The Star of David
David was 60 and already grey, when Nathan came before him to pronounce the judgment of God for his sin against Uriah the Hittite.
“Henceforth the sword will never depart from your house”, the prophet proclaimed, while scribes recorded every word for posterity.
Silence fell in the hall, after Nathan had spoken. The smile inside hardly escaped David to form a ripple on his lips, but the seer seemed to capture his mood.
The man of God said:
“Has the king no shame?”
David waved at the four scribes located in each their corner of the room, and they immediately stopped writing.
“Shame, my brother, is all I have. And sadness too, most of all for Uriah. He was my loyal servant, my friend and my trusted brother in arms. I have given him over to death. May he rest in peace. May his sacrifice be of use to God. But I am still the king.”
Uriah had come to David already when he hid in the Cave of Adullam. As the drunkards sang in the taverns: The very presence of the brave Hittite had frightened enemies, when he fought besides David in many skirmishes – even if the battles were fewer than the enthusiastic composers recalled.
Of the thirty chiefs who joined David in his youth Uriah was the only one who had followed him to the depth of his degradation, serving with him as an officer of the ranks of the Philistines and still supporting him, as he later became the leader of a band of outlaws roaming the countryside of the kingdom of Judah.
Other brave men had fallen, and some of them David had banned for fear of treachery. The price on his head had weighed heavy on him from the moment Saul proclaimed David a traitor to the nation.
For 17 years he had not had a moment of peace, and in many of his nightmares he had been about fighting for his life against his own men.
His youth had passed with pointless battles no longer meaningful in a political context or worth remembering for any other sake than their value to the army of bards singing their praises to the divine king, the Son of God.
“Someone greater than I will come”, he had often reminded the poets composing verses to be read aloud in the streets and sung in the synagogues in his name or to his honor. “The glory belongs to God.”
Still the incessant praise rang through the days and the nights, as people celebrated their new belief that they would rise as a regional superpower. David, they sang, was the greatest king Israel had ever had.
That much was true. He was the second king, and the one before him was mad.
In the style of Philistines Saul had fallen on his sword, all his glory stripped away. He died with no hope of redemption nor a shred of the faith that had possessed him when he had been anointed.
David, however, had become great. He had fortified the walls around Jerusalem.
He had expanded the boundaries of Israel and Judah. And he had heavily taxed the provinces to collect gold and building materials for the temple that would become the triumphant accomplishment of his unborn son, Solomon, whom David already loved above all of his other children.
Now the holy man, the seer, had returned to him. His name was no longer Samuel. Samuel had passed away. He had gone wherever holy men go when they die, leaving behind but a carcass and his disciple Nathan, who had now arrived to proclaim the death of Solomon for giving the enemies of God a reason to blaspheme.
The power of these clergymen should never be underestimated, thought David.
One could only speculate as to how they received their insights. Perhaps God had really spoken to him?
David could still recall what it was like to receive a premonition this way, and the startling effect it had on those who observed how a hint or an omen or an intuition could decide the outcome of a battle.
Once, David had felt as close to God as any man of the cloth.
Perhaps Nathan had simply heard the rumors, the gossip of women whispering about David’s new beautiful but not quite innocent wife, and of the convenient accident that befell her former husband.
Perhaps some generals had informed Nathan. They were always conspiring for some purpose, whether it was to start a new pointless war or to simply reinforce their own power, or both. Some of them had political ambitions. Some were still secretly loyal to the followers of Saul.
This is a country in which conspiracy is always brewing, David thought. And if it is not conspiracy, it is the suspicion of conspiracy, or both.
His mind was wandering.
Many times at night and sometimes in the daytime David had envisioned Uriah by the gate of the besieged city. David knew from first hand his reckless style of combat that so resembled his own – leaping across trenches with his spear drawn and his sword oiled in the sheath, forcing aside even his own in order to become the first to draw blood.
Killing him had been so easy. As always with efficient killing it was a matter of timing.
In the case of Uriah it had been a matter of days. Had they besieged Rabbah only three more days, taking it would have been easy and likely without casualty among the officers.
