Kings, Prophets, and Judges

Together, the three books Judges – Samuel – Kings tell the larger part of the story of Israel and Judah as more-or-less independent nations on their own land. Their principal focus is on ‘rule’, good rule and bad rule: mostly royal rule (by kings), but also ‘rule’ by judges and deliverers, and even by prophets. God too ‘rules’ in these books, but as judge rather than as king. Together with the book of Joshua, they constitute the sub-set of the Hebrew Bible called Former Prophets.

Judges starts where Joshua finishes, with the death and burial of Joshua under whose leadership Israel had gained her land – and the warning that, with the passing of the conquest generation, people were no longer aware of what Yahweh their God had done for Israel. The larger part of the book (chs 3–16) tells at greater length how a handful of ‘deliverers’ saved Israel from a series of external foes and reports quite briefly on a series of five men who in turn ‘judged Israel’. The latter part of the book (chs 17–21) concentrates instead on problems that threaten Israel from within. Kingship makes a brief explicit appearance in the heart of the book (chs 8–9): victorious Gideon (also known as Jerub-baal) refuses Israel’s offer of monarchy while behaving as if he had accepted it, and his concubine’s son Abimelech is briefly king – not over Israel or even a large grouping within it, but locally in Shechem in the central mountains. Then its absence becomes the focus of the final chapters. Through these, we read a fourfold refrain: ‘in those days there was no king in Israel’. The first and last of these go on to state, ‘each person did what was right in their eyes’ (Judg 17:6; 21:25). In the book of Kings, every king would be assessed as doing right or evil ‘in Yahweh’s eyes’. The actions recounted towards the end of the book of Judges leave readers in no doubt that ‘right in their own eyes’ – and the absence of kings – was very wrong.

Samuel reports the beginning of settled kingly rule in Israel. It opens with the birth and early development of Samuel (1 Sam 1–3) and reports the rise and fall of Israel’s first king, Saul (1 Sam 9–31). But the figure that dominates 40 of its 55 chapters is David: from his secret anointing by Samuel, through his uneasy relationship with Saul, to his acceptance as king first by Judah and then by the rest of Israel, early external successes, his fateful adultery with the wife of one of his leading warriors whose death he then contrives, and growing tensions within his household and mirrored in his kingdom. Though known as ‘Samuel’, its contents suggest ‘[The Book of] David’. Moses may feature across four of the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch; but no biblical character is delineated in such detail as David.

Pace picks up again in Kings: its 47 chapters tell a tale that spans some 20 generations. Solomon, David’s second son by Bathsheba, succeeds him, is proverbially wise, builds the temple in Jerusalem, enjoys international connections, but is corrupted by the religious implications of the many concomitant marriages (1 Kgs 2–11). The kingdom he inherited from David is divided between (the majority of) Israel to the north and Judah (ruled by his successors) to the south. Each of these kingdoms will have 19 kings before they collapse: Israel first, conquered by Assyria; and Judah, overthrown by Babylon some seven generations later. The central third of the book (1 Kgs 17–2 Kgs 10) is dominated not by kings, but by two prophets, Elijah and Elisha. The apostate character and subsequent demise of Israel is portrayed as a warning that Judah should have learned from (2 Kgs 17).

King David, his royal line over four centuries in Jerusalem, and the whole issue of kingship in Israel are together the main subject-matter of Judges, Samuel, and Kings. David himself dominates both books of Samuel. But many issues relating to his reign are seen more clearly from the part-earlier, part-overlapping story of Saul. When David becomes king of all Israel, he captures Jerusalem, defeats the Philistines, and brings into Jerusalem the sacred ‘ark’ – symbol of divine presence (2 Sam 5–6). He then proposes to the prophet Nathan building a house for the ark, only to receive the divine response that Yahweh needs no house but will create ‘a house’ for David (meaning ‘a royal line’) ‘for ever’. ‘For ever’ is used more densely in 2 Sam 7 than any other biblical context: Nathan’s words read like a promise that will not be recalled. No such promise was made to Saul at the time he was anointed king; but when Samuel told him of his rejection by Yahweh remarkably early in the story (1 Sam 13:13b–14a), he said: ‘The Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel for ever, but now your kingdom will not continue.’ And this issue of kingship ‘for ever’ is anticipated even earlier in the book. At the time of Samuel’s birth and childhood, rule in Israel was exercised by Eli, hereditary priest at Shiloh. But in light of the gross failings of his sons, he was told by a man of God that the earlier grant of priesthood ‘for ever’ to his family was now anathema to Yahweh: ‘those who honour me I will honour; and those who despise me shall be treated with contempt’ (1 Sam 2:27–36). After the stories of promises to Eli and Saul being revoked, even the much-repeated ‘for ever’ in the account of David and Nathan should be read as conditional – like a modern contract for life, unless voided by bad behaviour.

