David Ascendant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 7) (35 page)

Saul had run out of steam. He had switched to a battle axe earlier, but his arm felt heavy as lead. He could swing no more. Jonathan’s bow was empty. The armor-bearer was out of arrows. The fight between the three guardian angels and the three demons from hell continued unabated. But the demons were pressing in. The fighting all around Saul dizzied him. Jonathan pulled his sword and held his own against the onslaught.

Mount Gilboa had turned into a mountain of death.

Earlier, dark storm clouds had gathered overhead. Now thunder cracked the sky, and it began to rain.

Asherah had faced off against Remiel, who was relentless with a battle axe. She matched him stride for stride. When the first drops of rain struck her, she thought to herself,
Just like Yahweh, the cowardly, cheating bastard
.

Since before the time of the Great Deluge, she and her fellow gods had been created with a weakness in water. Their supernatural strength would become as mere humans when submerged. By making it rain on this Jezreel Valley battle, Yahweh was tipping the scales in his favor.

By the time the gods were drenched in the rain, they had begun to falter. All of them could feel it. Even Ba’alzebul’s mighty brawn had lessened to a mere mortal’s. Saraqael began to push him back. Dagon’s arms tired with the use of his trident against Raguel. Asherah felt every hit of Remiel’s sword jar her muscles.

The hill had turned into a pile of slippery mud. Jonathan slipped and fell into the muck. It gave his opponent the opportunity to thrust his sword into Jonathan’s gut. He screamed out.

Saul howled, “Jonathan!”

He picked up a javelin with a superhuman burst of energy and thrust it into the Philistine attacker.

Then he was by Jonathan’s side. The armor-bearer shielded them for the moment.

“Father,” Jonathan grimaced. Saul saw his blood pumping out and mixing with the rain in the mud. Jonathan was pale. Saul placed his hand on the wound. He knew it was the end.

“My son. What have I done? What have I done?”

Saul looked into Jonathan’s eyes and knew in that moment that he was about to lose everything: his life, his sons, his kingdom, his legacy. He was being cast off to the uttermost. Deep within him a black rage welled up.
It is all Yahweh’s fault. He has done this to me. He has cursed me. He has caused this evil. I was a great man. He took my glory because he was a jealous, selfish tyrant.

Jonathan whimpered, “Father, Yahweh is just,” and he died in his arms.

Saul set him down with a steel heart.
Yahweh is just? Yahweh is just?
After all that Jonathan had been through, and now, the end of the Saulide bloodline, and the words on Jonathan’s dying lips were, “Yahweh is just?” Absurd. Preposterous. His son had died a deluded fanatic.

Saul stood up to scream into the black, stormy sky, “DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU TO SHEOL!”

Though the spirit of Nimrod had long since departed from Saul, he retained a kind of madness. The only one with power to damn a creature to Sheol was Yahweh. So a curse to damn Yahweh was the kind of irrational bellow that could only come from a mind and heart ravaged with the madness of unmitigated pride. It was pride that was the elemental sin of mankind. And pride unchecked became an obsession to control that would always end in the frustration of unfulfilled self-deification. Though he tried, man could not be God.

At that moment, Saul looked up into the sky. He saw a flurry of Philistine arrows raining down upon them.

Asherah and the gods knew they had failed. They braced themselves for impact.

A thousand arrows peppered the area, piercing men and god alike. The angels were hit. The gods were hit. Saul was hit. His armor-bearer had used his shield to protect himself instead.

Saul fell to the ground with three shafts in him. He lay in the muck next to his son’s body.

The gods pulled out the arrows from their bodies like annoying pins and needles. They knew they had lost. So they turned from the battle and ran off, leaving the angels to nurse their own wounds.

A new wave of Philistines approached Saul. They would be there in moments.

Saul looked up at his armor-bearer and grunted, “Draw your sword and thrust it through me, lest these uncircumcised Philistines molest me with dishonor.”

The armor-bearer stood agape with fear. He fell to his knees weeping. “I cannot, my lord. I cannot bring myself to it.”

Saul whimpered, “Forsaken by everyone.”