More troops would have arrived from the other provinces of Israel. And there might even have been an accord, for several high ranking officials among the entrenched Ammonites were solicitous.
But the signs of pregnancy could not be hidden. And so his last friend had fallen for the sword of the Ammonites, as they broke out from the gate in desperation with even their women assigned to battle on the walls, pouring rocks and burning tar on the heads of the attackers.
But this was no reason for the king to smile. How could he, himself a soldier, but mourn the death of someone so brave?
The four scribes – there were always four scribes present to record official events in the audience hall of the castle – sat completely still with their pens floating in the air and with that feigned look of indifference on their faces as they greedily sucked up every controversy and intrigue they witnessed.
Nathan stood still too, as if he was awaiting further reply than the king had already given. As if the king was expected to give explanations.
This was an insolent prophet, young and a little too confident, a little too eloquent for his age. Surely he had extraordinary gifts of the spirit. Of course, David thought, one of these gifts might be a direct family tie to Joab.
Still, in spite of the cunning gathering of intelligence – even a king had to be surprised by the industriousness of these religious madmen – or the actual appearance of an angel or a vision from
God in his dreams, it struck David how little Nathan perceived of the truth he spoke.
He knew what he had read in scrolls. Perhaps he had some accurate insights, some words or a visit by a heavenly messenger from time to time.
But what could he possibly know about God?
To understand God you have to be a king. You have to know what it means to distribute provisions, to plan a conquest, and to administer death. This is what God does. It is the part of his nature that is hidden. It is why the prophets say that God hides in the shadows. To rule, David thought,is to conceal your hand in events.
His heart was heavy. On the orders of the king the generals had posted Uriah and his small squadron of Hittite elite forces in the front of the offensive.
No native born Judean would ever question such a priority. After all, even friendly tribes existed merely by the lenience of the God of Israel and for the sake of His glory, useful as vassals to the heavenly kingdom or instruments of its grandeur.
Uriah, of course, would have seen it coming. A seasoned veteran. Part of the planning of many of battles in the past. Bound by duty he would have walked towards his fate, resolved, like a condemned man facing execution.
This thought had crossed David’s mind several times.
There was the night Uriah had spent on the doorstep to the palace, claiming with the demonstrative zeal of a privileged immigrant officer that he would refrain from intercourse with his wife and instead stand guard for his king.
That incident too had become an indispensable part of the gossip surrounding the event.
Now even children knew of the secret diplomacy taking place between Jerusalem and Rabbah, and privates were openly discussing the hazardous nature of the offensive.
Enemies of the house of David spoke of the courage of this man who had stepped boldly into death, knowing that life was stripped away from him by a friend and a patron who had become an enemy due to the sin of lust.
But that was just the surface of it.
From where David sat – on the gold encrusted throne with the four seraphim and the star with the six apexes, in full control of a kingdom – it was all just the trivial speculations of bored and overzealous public servants.
What was he to say about it? Uriah had gotten the best of life. His fate had not been the worst. Seldom David remembered the Hittite with a downtrodden spirit or less than a grin to spare harrowing oppression or for the most startling threat of violence.
Even Saul was the more fortunate, and his death the death of such a man as David had once been. It was the death that only a warrior could conceive of, but in no manner a tragedy like it was depicted in song. As a king his bride had never been soiled.
The singing, David thought. I wish to God they would stop the singing.
In his own desiccated heart there were no more praises.
The psalms had served him well in the caves and in the trenches, as it is always the case with poetry. The men had been united by the singing. Their spirits had been strengthened by supplications.
But David had spent it all in those 17 years as a public enemy and an outcast and a leader of rascals and highwaymen. The thing they called faith, his passionate search for God – it was over.
As he sat down on the throne for the first time during the official coronation he had listened to the ceremonial words imagining they were his eulogy.
The former David was no more. The rest of it was to be jurisprudence and political philosophy. Forming alliances with these, banning those, not unlike what Saul had in his time done to protect his own throne.
