Storybook Wedding: Michal and David

Sometimes people dismiss the Bible as being nothing more than a “collection of fairy-tales,” a judgment which to my mind shows a superficial appreciation of fairy-tales as well as of the Bible. If you define a fairy-tale as a ridiculous fantasy fit only for children and the feeble-minded, Professor Tolkien would like to have a few words with you out behind the Bird and Baby.

I can think of one Bible story, though, that does have certain fairy-tale elements in it. It’s the story of a Princess, and of the Brave Peasant Lad who saves the kingdom and is given her hand in marriage. It’s the kind of story that ought to have a Fairy-Tale Ending, in which the two of them Live Happily Ever After.

Except that in the Bible story, things don’t work out that way.

Most people have probably heard the story of David, the humble shepherd boy, and how, armed only with his faith in the Lord and five smooth stones, he sleweth Goliath who lay down and die-eth. King Saul, the ruler of Israel at that time, was pleased with David's defeat of the giant and the subsequent victory over the Philistine army. He gave David a high rank in the army of Israel. And that's when the trouble began.

David proved himself a capable officer. He was successful in battle and led his men wisely. He was popular with the other officers and with the people as well. He became best buds with Saul's son, Jonathan, which is another story we'll be getting to.

Once, when Saul and David were returning after another successful campaign against the Philistines, they were met by a group of women who had come from “all the towns of Israel” to welcome them home. As they played music of celebration and danced, they sang a little song in honor of the heroes:

Saul has slain his thousands,and David his tens of thousands.(1 Samuel 18:7 NIV)

Now, Hebrew poetry has a literary convention of stating an idea in one line, and then restating it, slightly re-phrased, in the next. It's the reason why the Psalms work so well as responsive readings in worship services. So it's very likely that all the women meant to say was that the armies of Saul and David have killed many thousands of enemies.

But that's not how Saul took it.

Saul was very angry; this refrain galled him. “They have credited David with tens of thousands,” he thought, “but me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?” And from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David. (1 Samuel 18:8-9)

There's an old saying that you should always keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Saul seems to have had a similar thought, because his first idea was to offer David his eldest daughter, Merab in marriage. Well, to be honest, Saul had previously promised his daughter to anyone who would kill Goliath, so he was making good on his earlier promise; but he made a condition of marriage that David continue his brave service in the army and continuing to “fight the battles of the LORD.” Sooner or later, Saul figures, David will get killed in combat, and then he won't be a problem any more, will he.

Which, come to think of it, is similar to the plan David later used against Uriah the Hittite. I wonder if that's where he got the idea.

A more ambitious man, or perhaps a less prudent one, would have jumped at the offer. David turns Saul down. “Who am I, and what is my family or my father's clan in Israel, that I should become the king's son-in-law?” (v. 18)

The plan wasn't a total wash, though. David is still in the army, and accidents can still happen. Saul marries Merab off to a guy named Adriel and the two of them fall out of the narrative. Much later the Second Book of Samuel makes mention of five sons of Adriel (2 Samuel 21:8). Many of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts refer to them as the sons of Adriel and Michal, Merab's sister; but that doesn't make a lot of sense and many translators and commentators – regard this as a goof and say that Merab was the mother. One explanation, which makes about as much sense as anything, suggests that Merab had died by this time and that Auntie Michal raised the five boys. Maybe.

But what about Auntie Michal? We're getting to her.

Michal is Saul's younger daughter, and she has fallen in love with David. This pleases Saul because it gives him another chance to sucker David into doing something rash. He has some of his flunkies go to David privately and butter him up. “Look, the king is pleased with you, and his attendants all like you; now become his son-in-law.”

Dave still plays it cagey; or perhaps he really is that humble. “Do you think it is a small matter to become the king's son-in-law? I'm only a poor man and little known.” (v.23)

It was customary at the time for a bridegroom to pay a “bride-price” to the father of the bride. To our sensibilities, this sound awfully like the girl is being sold like a prize heifer; and to a certain respect it is. The reasoning behind it was that the bride-price was compensation to the bride's family for the loss of a daughter; and also insurance to support the bride, should she become widowed; which, given David's line of work, was a distinct possibility.

This time, Saul is ready for David's demurral, and passes on the message that the only bride-price he wants from David is one hundred Philistine foreskins. Presumably from dead Philistines, although I suppose they could have been taken from prisoners; but yes, foreskins.

