Apropos of David The King

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2007

2006

THE TENDENCY TO CONSIDER the Books of Samuel as didactic literature, propaganda, ideology, or apology has had unfortunate consequences for the reputation of King David. David has long been a controversial figure, and the interpretive tradition has generally been admiring. Modern scholarship, however, has taken a critical turn. The Enlightenment philosopher Pierre Bayle's article on David in Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) concentrated on David's moral failures and challenged the traditional interpretation of David as a hero. In recent forms of this modern trend, David has been presented as a bloodthirsty tyrant or terrorist.

Characters and Characterization in the Book of Samuel; LHBOTS 69; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2007

The Book of Samuel and Its Response to Monarchy (edited by Sara Kipfer and Jeremy Hutton; BWANT 228; Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2021), 2021

It is common to view the story of David, at least the first part of the story in 1 Samuel 16-2 Samuel 5 (give or take), as an ancient Near Eastern apology defending David's ascension to the throne. However, it is also not uncommon to read the text as it stands and see in the David story at least a complex portrayal of Israel's founding monarch, if not a completely negative one. The present essay will argue that both of these perspectives have a basis in the text of Samuel. The thesis of this essay is that the story of David in its 'current literary form' is not purely critical of David nor purely defensive of him. Instead, what we have in the David story could be described as an unapologetic apology that, on the one hand, defends David and retains him as the hero of the story, while, on the other hand, being fairly critical of him. This complex portrayal allows the David story to be of continued value as it is not simply propagandistic literature but a sophisticated reflection on the character who founded and represented the monarchy, and is thus a sophisticated reflection on the nature of human monarchy as an institution.

Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2003

Bill Clinton was not the only comeback kid of the 1990s. King David enjoyed a remarkable revival as well. In 1993 he, or rather his name, made an unexpected reappearance with the discovery of the famous``House of David''inscription at Tel Dan, the earliest reference to ...

Historical Settings, Intertextuality, and Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Marvin A. Sweeney, 2022

Horizons in Biblical Theology, 2012

We are not interested here in David as a hero," writes the prominent biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann in his new book. "Rather," he continues, "the tradition, in reflecting on David discerns something new about our humanness" (pg. 54). Thus, Brueggemann, the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, attempts to expose the theological signifijicance of the very human portrayal of David in the Old Testament in a new collection of his previously published essays. Assembled and edited by K. C. Hanson, the essays in this new monograph are not ordered chronologically by publication date, but so as to roughly follow the sequence of David stories in the Deuteronomistic History. Thus, this collection begins with an essay that assesses the Succession History overall and ends with a piece concerning the concluding stories about David in the last chapters of 2 Samuel. Though this particular arrangement has the drawback of presupposing knowledge of an essay that is placed later in the book, it, however, allows the reader to follow Brueggemann's arguments more easily as it corresponds to a sequence of David stories that is well-known and familiar. Whatever the order, having a collection of most, if not all of Brueggemann's work on David is extremely useful as it allows one both to get a more holistic sense of the scholar's thoughts on David as well as a deeper understanding of Brueggemann's evolution of ideas. It just so happens that the book, for reasons that will become clearer later on, begins with Brueggemann's earliest article. In this fijirst piece, Brueggemann argues that the stories in the Primeval History, namely Genesis 2-11, have been revised by the Yahwistic writer so as to reflect and correspond to the stories in the Succession Narrative. So, for example, the story about Adam and Eve (Gen 3:1-24) reflects that of ; the Cain and Abel (Gen 4:1-16) myth speaks to the tale of the murderous relationship between