The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (22 page)

From start to finish, the procession of the ark into Jerusalem was constructed so as to elevate David to new heights in the eyes of the people. He endowed his new capital with religious significance by laying claim to the most prominent symbol of God’s presence in all of Israel. He made himself out to be the central officiant of the new Jerusalem cult. And he both displayed his personal wealth and made clear the rewards that were available to those who accepted the new religious reality at the heart of the new Davidic kingdom. The bringing of the ark to Jerusalem is often viewed as a sign of David’s great piety, but it was in fact a shrewd political move. David had claimed the political leadership of Israel by force. Now he had done the same with Israel’s religion.

In our modern age, with its common notion of a transcendent God who is accessible from anywhere through the intangibles of prayer and faith, the material realities of ancient religion are easy to overlook. In early Israel, God was not transcendent, but very much physically present, even if invisibly so. God had said to Moses, “I will come to you and bless you” (Exod. 20:21) at every sanctuary; “For there I will meet with you, and there I will speak with you, and there I will meet with the Israelites. . . . I will dwell among the Israelites” (Exod. 29:42–43, 45). Sanctuaries were divine places where the deity was literally present. And though prayer was a means of communicating with God, it was not generally sufficient by itself. Sacrifice—the burning of a slaughtered animal on an altar, the bringing of raw or cooked grains, the pouring of wine libations—was the primary mode of appeal to the divine. When we put these two elements together, it becomes clear that the cult was not only a spiritual enterprise, but also an economic one. The ritual laws written by the priestly class of Israel, those found in Leviticus, not only invent new types of sacrifices previously unknown in Israel—the guilt offering and the purification (or sin) offering—but also institute rules about purity that require abundant sacrifices when none was needed in the culture before.
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Almost every sacrifice (with the exception of the burnt offering) required that the offerer give some portion of the animal to the priests. Often, sanctuaries kept their own herds and flocks so that offerers, rather than bringing their own animals, could simply buy one from the sanctuary and offer it instead.
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Tithing and offering the first fruits of the harvest or the firstborn of the herd and flock were ways to ensure the continuity of God’s favor on the part of the offerer—and were ways for the priests to ensure the continual growth of the sanctuary’s finances. The priesthood was a lucrative job, and sanctuaries were the most well-established economic cornerstones of Israelite society.
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Moreover, three times a year, on the major agricultural festivals, it was common practice for Israelites to make a pilgrimage to a sanctuary. As the great pilgrimage sites from medieval Europe demonstrate, significant ancillary economic advantage could be gained from these visits: pilgrims need shelter, food, and other supplies, and the local economy booms as a result.
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In practical terms, this meant that there was some competition for the faithful, at least among the largest and most important sanctuaries. An entire community could be sustained on the strength of a local sanctuary. Thus an ambitious sanctuary needed a “draw,” something to make its altar more attractive than the one a few towns over. The same combination of cult and economy carried forward into Christianity, for which the cult of the saints, centered on the possession of relics, served as a major source of income for shrines throughout the Christian world from the fourth and fifth centuries to the present day.
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In ancient Israel, physical objects—such as the ark—could also do the trick. This sort of competition is behind the story in 1 Kings 12 of Jeroboam’s golden calves. Having split Israel off from Solomon’s united kingdom, Jeroboam needed to draw the religious economy back away from Jerusalem. So he made two golden calves—symbols of Yahweh—and put one in Bethel, a town near the southern border of Israel, and one in Dan, to the north, saying, “You have been going to Jerusalem long enough” (12:28).

All of this is to say that in bringing the ark to Jerusalem, David was after more than the Israelites’ faith—he was after their wallets as well. To make Jerusalem a viable center for sacrifice, one key element was required: a public altar on which to offer the sacrifices. The biblical story of how David came to build this altar, in 2 Samuel 24, is complex and decidedly theological. God, rather bizarrely, incited David to take a census and punished him for it by bringing a plague on Israel. When the plague reached Jerusalem, God stopped it just as his messenger of destruction was at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. In thanks, David chose this spot as the place where he would build an altar and bought the property from Araunah.

There is undoubtedly a kernel of historical truth in the notion that David took a census. The census in Israel existed solely for the purposes of identifying men of fighting age; it was the first step in military conscription.
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For this reason, the census was generally viewed negatively by the majority of the Israelite population, including the biblical authors, who describe it as instigated by God for the purpose of punishment: conscription was yet another means by which the monarchy, an untrustworthy institution to begin with, could impose itself on the freedom of the people. Given the military function of the census, however, and David’s understandable need to know what sort of fighting force he could muster from his new kingdom, it is reasonable to assume that he did indeed take a census, probably relatively early in his kingship. The story of the plague, however, appears to be no more than an etiology for why the altar was built where it was. Yet no such narrative is really required—David’s motivations for building the altar and his choice of the threshing floor of Araunah are logical in and of themselves.

As we have already seen in the story of Keilah, the threshing floor was among the most prominent public spaces in every community. It needed to be large enough to accommodate a good number of people, for everyone would have been harvesting and threshing at the same time each year. It also needed to be in an open space, where the wind could blow away the chaff. As noted earlier, for walled cities—like Jerusalem, which had been fortified since at least the Jebusite era—this meant that the threshing floor would be outside the city walls. As Jerusalem was built on a hillside, the natural location for the threshing floor would have been the flat area to the north—what is now known as the Temple Mount.
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There hardly could be a better location for the altar. It would be prominent above the city, as close to the heavens as the landscape could allow. And the transformation of an agricultural area into a cultic one would signal that Jerusalem was a distinctively religious center, with enough open space to serve the needs of the pilgrims who would come to sacrifice before the ark. By taking over and repurposing the threshing floor, David made certain that his capital would no longer be an agricultural community, but an urban one, dependent on royal income—both political and sacrificial—rather than on the land.

