Comments on King David in 1 and 2 Samuel

Comments on 1 Samuel 16:14-23; 17:1-58; 18:1-16; 2 Samuel 1:1-27; 11:1-27; 18:1-33 

Biblical Literacy, pages 96-109

Whenever you go to a funeral, you always learn something about the deceased that you didn’t know before. When different people speak about him or her, it is amazing how their perspectives differ and their stories change, as if they were turning the prism of someone’s life in the sun, and bright colors were springing out and dancing on the walls.

In reading these passages from the Book of Samuel (originally one book in Hebrew) that are stories about David, it is disconcerting at first to find that they don’t fit together (Dr. Walter Brueggemann says that about all of Scripture). Pieces seem to be missing. We want our childhood hero, who slayed Goliath with a slingshot, to be all of a piece. We don’t want to hear that Elhanan did it in 2 Samuel 21:19. We want to see some resemblance in David's old age to that magnificent impression that Michelangelo left us in Florence.

But then, I guess there will be lots of different stories told at our funerals, too, and many of them will be suppressed out of respect for the surviving relatives. Some will be folklore and not true at all. Not many lives are all of a piece. Not many are free from shadows and wounds and dark places. We just had the ferocious example of Samson In the previous passages from Dr. Beal’s book. Are we shocked more by David’s sending Uriah the Hittite into the front lines to be killed so he can marry Bathsheba or by Samson’s slaughtering a thousand Philistine’s with a jawbone?

Some things CAN be explained. Too bad the deceased are not there to do so if the stories turn ugly. Saul has this wonderful relationship with David when he has him play the lyre during his terrifying bo uts of illness; but then he doesn’t seem to know who he is when he first goes out against the Philistines, and then Saul tries to kill David a short time later. All this can be explained, I guess, by Saul’s deteriorating mental condition, especially since the favor of God left him and God rejects him from being king over Israel.

What may be the preposterous truth in these passages is that God does not give up on his people. He works through imperfect people, through strangers and non-Israelites, through adulterers and murderers and unfaithful, angry, blasphemous people! The sins and weaknesses of a Samson, a Saul, and a David have serious consequences—despite attempts of repentance, fasting and prayer (David’s child that he conceived with Bathsheba, dies, as Nathan foretold). But God will not be thwarted. Solomon is born, and so, eventually, ages and ages in the future, is Jesus—from the line of David!

Some good will come of this creation!