And it will be so for Solomon, David thought. A battle against chaos, a struggle to retain what has been gained. That is the burden of man, always to glance with distrust at his neighbour, and to fear for his life at their hands. God has placed this burden on us. I will teach him so he will never forget.
The prophet might have his own mind about it, but David would never put away Bathsheba. She would give him his heir, and his name too would be Solomon. Even the moral indignation of God would not stop it.
Whatever God decides to do to David, David is too old to care. It was a promise, and the promise is to be honored. It was a part of the bargain, my great prize for enduring all those hardships: My son is to be the greatest king of Israel ever, a man renowned for building the temple of God.
Thoughts, cold calculations of an almost military nature, rushed through his mind:
God, in spite of all his claims of righteousness, has revealed his hand. He has a purpose with the house of David, as He does with Israel. Some grand political and military plan is to be put in motion through this tiny nation. That is evidenced by all the unusual effects surrounding its emergence. That is the sole conclusion to be drawn from a fate like mine.
In a sense he had done worse than Saul ever did in his madness. Some part of his soul, not entirely disassociated from God, was fully aware that he deserved to die.
But David was staring at the pattern of events, and from all he could see his timing when compared to the plans of God, was favorable.
There was, he had often noticed, a gift of luck bestowed on all who had been touched by God, chosen for his inscrutable purposes, even from the days of Noah.
They got away with things, because in the ultimate mathematics of heavenly bureacracy, their moral shortcomings were outweighed not so much by grace and forgiveness as by political necessity.
And 17 years as a victim of political necessities, abundant with scheming and tactical maneuvering, David had become a veteran in the discipline: When you know the intention of someone you also know their heart. You know their fears.
And what God fears, more than anything, is to be humiliated. In that regard He is similar to men. Therefore, what David desires, is convenient to God.
For all their wisdom, and all their moralizing, and all their spiritual insights, the priests and the prophets knew nothing of political reality. That was also their spiritual limitation. They gazed at the stars, seeing in them cloudy formations hinting at this or that, but proving nothing.
While to David the same perspective was like gazing at the face of God:
His will is written there, and for those who understand the nature of ultimate responsibility, responsibility for a nation, the future is predictable.
Like Samuel had no thought of what he had sentenced David to with the anointing he poured out on his head so many years ago, this Nathan character was clueless to the meaning of even his own words.
But David saw, through the very words of his condemnation, into a bright light that illuminated a part of his heart he had been unaware of.
Until the very moment the verdict was passed he had not been able to see through the veil. It obscured everything, even his understanding of his own actions. It was a crime crouching in the dark, cowering like a god of its own.
All along he had known that what drove him was more than mere lust: Surely the king could have had any virgin in Israel by the wink of a hand, and probably matrons as well, and the king was already past the prime of his passion.
Neither was it envy against Uriah, the only man he had ever considered more fearless than himself and at least as noble. Even if the gods they worshipped certainly differed on crucial points, David had seen his own reflection in Uriah.
He had no name for what had taken over him. He was not sure a word even existed in Hebrew or in any other language, but it had taken him and consumed him.
Like an evil spirit from God – perhaps even the same that had possessed his predecessor – it had penetrated his heart and filled him with a sense of finality, not unlike that a brave man will feel as he ventures towards certain death.
It was something he knew he had to do.
Yes, her beauty was alluring. Yes, she had many features resembling Micah, the daughter of Saul, the first of his three wives and of all the women he had known – whether wives or mistresses or harlots – the one who had loved him the best.
She had been taken from him, when he was banished from Israel, and the price on his head proclaimed at every public square in every town in the nation.
Traitor, they had called him, even if it was not so. Fornicator. Outlaw. Highwayman. None of these things had been true or even conceivable to David, before he was anointed.
Had he even imagined himself great as he left his herd of sheep to battle the giant, David would have condemned his own soul. He was 13 when Samuel had come to him and poured out the balsamic oil on his hair.
The sweet scent of it, and the allure of the promise in it. Nothing had escaped him, and the memory of the moment was still vivid in his mind. He could even hear the birds shrieking in the sky and recall the formation of the clouds.