Who was Araunah the Jebusite, the man from whom David purchased this property? Most likely he was actually no one at all. Though Araunah is commonly understood, even by the biblical authors, as a personal name, it is almost certainly a Hittite title,
ewrine,
meaning “lord.”
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That is, this threshing floor originally belonged to the previous Jebusite ruler of Jerusalem and was a sort of state-owned property. If this is the case, then we can also dismiss the notion that David bought the land from “Araunah.” Although the Jebusite community may not have been completely eradicated when David conquered the city, it is certain that the Jebusite ruler would have been subject to David’s hungry sword. When David began his reign as the new king in Jerusalem, this royal property would have devolved directly to him. He would have had no need to purchase it—it was already his.

From the perspective of the biblical authors, however, it was important that David purchase the land—indeed, they depict Araunah as trying to give it to David as a gift, and David refusing. The depth of Israel’s connection to the site of its temple was such that no possibility could be allowed for anyone else to make a rightful claim on the property. This same impulse is at the root of the story of Abraham’s purchase of the cave of Machpelah in Genesis 23 (where, as in our passage, the property is first offered as a gift): the land is fully Israelite only if the claim to it is undeniable by both its previous and its current owners. It was thus important for the biblical authors to make certain that the site of the altar in Jerusalem—which would become the site of the temple—was authentically and incontestably Israelite. David, however, would not have had such qualms. Taking the property of others was never a difficulty for him.

The threshing floor of the Jebusite city thus became the cultic center of David’s new capital, and it is to this spot that he also moved the ark, protected by its traditional tent. Just as the threshing floor was the economic center of most Israelite communities, so now the ark and its altar would become the economic centers of David’s Jerusalem, a communal space not only for the surrounding area, but, in theory, for the nation as a whole.

The establishment of Jerusalem as a religious center may have been a shrewd economic move by David, but it also served a greater symbolic purpose. Throughout the ancient Near East, the king and the deity were closely intertwined.
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In Mesopotamia, kings were understood to have been divinely appointed to rule; they engaged in divine rituals such as the “sacred marriage,” in which they symbolically slept with a goddess; they are depicted in art as taking the form of a deity.
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Among the Hittites, the king was also the chief priest of the land; one shrine shows the king being embraced by a god; and upon his death, the king was said to “become a god.”
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In Egypt the equation was simple: the pharaoh was himself a living god.
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Such explicit deification was an impossibility in Israelite religion—but it would have been natural for David to want to demonstrate God’s approval of his reign.
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The presence of the ark in his new capital accomplished this end.

What we have in David’s bringing of the ark to Jerusalem, then, is the beginning of Israelite royal theology: the notion that Israel’s king was akin to God’s steward on earth. Saul, David’s sole predecessor on the throne of Israel, ruled by consent of the people, his reign legitimized by his ability to protect Israel from its enemies. David, by contrast, positioned himself as divinely legitimized—a position he was more in need of than Saul, for David ruled not by popular consent, but by force. This claim of divine approval, and even selection, was a common technique for establishing power. When Babylon was briefly captured by the invading Chaldean people in the late eighth century
BCE
, the conquering king claimed that Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, had personally selected him to rule.
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Centuries later, when the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, he made the same claim.
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This is royal propaganda at its best: an attempt to persuade a defeated enemy that their new overlord came to power by the choice of their own deity. Though there is no reason to doubt that David authentically worshipped the Israelite deity Yahweh, his possession of the ark in Jerusalem sent much the same message.

In time, this royal theology would come to encompass not only David’s reign, but that of his entire dynasty. It is therefore understandable that in the seventh to sixth centuries
BCE
a biblical author would explicitly link the arrival of the ark in Jerusalem to God’s promise of an uninterrupted Davidic lineage on the throne. This is the famous passage in 2 Samuel 7, following directly on the ark’s entrance into the city, in which God promises David through the prophet Nathan that God “will establish a house [that is, a dynasty] for you. When your days are done and you lie with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own issue, and I will establish his kingship. . . . Your house and your kingdom shall ever be secure before me; your throne shall be established forever” (7:11–12, 16). This is the fundamental statement of the royal Davidic ideology, projected back onto the beginning of the dynasty by authors who had known uninterrupted Davidic kingship for the previous three hundred years.
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The text is pure theological invention, but its roots are in the reality of David’s establishment of Jerusalem as a royal cultic site.

This chapter in 2 Samuel seeks not only to justify David’s dynasty as divinely ordained, but also to address a well-known fact that must have pressed heavily on the minds of the later pro-David authors: David, the great king, did not build the temple in Jerusalem. According to 2 Samuel 7, David is promised his dynasty because he wanted to build the temple, but was dissuaded by God himself: “I have not dwelt in a house from the day that I brought the people of Israel out of Egypt to this day, but have moved about in tent and Tabernacle” (7:6). This text explains, then, why David did not build the temple; but it fails to explain why, if God was uninterested in such a dwelling, David’s son Solomon would be allowed to construct one. In the fourth-century
BCE
books of Chronicles, this logical inconsistency is recognized, and it is explained that David did not build the temple because he was a man of war, whereas Solomon was a man of peace. Both explanations are apologetic. What is commonly agreed is that David did not build the temple. The question that the biblical authors seek to answer is, why not?