Perhaps you might ask yourselves at this point, “What is it with these ancient Hebrews and their thing about foreskins?” Well, Circumcision, the excision of the male foreskin, was the sign of the covenant God established with Abraham way back in Genesis chapter 17. It became a symbol of Jewish identity; a physical sign that they were a people different from other nations. Not only were the men required to be circumcised, but also their servants and the other male members of their household.

One Bible study program that my Dad used back in the '70s used Circumcision to represent a whole class of Mosaic laws and Scriptural narratives which emphasized the separation of God's People from the Gentiles; but I wonder if the reverse wasn't true as well. By requiring the servants and even the slaves to also be circumcised, the Law was including them in the Covenant community as well.

Looking at it from this point of view, Saul's request becomes rather perverse. Besides the the inherent squickiness of the the body part he requested, I mean. A ritual intended to be a sign of inclusion in a group, is being used as a mark of humiliation inflicted on an enemy.

On a less theological level, Saul is also following the venerable fairy-tale tradition of demanding that a suitor perform an impossible task before granting him the hand of his daughter, in the hopes that the guy will fail or die in the attempt.

In the fairy-tales, this never works. The Poor but Honest Peasant Lad succeeds in his impossible task; and in this story, so does David. He goes off to fight the Philistines and comes back with twice the number of trophies Saul demanded.

This ought to be the point where they all live happily ever after; except that Saul still hates and fears David. He sees David's success as a sign that God favors him, and the jealousy Saul feels is eating him up. Everything David does is a success; he has more victories than any of Saul's other generals. Saul's daughter is in love with David and even his son, Jonathan, who ought to regard David as a rival, speaks up for him.

Saul's jealousy deepens into an obsession and on a few occasions, he impulsively tries to kill David.

On one of these, Saul sends minions to David's house with orders to watch it and to kill David in the morning. Michal becomes aware of this and warns her husband that he needs to flee for his life. She helps him escape through a window, and then hides the escape by sticking a dummy in his bed and covering it up with blankets and a goat-hair pillow at the head to make it look like David is still sleeping. Saul's minions obviously haven't seen enough movies and so they are fooled.

The text doesn't call it a dummy of course; the Hebrew calls it a “terephim”. The word is believed to refer to an idol, and is used in the story from Genesis where Rachel steals her family's household gods and winds up embarrassing her husband. Why would the daughter of the king of Israel have a heathen idol in her house? Well, the obvious answer is that King Saul wasn't all that righteous. Another possibility is that the people of David's time weren't nearly as doctrinally pure as the later priestly writers of Scriptures would like us to think, and that sometimes made graven images. Maybe it was simply an object d'art, or a piece of plunder from a neighboring kingdom.

Whatever it was, when Saul arrives the next day desiring to kill David and finds how his myrmidons were bamboozled, he is furious with his daughter. Michal pleads that she had to help David escape because he threatened to kill her if she didn't. Which was a lie, but one which probably saved her life, considering her father's rage.

David flees Saul's court, and for the next several years sort of knocks about with a small group of loyal followers. Let's not be cute about it; the were essentially mercenaries, like Jephthah's band of “worthless men”. Sometimes they were pursed by Saul and his men, but even when they weren't, David kept his distance. There were times when David even wound up working for the Philistines, although he tried to finesse this conflict of interest by raiding third parties who were enemies of both the Philistines and the Israelites.

And what of Michal? As far as Saul is concerned, David is dead to him; or at least Saul wishes he was dead. He marries Michal off to a guy named Paltiel. I don't imagine he asked Michal's input on the matter; even if such a thing were customary at that time, Saul wasn't that kind of a guy.

The on-again/off-again wars between the Israelites and the Philistines continue. In one climactic battle, most of Saul's sons are killed, and Saul commits suicide on the battlefield rather than be captured by the enemy. His remaining son, Ish-Bosheth, is a weak leader who holds only a tenuous grasp over the tribes of Israel.

David returns to his native Judah, to the city of Hebron; where the tribe of Judah elect him king. There follows a period of tension between David and Ish-Bosheth over which one would rule over the whole of Israel.

David sends messengers to Ish-Bosheth, demanding that he return his sister Michal to David. After all, David did pay for her. Perhaps it was tacky of him to mention the hundred foreskins, but at least he didn't bring up the fact that he had supplied double the price.

