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.
The following exchange will focus on his book The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (HarperOne, 2014).
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Dear Professor Baden,
Your new book sets out to uncover the real 'historical' person behind the mythical figure known to all as 'King David'. Before we go into details about the surprising character your book describes, i'd like to start with a very basic (perhaps inevitable) question:
Assuming, as you do, that a substantial part of the stories the biblical narrative presents are deeply suspicious, what sense is there in talking about 'a historical King David'? If the man we are talking about, say, was not discovered and anointed by Samuel, did not slay Goliath, and was not a warior-king who authored wonderful Psalms, what sense is there in calling him King David? What counts as a “King David”?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
“King David” is, I think, three possible things at once. He is a legend of Jewish (and Christian) culture. He is a character in the Bible. And he is a historical figure who walked the earth three thousand years ago. These three Davids are all interrelated – the legend could not exist without the character, nor the character without the historical figure. At the same time, however, they are also all quite separate.
It is easiest, perhaps, to begin with the biblical character “King David.” I am, as you say, “suspicious” of the biblical narrative. That is, I read with what is called a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which is essentially the understanding that because all authors write with a purpose – especially in the era predating the modern concept of objective historiography – we cannot take any text at face value. Thus when I read the biblical story of David’s life, what I am reading, and reading for, is how the biblical text divulges its own interests and biases, which are always something far beyond the simple recapitulation of historical events. When read in this manner, the Bible becomes a window looking both forward and backward. Forward, in that the legendary figure of David is obviously based on his biblical portrayal; backward, in that recognizing the biases of the biblical representation of David allows us to see through them to the historical basis that lies beneath.
The legend of David is well known to most in the Judeo-Christian tradition: the slayer of Goliath, the ancestor of the messiah (both Jewish and Christian), and the author of the Psalms. Only one of these is actually in the biblical story of David itself: Goliath. But the authorship of the Psalms is never mentioned in the story – only that David played the lyre for Saul. Indeed, nowhere in the Bible does it say that David actually wrote the Psalms; it says only that he was responsible for organizing the singing of hymns in the Temple, and even that is said only in the late book of Chronicles. (The common superscription in the book of Psalms, le-David, might have many meanings, but “written by David” is simply not one of them, on purely grammatical grounds.) The idea that David is the ancestor of the messiah is biblical, but comes only from books written well after David’s time, and is not part of the earliest narrative of his life, that found in the books of Samuel.
The biblical story of David is not objective history writing, nor does it read as such. The text is very clear about the messages it intends to convey – often because those messages are repeated. That David came from humble backgrounds to enter Saul’s court – that’s told twice, once in the story of the lyre-playing and once in the story of Goliath. That David was widely loved, even by Saul and Jonathan, and that his swift rise was due entirely to the admiration of others rather than any positive efforts on his part – also told repeatedly. Over and over again we are told of David’s positive qualities, and especially of his innocence as almost everyone around him falls victim to the sword. We are meant to think highly of David.
This is where the biblical character begins to seep into the legend, or at least where the depiction of the character is the clear basis for the legend. It is also, however, where we can get behind the character to the person it was based on. The Bible makes an argument about David; and we can often see why that argument would need to be made. In biblical scholarship, there is a strong tendency to deny that David existed at all, to claim that he is pure literary invention. The very fact that the Bible makes the case for David, however, speaks against such a conclusion. Indeed, the fact that often the biblical stories about David are less than flattering, even when they are positive overall (consider here especially the story of Nabal and Abigail in 2 Samuel 25), renders the possibility that David was simply invented highly unlikely. Who would invent the David that we find in the Bible, and who would feel the need to defend so strenuously an invented character?
It is this third King David, the historical figure, that I am interested in – but I cannot access him without paying careful attention to the biblical narrative, which is, after all, the only real source of information we have about David. To talk about “King David” in the sense I mean, then, is not to talk about the legend, the Psalm-writing messianic figure; nor is it to talk about the biblical character, who is the product of great literary skill and rhetorical argumentation. It is to talk about the man who, without necessarily being prophetically anointed or slaying a giant, still made an enormous difference in history, and in the history of Israel especially: 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. That’s the “King David” I mean.
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