He picked up his own sword, placed it at his gut and fell to the ground pushing the sword into him with a guttural groan.

The Philistines came upon them. The armor-bearer looked up and followed his king by falling on his own sword.

The reign of Saul had ended.

The town of Ziklag had been repopulated with the hostages rescued from the Amalekites. David and his four hundred men slaughtered eleven hundred of their enemies. Four hundred of them had escaped on their camels, and along with them, Lahmi of Gath.

But now they had their work cut out for them in rebuilding the ruins of their town. It would take many months to repair what evil had destroyed in one day.

Ittai stared out into the hazy desert terrain. He was on duty as watch-guard of the town’s perimeter. David had felt foolish because of his decision to leave Ittai out of the raid on the Amalekites. He had almost been killed because of it. He told Ittai he would never let that happen again.

Ittai’s attention was piqued by the sight of a single man on a horse approaching the city. He appeared to be half dead, in ragged clothes and almost falling off his mount.

Ittai rushed out to meet the visitor with a squad of gibborim.

              • • • • •

“I am the son of a sojourner,” said the man in tattered garments. He knelt before David in the leader’s war tent, surrounded by his trusted commanders.

“My name is Namiaza. In my travels, I happened upon the aftermath of a battle at Gilboa between the Philistines and Israel.”

David gestured to some servants, who brought forward some wine for the messenger. Namiaza’s eyes went wide and he gobbled up the bread, nearly choking on it, spilling the wine as he guzzled it desperately.

Abishai and Joab looked askance at David, who sighed in thoughtfulness. “Tell me what you saw, Namiaza.”

Namiaza spoke with his mouth full of food. “The Israelite forces have scattered. Many are fallen and dead. Saul and his three eldest sons are dead.”

A sea of heads turned to look at David. He closed his eyes with pained heart. His whisper was only heard by Benaiah. “Jonathan.”

Namiaza continued, “The Philistines found the bodies of King Saul and his three sons. They cut off Saul’s head, hung his body and his son’s bodies on the walls of Beth-shan, stripped his armor and hung it in a temple of Ashtaroth.”

Idol of shame
, thought David.

He looked back up at the traveller. “How do you know this?”

Namiaza took another gulp of food. “I travelled through Jabesh-gilead. And some of their valiant men had taken the bodies down from the walls of Beth-shan. They burned the bodies and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh.”

Silence permeated David’s men. It was a holy silence of respect. The world had just changed and the implications were far reaching.

“But I have not told you the most important part,” said Namiaza.

David looked at him with curiosity.

“You see, I had travelled through the battlefield before the Philistines had plundered it. And I had happened upon Saul, still alive, and leaning on his spear.”

David could not believe what he was hearing. All ears waited to hear what happened next.

Namiaza continued, “He called out for me to kill him before the Philistines were upon him, because he was already dying with some arrows in his body. I quickly recognized him as the king, and so I obeyed him, to protect him from the abuses of the Philistines.”

Terror filled David’s face. He slowly reached up and grabbed his outer robe and ripped it. The other leaders followed him, ripping theirs as well in the traditional manner of grief.

Namiaza reached into a sack he had with him. Benaiah and others reached for their swords in defensive reaction.

But it was not a weapon that Namiaza pulled from the sack. It was a golden crown and an armband, the royal emblems of Saul.

Namiaza approached David and knelt before him, handing him the crown and armband. He said, “My lord, how the mighty have fallen.”

He had hoped that since David would be the new king, maybe he would appoint Namiaza to some important position with wealth and prestige for his honorable obedience to the king and for producing the king’s crown.

He had counted wrong.

David’s eyes thinned in anger. “How is it you were not afraid to raise your hand in destruction against Yahweh’s anointed one?”

Namiaza’s eyes filled with terror. “But I obeyed the king! And I brought the crown to you.”

David looked away from him and said, “Execute this blasphemer.”

Joab had been waiting for this very moment before all the others. He stepped out, drew his sword, and cut off Namiaza’s head.

David looked back upon the decapitated corpse with blood pumping out onto the floor of the tent. He said without mercy, “Your blood be upon your own head. For you have testified against yourself when you said, ‘I have killed Yahweh’s anointed.’”

