King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Kirsch Jonathan

Author:Kirsch, Jonathan [Kirsch, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2015-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE FRIEND OF DAVID

Just as David seems to have mimicked the pagan practices of the Canaanites, he appears to have modeled his cabinet after the court of Egypt or the “Egyptianized” monarchies of Canaan and Phoenicia. A “rational and bureaucratic mode of statecraft,” proposes Joel Rosenberg, “is David's specific innovation.”10

Thus the duties of the man described in the Bible as a “remembrancer” may have been comparable to those of his Egyptian counterpart—“a master of ceremonies and foreign minister”—and the scribe may have been comparable to “the personal secretary of the pharaoh and his chef de bureau.”11 The “Friend of David” may have been a kind of privy counselor and marriage broker patterned after an Egyptian courtier with the formal title of “the Friend of the King,”12 and David's corvée resembles the program of forced labor by which the pharaohs built their mighty temples and pyramids. Even the soldiers known as the Thirty may hark back to the “royal cortege” of thirty men who served in the court of Ramses II of Egypt three hundred years before the supposed lifetime of David.13

David, who had sown the seeds of more than one tribal blood feud during his years as a bandit and a mercenary, learned a practical lesson from the pagan kings whom he had served. Thus, he chose to surround himself with a personal bodyguard that consisted entirely of foreigners14—the “Cherethites” and “Pelethites” whose duty was to protect David from his own people are understood to have been “Sea Peoples” who, like the Philistines, came to the land of Israel from Crete or elsewhere in the Aegean. Some scholars propose that the Pelethites were, in fact, Philistines, and the Bible itself confirms that David's foreign mercenaries included a contingent of Gittites, that is, men from the Philistine city-state of Gath, the hometown of Goliath. (2 Sam. 15:18)

Even something so fundamental to the biblical history of ancient Israel as the “twelve tribes” may have been an innovation of King David. A fundamental assumption of the biblical authors is that the twelve tribes originated with the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob, but the “twelveness” of the tribes is not always in evidence in the Bible—a close reading reveals that the total number of tribes ranges from ten to thirteen.15 So the conventional wisdom of biblical scholarship—and the Bible itself—holds that David's single greatest achievement of statecraft was to forge the clans and tribes known loosely as “Israelites,” including his own tribe of Judah, into a single nation called “Israel” and to place the nation under the governance of a king, an army, and a royal bureaucracy.

“Israel was no longer a tribal confederacy led by a charismatic nagid who had been acclaimed king, but a complex empire organized under the crown,” explains John Bright. “While David's court was no picture of sybaritic luxury, it was hardly the rustic thing that Saul's had been.”16 Indeed, David proved himself to be a daring and energetic leader who constructed “a fully imperial conception of kingship,” and did so “out of whole cloth.

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