He had looked up, and there, somewhere far above him, God had looked down in him and chosen him for something marvellous.
Then later, all the accusations became true.
One by one, as if they were steps to the underworld, each event had plunged him deeper into degradation. Violence, bloodshed and threat had become his companions.
He was 15 when he slew his first opponent, the giant with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.
In his thirties he found himself at the head of a Philistine army ready to invade Israel. He had been so excited about it he had been convinced the Holy Spirit had come upon him. He had thought, hoped for, believed, that this was his moment, the moment of reckoning and of truth – but the moment had passed on, into another moment and yet another.
When the Philistines, arguing for a long time among themselves, finally discarded him for being circumcized – unreliable in a campaign against other Jews – David had gathered as many men of all tribes that would follow him, and he had taken to the road to plunder and extort.
For 17 years his fate had been out of reach. And just like scars grew on his arms and his thighs and his chests, his heart had hardened.
The change was subtle and undetectable to everyone, even to those who were closest to him. With power his soul had become shrouded in engima and a stranger to all. Now all they could see was his triumphs.
There were the skirmishes in the caves, where he had thrice spared the life of Saul – why do you persecute me? – and later the wars between the two factions in which David had finally come out victorious.
There were the songs of his mercy, the tales of his friendship with Jonathan, and the famous legend of his battle against Goliath.
All of it fable, thought David, not so much because the stories are not true as for the truth they conveniently ignore.
And now, for them to say that he had acted out of petty motives when having his future queen visiting him secretly in his room – it was an insult far worse than having some skinny prophet in rough clothing chastising him for it.
There was nothing petty about it. His actions sealed the fate of a nation.
For the archangel of the night, David recalled, had stood beside him on the roof, as he watched Bathseba bathing.
David had not seen him as such, but he had felt the presence of someone almost omnipotent, yet not quite. The creature had whispered into his ear in an audible voice, but words too subtle for the mind to comprehend.
The sound had been like the singing of cherubim or the sight of God walking on the mountains.
He had been lifted up above the ground, above the rooftops of Jerusalem, and carried by the wind to a place where he could see everything for what it was, or so he imagined: The world he knew of, and even worlds he had not heard of from the salesmen and adventurors in the market places, had all been stretched out beneath his feet.
There, floating above the clouds like an eagle, yet able to see the tiniest details of the most insignificant events taking place on Earth, David had understood what little his life amounted to in the eyes of God.
And if this was true to the king, how much more to his servant?
Later, under changing moons, the spirit of God inside him had interpreted the words and their meanings, laying it out in the language of frightful dreams.
They had taken Micah from him, he recalled, and he had loved her more than any other woman, because he was young, and she was his first.
Now her kisses that would once greet him in the morning were given to another man. Her body would lie beneath another man, and the delight of her beauty would be replaced by dirty caverns and improvised barracks in which the archangel of time bleeded David of his youth, drop by drop, without mercy or remorse or apology, until there was nothing but the scars and the grey hairs left to testify about it.
In the morning he saw that not even a single friend was left, not even Joab, who would look at him sideways like a man who dreaded the fire of his own tongue.
David had spent his life in servitude, in distress, wrongfully persecuted and expected to be patient, to be grateful even, because some day some grand destiny awaited him. But as time passed this destiny – his future appointment as a king – had ceased to matter.
It had taken place, this shift, long before Bathsheba: Nothing moved his heart, and the luxury of his surroundings merely increased his melancholic mood.
He brooded over his memories – not only those of treachery but also the pure exaltation of dancing among the pilgrims going for Pesach or the serenity of watching the birds in the sky as he played the harp for the beasts in the field.
Yet he had kept his golden tongue. The ability to compose verses and dictate eloquent phrases to the glory of God prevailed in him, while all he felt inside was an emptiness.
Even as despair showed through in his verses, nobody dared or cared to recognize it. It was another of those truths so conveniently ignored. It was the pangs of unrequited love.