Two men dragged the corpse away. David said to his men, “Tonight, we will fast. Have everyone meet in the town square for a lamentation.”

              • • • • •

That night in the town square, David sang a lamentation he had written in honor of King Saul and his son Jonathan.

“Your glory, O Israel, is slain on your high places!
How the mighty have fallen!

Tell it not in Gath,
publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon,

lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
lest the daughters of the uncircumcised exult.

“You mountains of Gilboa,
let there be no dew or rain upon you,
nor fields of offerings!

For there the shield of the mighty was defiled,
the shield of Saul, not anointed with oil.

“From the blood of the slain,
from the fat of the mighty,

the bow of Jonathan turned not back,
and the sword of Saul returned not empty.

“How the mighty have fallen
in the midst of the battle!

“Jonathan lies slain on your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;

very pleasant have you been to me;
your love to me was extraordinary,
surpassing the love of women.

“How the mighty have fallen,
and the weapons of war perished!”

After the lamentation, David looked out upon the people gathered around him. They were weeping for their king and for Israel, their people. He wept for his brother, Jonathan. The only man he had ever known who was without guile. He was the only man David could ever trust without reservation, because he was the only man who willingly gave up a kingdom for the glory of Yahweh.

His was a faith that had changed David. Beside Jonathan’s true, unwavering belief, David’s passionate ups and downs felt like so much juvenile insincerity. Yahweh had described David as a man after his own heart, and yet, David knew deep down that Jonathan was more worthy of that designation. He could only conclude that Yahweh brought things into being for his purposes. What Yahweh declared, he would create and make it so. David prayed that he would one day become what Yahweh had proclaimed him to be.

He quieted them down and announced, “I have consulted the ephod of Yahweh!”

The crowd waited to hear what the will of Yahweh was.

“We will go up to Hebron. And there, I will be crowned king of Judah!”

The crowd leapt with cheers.

After all these years of running and fighting, the time had finally come.

Someone yelled out, and the crowd chanted, “The king is dead! Long live the king! Saul is dead! Long live King David!”

David looked out upon the city of Jerusalem before him. His forces were arrayed for a triumphal entry through the gates. He had conquered the city and was making his official entry to establish his kingship and rule from the city as his new capital.

So much had happened since he had been anointed king of Judah at Hebron. Now, he was about to be crowned as king of both Judah and Israel in this new city, dubbed, “The City of David.” This would be the new capital from which he would rule a united kingdom of Judah in the south and Israel in the north.

The first thing he had done upon conquering and naming his City of David was to find a hill just outside the northern walls where he buried the skull of Goliath of Gath deep in the rocks of the earth. It was a symbolic ceremony of remembrance. That rocky ridge he named “Golgotha,” for “place of the skull.”

A company of minstrels and women dancers led the procession through the gates of the city. Women waved long, flowing, silken banners to the sounds of timbrel, lyre and tambourine. Other women sang songs of victory and kingship. Citizens laid palm leaves and branches on the ground as a ritual carpet of entry.

Benaiah sat ever-presently beside David, still the king’s chief counselor, and head of his bodyguard of Cherethites and Pelethites that followed the king’s entourage.

Joab rode at the forefront of the king’s escort with his brother Abishai next to him. Abishai was still chief of the Thirty, but Joab had finally surpassed him after years of competitive attempts to outperform his older brother. Joab was now Chief General Commander of all of David’s armed forces.

He had won this distinction by accepting David’s offer for a competition. The armies of Israel had besieged Jerusalem’s walls, but could not penetrate them to conquer the Jebusite inhabitants. So David offered the position of General Commander to anyone who would lead a strike force into Jerusalem using the underground water shaft. Joab volunteered first and led Judah to victory. It was Joab’s fearless leadership that led to the very triumphal entry that entered Jerusalem right now.

Behind the Cherethites and Pelethites were a contingent of David’s gibborim, his finest warriors who performed amazing feats of daring in battle and defense of the king. Many were in his original band of outlaws when he was on the run from Saul’s murderous pursuit.