Many of the great David-stories concern his relations with women. The first of these is preceded by a huge female chorus. After young David had killed Goliath, the giant Philistine champion, Israel’s homecoming forces were greeted by women chanting: ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands’ (1 Sam 18:6–7). All Israel and Judah loved David, but Saul was furious. When he found that his daughter Michal was among the hero’s admirers, he tried to bring David down by offering marriage and setting her bride-price at a hundred Philistine foreskins – but this challenge was met. Once his wife, Michal helped him escape her father’s agents. Saul had already used his daughter against David; the next time we hear of her, he has given her to another man – in circumstances that are not explained. After Saul’s death, David demands her return as part of his negotiations to succeed him in the north. We last see her watching the celebrations through a window as the divine ark is brought into Jerusalem; but this time she despises his behaviour – and significantly she is now identified as Saul’s daughter and not as David’s wife. She scolds him for exposing himself as he dances, but he assures her he will be honoured by the other women who see him. No longer is she seeing him like the majority of women; and her return to his ‘house’ anticipates the fate of the ten concubines he left in Jerusalem when he retreated during Absalom’s revolt. Absalom had intercourse with them ‘in the eyes of all Israel’; and when David returned he had them confined ‘living as in widowhood’. So too Michal had no child till the day of her death.

Nabal (or Fool) is seen by many critics as a double of Saul (1 Sam 25). Between two episodes during Saul’s hunt for David in the arid southern regions when the hunter came into the power of the hunted (1 Sam 24; 26), we find David providing ‘protection’ for the rich Fool and his flocks. Denied access to the party at the end of shearing, he moves to take revenge but is intercepted by Nabal’s wife. Abigail is beautiful and has ‘taste’: she meets David with donkey-loads of provisions and wins him over in one of the longest and deftest speeches in the book. Nabal is a fool; but, when David becomes king, he should not have this death on his conscience. After the party, she tells Nabal what she has done, and he has a (divinely-induced) heart-attack. Abigail becomes David’s wife: they are well matched.

Bathsheba is the most famous of his wives, and yet she remains elusive. Almost every aspect of the story in 2 Sam 11–12 is ambiguous: what sort of washing did David see her engaged in; did she come to him willingly when sent for; did her husband Uriah (one of David’s officers, the Thirty) suspect why he was brought back from the battlefield and sent home to sleep with his wife; why did David mourn their baby before he died and not afterwards? In striking contrast to Abigail, accentuated by the length of the whole telling, Bathsheba says hardly a word. Her only reported utterance is her two-word message to the king, ‘I’m pregnant’: enough to set deception and murder to follow adultery. Through all the subsequent troubles in David’s family, she is absent from the scene (2 Sam 13–20). When David is on his deathbed, his eldest surviving son Adonijah (son of another wife) claims the throne. Only then does she find her voice (1 Kgs 1) – or at least voices Nathan’s strategy: Had not David promised that her Solomon would succeed him? Once Solomon is on the throne, she is happy to voice Adonijah’s request of the new king (1 Kgs 2). Presumably she is confident this request will be his last: his unwise petition is for Abishag, the latest of his father’s bedmates. Solomon reads a request for even one woman from his father’s harem as a continuing claim on the throne and has him killed.

Is David careless or complicit over the rape of Tamar by her half-brother Amnon (2 Sam 13)? His love for her has made him sick, and he asks his father if...