So, he had called in Bathsheba, who was more than willing to accommodate him. He loved her, of course. There could be no doubt about that. He had doomed a nation for her sake. He had betrayed the very vision of God.
The full extent of the damage became apparent to him only after Nathan had spoken: “The sword will never depart from your house.”
David knew that the prosperity of the entire nation of Israel would flow from his house. Every king to ever reign, even the fabled Masiach, would be counted from the house of David.
And so, the sword would be the fate of even that King of Peace. Even his home would be torn apart, as David had experienced it, and ultimately God – that God of the wilderness who took such delight in sacrifices – would have to make a sacrifice of his own.
That – the feeling that he had for once in his life touched God, even if it was with the edge of a sword – made David smile.
It made him feel, for a moment, like the shepherd boy who had gathered those smooth rocks by the creek, while the giant roared his taunts across the battlefield.
The very concept of God taking his wives and giving them to someone else, even publicly – as shameful as that might be – seemed to David a trivial burden placed on him by a forgetful God.
That too was a part of his fleeting amusement.
Was The LORD asleep, when his first wife was so taken from David?
Through reports secretly brought to him from the court David had been able to follow the life of his first wife as he scrambled and skirmished his way through the wilderness pursued by the royal guard of Israel.
Likewise, he assumed, reports of his exploits and trials had reached Micah back in Jerusalem. What had she thought about her fate? What had she felt in his absence? How heavy had her tears fallen?
In fact, everything about David had happened in public, and it was now a matter of public record as well as many a fanciful reproduction.
Everything except for that which he had conveyed in his hymns, the sense of abandonment and pain – my God, why have you forsaken me? – and that which he had never conveyed at all.
For a moment – as long as the smile lingered on his lips – David forgot about his concern for his children. He knew that what the prophets spoke would come to pass. The price they had to pay was to be horrifying for sure.
But even with that knowledge David delighted in the stunning realization that he, a mortal man, had overturned God’s devices and put the LORD of Hosts – the mighty one who moves the very sky and shakes the foundations of the Earth – at odds with Himself.
When all is said and done the king would have his queen. What was the rest to him? It was like the heartaches of a king to his lowliest slave: Irrelevant and beyond comprehension.
And likewise, what was his heartache to God, who had set the stars on the night sky – even his own star, whether it rose or fell, was merely one grain of sand in the desert, and his most deepfelt sorrow little less than the anguish a man would feel at the sight of a dismembered ant.
Such is the nature of the God that once commanded the Israelites to become a nation, and to serve his purposes on Earth: Only by foiling his plans may you entice him to care, thought David blasphemously. In the end we are all sacrificial lambs in the greater plan, whether we know it or not. So with Uriah. His blood may cry to the heavens for vengeance, but it also cries about something else.
It was something deeper, more profound than David had ever thought of her heard of in any sermon – almost like the truth in the mouth of an infant – but it escaped him now: The Grand Shepherd David had sung to when passing time in the fields watching over his father’s herd of sheep had somehow turned into a grand bureaucrat who only spoke, when condemnation was called for.
This too would never be put on record by notaries or discussed by the noble members of the sanhedrin.
David’s parting words to Nathan were, in the formal style of communications between the court and the clergy:
“I have sinned against the LORD.”
The scribes, on the king’s command, began to write again.
“The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die”, Nathan replied.
To David the seconds that had passed felt like an eternity in which he had seen both his own soul and that of God revealed, as much as God can be said to have one.
Like so often when accident befalls a man, right in the moment they feel nothing but a heightened sense of awareness, an invigorating feeling of being truly alive. Only later, when the consequences must be suffered through many a lonely day and night, where the mind is wrapped up in its own private recollections, the depth of a tragedy is revealed.
David felt it: The elation of watching the world unravel before his eyes, and everything solid turn into air.
To Nathan it had just been less than a minute, even if it was to be the most significant in his life as a servant of God. His name would be on record for speaking truth to power.
As Nathan had announced to the king in the proud prophetic tradition of Moses and Samuel:
“Whatever is done in secret will come into the light.”
The scribes would make sure of that.