In the back of the train were the chained captive Jebusite leaders led on foot through the streets of the city for humiliation of the vanquished and exaltation of the vanquisher. They would be executed when the king was enthroned as the final display of power over the principalities and authorities.

The chariots of Elohim are twice ten thousand,
thousands upon thousands;

Adonai is among them;
Sinai is now in the sanctuary.

You ascended on high,
leading a host of captives in your train
and receiving gifts among men,

even among the rebellious,
that Yahweh Elohim may dwell there.

There were five acts to the king’s enthronement and coronation. First, the procession arrived at the palace steps where David stepped off his carriage and stood on the steps before the people. It was a small Jebusite palace and would have to be rebuilt soon with the aid of David’s ally, the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre. But that would have to wait.

The court prophets and priests surrounded David on the top of the steps. David’s eyes met with his close confidant, Nathan the prophet, who had been with him from the earliest days before Samuel’s school of prophets had been slaughtered by the Rephaim. They shared a bond of honesty that David treasured in a court full of sycophants. The high priest Abiathar approached David. He had also been with David from the early days after escaping Saul’s murder of the priests of Nob. These men had been through much pain and violence together.

Abiathar placed a golden crown upon David’s head. This was the very crown retrieved by Namiaza from Saul’s dead body on Gilboa. It was a crown with a bloody past of betrayal and dishonor that David would now seek to redeem with his rule.

He was also handed the “testimony,” a large scroll that contained the words of Yahweh’s Law handed down through Moses. He was charged with the obligation to uphold that holy code in his personal conduct as well as his governance of the nation. In Israel, the king was not above the law. All men were subject and accountable under Yahweh’s kingly rule, especially the monarch. He kissed the scroll and held it high to the cheers of the crowd.

He glanced over at his wives, who stood to the side on the steps. He now had seven of them. When he became king of Judah at Hebron, he brought his two wives Abigail and Ahinoam with him. But while there, he married four others and began to have sons and daughters. He sired six of them at Hebron alone. It was a weakness that Nathan said would be the ruin of him: he loved women. As king he justified the need for a well-populated royal family and diplomatic ties with allies. But Nathan warned him it would be a habit that would assuredly be adopted with less restraint by his sons.

David’s biggest heartbreak stood with the six other women: Michal. During the recent civil war with Ishbaal, Saul’s son and claimant to the throne of Israel, David had negotiated the return of Michal to his household. Though she was his first love and wife of his youth, she had been stolen from David by Saul and unlawfully married to another man. Nevertheless, it had been some ten years since she had been so unjustly treated by her father, and she had learned to adjust to her new life and even love her new husband.

When she was returned to David, her husband, Palti son of Laish, followed her, weeping for miles. Her return to a distant and changed David with her own changed heart was bad enough. But to become one of seven in a harem of wives was devastating to her heart as it was to all their hearts. Now, she could not stop longing for the singular devotion of her second husband Palti, who worshipped her and treated her like a queen. Now, she was treated with the others like a pet.

It was the universal curse of polygamy, an institution that favored the interests of men in a patriarchal society. It reduced women to breeders and objects of male sexual taste. A different wife for each night of the week or for each whim of desire for variety. When a relational problem arose with one wife, he would simply avoid that one by moving on to another until things settled down. It was a way for the husband to skirt the responsibility of relational holiness and sacrifice. It bred male selfishness and destroyed the one flesh unity that Yahweh had originally designed for marriage. While there was no explicit command forbidding polygamy by Yahweh in the Law David now held in his hand, it certainly defied the original definition of marriage in the Pentateuch, and worked against every intention of the heart of his God.

Michal was now trapped in it like her other six sisters were. She suffered from bouts of sadness that rendered her morose and led to sleeping more hours than was healthy. She also sought more comfort praying in the arms of Asherah, her goddess.

