin J. M. Johnson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781532631481
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Biographie biblique

David is one of the most complex and fascinating characters in all of literature. His story exists at a crucial point in the biblical narrative where God turns toward committing to monarchy in Israel. He is the slayer of Goliath, the hero of Israel, and God's chosen king. Yet, he is also a manipulator, adulterer, and murderer. This book provides a broad audience of students, lay readers, and scholars with a close reading of David's story, presenting scholarly study of this fascinating and crucial character in an accessible and engaging manner. By carefully presenting David's story, this book addresses how it is possible to consider a flawed and imperfect character like David as a man after God's own heart.

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Introduction

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

“David was a successful monarch, but he was a vile human being.”

—Joel Baden1

“David is good and evil, hot and cold, lovable and worthy of admiration, frightening in his disregard for the welfare of others. ”

—K. L. Noll2

“. . . my servant David, who kept my commandments and who walked after me with all his heart, doing only what was right in my eyes. . .”

—God3

“What have I done now?”

—David4

David has been called “the first human being in world literature.”5 That’s quite a big claim. If it is true, then perhaps understanding David will help us understand something significant about what it means to be human. However, in reading David’s story, we cannot help but resonate with Nabal, a wealthy landowner, who asks, “Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse?” (1 Sam 25:10). As can be seen by the above quotations, there are many and various answers to this question. David is perhaps the most well-known and prominent character in the Old Testament. Only Moses even comes close. He is also perhaps the most interesting, complicated, and opaque character in ancient literature. He is the slayer of Goliath, the foil of Saul, the friend of Jonathan, the chosen one of God, the poet of Israel, and the paradigm of the good king. However, he is also the ambitious warrior, the deceiver of many, the raper of Bathsheba, the murderer of Uriah, and the Michael Corleone style mafioso who ends his days by giving his son a hit list. He is, in short, a complicated character. Sometimes, however, in our popular conception of David we are too quick to see in two dimensions. He is either the purely pious pastoral poet who is especially attuned to God’s heart or the murderous Machiavellian mafioso whose path to the throne is paved with the blood of his enemies. It is easy to get literary whiplash from the portrayal of David in the biblical narrative.

However, it is not good enough simply to leave our understanding of David as a literary mess, a complex set of characteristics that fails to cohere. Because as strange as his portrayal is, as diverse a persona as he appears to be, he is one of the most important characters in all literary history. It is hard to think of any character in history who has had as big an impact on the world as David. One has to turn to Jesus of Nazareth or Julius Caesar to find someone as significant as David. He is the founding king of the nation of Israel, he is associated with the bulk of the psalms in the Old Testament, and God’s commitment to him (2 Samuel 7) is both a driving force in the rest of the Old Testament and foundational for our understanding of Jesus. In short, David is a big deal.

But David might offer us even more than that. As Baruch Halpern writes in his aptly titled David’s Secret Demons, “David, in a word, is human, fully, four-dimensionally, recognizably human. He grows, he learns, he travails, he triumphs, and he suffers immeasurable tragedy and loss. He is the first human being in world literature.”6 What does it mean to say that David is the first human being in world literature? In a justly famous essay, literary critic Erich Auerbach argued that biblical narrative was essentially different from its classic counterpart, the epic poetic tradition of the Greek world. He noted that in the Greek epic tradition (and we could include other ancient Near Eastern epic works in this list) characters are one-dimensional; they wear their heart on their sleeve so to speak. For example, Odysseus is wily and clever and Achilles is the personification of rage. In contrast, Auerbach said, “[h]ow fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul and David! How entangled and stratified are such human relations as those between David and Absalom, between David and Joab!”7 Thus, the biblical tradition gives us more fully rounded characters, with depth and complexity. In David we see “a symbol of the complexity and ambiguity of human experience itself.”8

We live in an era that loves complexity and ambiguity. If Game of Thrones, the wildly popular HBO series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin, is compelling in part because of its grittiness, its intrigue, and complexity in the portrayal of their characters, then the David story ought to draw our attention because the author of the David story beat Martin there by a few thousand years!

David’s story is an exploration in leadership. It is an exploration in human ambition and human relationships. But more than that, it is an exploration of what it means to live in relation to God. Our story claims, as we will see, that David is a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam 13:14). What that means, we will have to see as we study his story. However, David’s dynamic relationship with God offers a provocative paradigm for what it might mean to be a person of faith. If David is a man after God’s own heart in some way, then, as one scholar has put it, “the question about who David really is emerges as a corollary to the mystery of who God is.”9 Perhaps, the more we dive into the character of David, we may understand something of the character of God.

Kaleidoscope of a King

So what is it about David that makes him so complex? It is the diverse portrayal of him in the biblical narrative. I had a seminary professor who was fond of saying that if you have a settled theologi...