Joel Baden is Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Yale Divinity School. He holds degrees in Judaic Studies (BA, Yale), Semitic Languages (MA, University of Chicago), and Hebrew Bible (PhD, Harvard). He specializes in the literary history of the Hebrew Bible, particularly of the Pentateuch, as well as in disability theory in biblical studies. Along with numerous scholarly articles and essays, he has authored four books.
This exchange focuses on his book The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (HarperOne, 2014). You can find part one right here.
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Dear Professor Baden,
In part one I asked you what attributes would be enough to call a historical figure who didn't slay Goliath and didn't write the psalms 'King David'. In your last paragraph you gave me a pretty straightforward answer – “the man who brought Israel and Judah together, who expanded and secured Israel’s borders, who made Jerusalem Israel’s capital, and who inaugurated the worship of Israel’s God there.”
In the book you describe establishing the religious status of Jerusalem as David's biggest achievement. But then you describe David's Jerusalem as having “virtually nothing to do” with the Jerusalem people visit and worship today, which really started becoming impressive in the days of Herod. In fact, you point out that the city he ruled from at the time was little more than half a kilometre long and a quarter kilometre wide (that sounds like a small block rather than an actual city). You then describe the act of bringing the Ark of the Covenant (“In truth… the Israeli equivalent of an idol”) to Jerusalem as a “shrewd political move” rather than “a sign of David's piety”. According to your description, the king “made himself out to be the central officiant of a new Jerusalem cult”.
So we basically have, according to your description, a cynical politician – in a land without centralized governance, by the way – bringing a small idol into a fortified block and establishing a small cult around himself. If this non-event is the real story behind King David, where is David's great achievement? Do you think that your narrative about the historical David dispels the grandeur of the traditional King David?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
Usually, grandeur is a description reserved for memory or legend. In the real world, three thousand years ago as today, people – even kings – act on a far more mundane level. Ruling, and acquiring the power to rule, doesn’t simply happen. What’s the difference between a cynical politician and a regular one? About the same then as it is today, I would imagine – which is to say, not much at all. And we cannot pretend that David wasn’t a politician – this is a man who did virtually nothing but politics for his entire career, or as much as we know of it. He wasn’t a prophet, he wasn’t a priest – he was in government, and he spent enormous energy convincing people, militarily or otherwise, to follow him. He was constantly on a campaign, and I think we can in many ways read the biblical narrative as the press release for that campaign.
So in many ways I think that simply recognizing the realities of how power worked in the ancient world should dispel any notion of grandeur – it was quite plainly a dirty job, especially for those who had to work their way up the ladder. And, I should add, especially in smaller cultures like that of ancient Israel. An Assyrian monarch could probably sit back and allow the empire to run, enjoying the perks of worldwide dominance (of as much of the world as they knew, at least). But Israel was no Assyrian empire: David had no extensive royal administration, had no bureaucracy, had no long lineage of dominance on which to rest his authority.
That said, it’s not always clear in the moment how extensive and important the repercussions of an action will be. The famous Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten attempted to centralize worship of the deity Aten by moving the capital and the cult of Egypt to the city of Amarna. He undoubtedly hoped that this would be a lasting achievement – but it lasted only until his death. David did something somewhat similar, by choosing and conquering a new capital and establishing a cultic center there. Could he have imagined that Jerusalem would be what it is today? Surely not – but that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be credited with having done what he did, whatever his motives.
It’s perhaps useful to compare that quite long-lasting accomplishment with the failure of David’s most significant political move, the combining of Judah and Israel under a single crown. This united monarchy lasted only until the death of Solomon – two generations – so it’s hard to call it much of a success on the ground. It was, however, an enormous success in the history of Israelite thought: the Bible is full of the notion of a united Israel, and it is the only way that we have really thought about Israel ever since. The shape of the current state of Israel is due ultimately to David’s failed attempt to create a lasting political union between the north and the south.
My point, I suppose, is that great achievements don’t have to be momentous in the moment, if you will. Sometimes they can be, obviously – but more often, I would wager, the truly world-changing events are only recognized as such in hindsight, when we can see their impact and repercussions. There was no guarantee that David’s Jerusalem would last as a capital; indeed, there were many moments in Israel’s history when it looked quite likely that Israel would go the way of Ammon or Moab or Aram, conquered and absorbed and consigned to history. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give David credit for doing what he did – only that we should remember that his actions were undertaken in a particular time and place and for purposes that must be understood within that historical context. David founded Jerusalem for his own strategic military and political reasons – and why should he not have? It turns out that doing so was one of the most important historical events in the history of western civilization, though there was no reason to think so at the time.
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