Abigail dealt with the plural status differently. By virtue of her age, she became a kind of older sister to the others, encouraging them to be strong in the face of adversity and to see their value to Yahweh in spite of a devalued harem status. Because of her harsh treatment at the hands of her previous husband, Nabal, she had become a survivor. Though she was older, without the nubile and innocent nature of the younger wives, David was still drawn to her most because of her strength and how she carried herself with such royal dignity. She knew Yahweh valued her, regardless of her social status or value to the king. She did not seek the praise of man but the praise of Yahweh, and ironically, that made her more desirable to the king. To David, the notion of a strong and virtuous, queenly woman willingly submitting herself to him was far more desirable than the young and simpleminded following him out of the weakness of their youthful will. And when it came to the marriage bed, a young wife would do as she was told, but an experienced older wife knew how to please without instruction.

The second act of enthronement and coronation was the anointing, also performed by Abiathar. David bowed before him and he withdrew a horn of oil, which he poured down over David’s head. This act indicated that the king was Yahweh’s chosen one, the messiah of the nation.

The third act was the proclamation of the anointed king and the people’s response of clapping and acclamation, “Long live the king! Long live the king!”

With my holy oil I have anointed him,
so that my hand shall be established with him;

I will crush his foes before him
and strike down those who hate him.

My faithfulness and my steadfast love shall be with him,
and in my name shall his horn be exalted.

And I will make him the firstborn,
the highest of the kings of the earth.

I will establish his Seed forever
and his throne as the days of the heavens.

For the fourth act of the enthronement and coronation, the gathered throng of royalty and palace staff proceeded inside to the palace, where they seated David as king on the throne. An enthronement hymn was sung by the minstrels that marked his assumption of power.

“I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”

I will tell of the decree:

Yahweh said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.”

David’s heart melted with the recognition of his own unworthiness to be seated on such a holy throne of Yahweh’s Chosen Seed. He reflected upon the past twenty years since Samuel the Seer first anointed him. He had been so young back then—too young. He never forgot the words of the Seer over him as the oil dripped down his face as it did this day. “I anoint you, David, son of Jesse by the authority of Yahweh, elohim of Israel.”

He could see now what Yahweh was doing; taking the youngest runt of a litter out of an insignificant family in an unimportant town, giving him the faith to face and defeat the titanic champion of Yahweh’s worst enemy with a mere stone, inciting Israel’s own mad king to hunt him down for years as an outlaw, and forcing him to live for a time in the lair of the dragon itself, all while waiting over twenty years to fulfill a promise. It was to show Yahweh’s greatness and goodness in the face of David’s own weakness. Yahweh had forced David to be broken, so that he would have to trust in Yahweh and not his own strength. He would have to seek Yahweh’s righteousness in a thoroughly depraved world.

But he could see now how he had failed to live up to that trust. As he sat in this holy position of honor, his sins flooded his memory as if raised by the Adversary of the Divine Council: his allowance of the idolatry of his first wife, Michal, ignored for the sake of his passions; his tolerance of wickedness within his warrior ranks for the sake of a better fighting force; his extortion of Nabal’s wealth in the name of “protection”; his rationalization of his regal polygamy to cover his insatiable hunger for more women; and possibly worst of all, his harsh temper that led to excessive violence far beyond Yahweh’s “eye for an eye” justice. He would never attain the goodness of his god for which he was called. He was a man of bloodshed and it had changed him so deeply and thoroughly from that young shepherd boy who played a lyre and wooed the girls of his village. Yet, in some ways, he had merely become a more sophisticated adult version of that same passionate, intemperate fool that he had been as a youth, with his spiritual highs and earthly lows, at war within himself.

With all these memories of his moral failures and fleshly excesses, he felt like a fraud. He did not deserve this throne. Jonathan of the house of Saul did, and he had lived the faith required for it. David had sought greatness over goodness, but saw how the good were rarely the great and the great were rarely the good. Jonathan had chosen goodness over greatness.

But Jonathan was dead. And Yahweh had chosen David, not because of David’s righteousness, but because of Yahweh’s own mysterious purposes. Just as he had chosen Abraham out of pagan Ur, dim-witted Isaac over Ishmael, and the deceiver Jacob over Esau. Yahweh seemed to enjoy using the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, the weak and worthless things to shame the strong, and the low and despised, the things that were nothing, to bring to nothing the things that were. God used sinners and their evil to accomplish his good. But he also redeemed them and made them good.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Create in me a clean heart, O Elohim,
and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit…

For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.