Perhaps if Ish-Bosheth had been in a stronger position, or if he regarded his sister better, he would have told David where to stick his hundred foreskins. As it was, he complies, and orders Michal to be taken from Paltiel and delivered to David. Paltiel is heartbroken to be separated from her and follows her weeping, until Abner, the general charged with escorting Michal, tells him to get lost.

It would be nice to think that David demanded Michal's return because he still deeply loved her. Maybe he did. But during the intervening years, he had picked up two other wives, Aninoam of Jezreel, and Abigail the widow of Nabal. Some readers have darkly observed that if David really loved Michal that much he could have taken her with him or tried to recover her earlier.

It could be that this was simply a matter of pride: Saul had taken David's wife away from him, and now he wanted her back. Or it could have been a matter of politics: by claiming the Daughter of Saul as his wife, David was trying to bolster his claim as the rightful successor to Saul.

Or it might have been something even more subtle. At this time, Abner, one of Saul's most able generals, is getting pretty fed up with Ish-Bosheth and decides to defect to David's side. His escorting of Michal might have been an excuse for him to go to Hebron where he could negotiate with David.

Or it may have been a combination of any of these factors. We aren't told how Michal felt about being yanked from one husband to another. The narrative simply notes that David regained possession of her and then goes on to other things.

Eventually, David does gain recognition by all the tribes as King of Israel. He conquers the Jebusite city of Jerusalem and makes it his political capitol.

At first he wants to bring the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem too, so that Israel's religious center and its political center will be in the same place. This doesn't work out so well. In his first attempt to bring the Ark to Jerusalem, he fails to follow the SOP, and one of the men transporting it accidentally touches the Ark and gets fried by its Divine Power. (2 Samuel 6:1-7) This frightens David, so he waits a few years before trying it again.

The second time, David was more careful and had his people follow the protocols established in the Law of Moses for transporting the Ark. Everything goes without a hitch, and David led the procession into the city, dancing before the Ark all the way. And why not? It was certainly an occasion for celebration. This moment, for David, is probably the peak of his career; more momentous than slaying Goliath, more important than being crowned king, even more significant than claiming the city of Jerusalem for his own.

Maybe, but Michal doesn't see it that way.

As the ark of the LORD was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, she despised him in her heart. (2 Samuel 6:16)

After the Ark has been placed in its new home, a special tent erected within the city walls, and offerings have been sacrificed to sanctify the occasion and David had given out bread and dates and raisins to the crowd in celebration, David returns to his palace, where Michal has words for him.

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, disrobing in the sight of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!” (v.20)

He was making a spectacle of himself and cavorting in a manner beneath the dignity of a king. Her phrasing has led many readers to assume that David was dancing naked, or perhaps in his underwear, but I'm not sure if this is necessarily true.

Verse 12 states, “David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the LORD with all his might.” The ephod was a sleeveless garment worn by those who served in the holy sanctuary. A special type of ephod was worn by the High Priest and had a special breastplate attached to it, but this was probably the bog-standard work smock worn by the entry-level staff. The text does not give us a detailed description of what the ephod looked like, probably because at the time those passages were written, it was in use and so everybody knew. The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us this:

All that can be gleaned from the text is the following: The ephod was held together by a girdle ... of similar workmanship sewed on to it (Ex. xxviii. 8); it had two shoulder-pieces, which, as the name implies, crossed the shoulders, and were apparently fastened or sewed to the ephod in front (Ex. xxviii. 7, 27). In dressing, the shoulder-pieces were joined in the back to the two ends of the ephod. Nothing is said of the length of the garment. At the point where the shoulder-pieces were joined together in the front "above the girdle," two golden rings were sewed on, to which the breast-plate was attached.

If the ephod was fairly short, coming down, say, to mid-thigh, and if David was wearing nothing underneath it, is is quite possible that in his enthusiastic dancing he gave the crowds on the street some entertaining glimpses of his royal dangly bits.

Or it could be that Michal was peeved that he cast off his kingly robes to prance about in a humble tunic like a peon. It was a rude reminder to the princess that the man she married was at heart still a peasant shepherd.

So was Michal's rebuke prudish, or snobbish, or justified anger? It was certainly a buzzkill, and David replies icily:

David said to Michal, “It was before the LORD, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the LORD's people Israel – I will celebrate before the LORD. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.” (v. 21-22)

The chapter ends with a sad commentary:

And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death. (v. 23)

Many commentators see this as Divine Punishment for her catty remarks about her husband's dance moves. I think it's something deeper and sadder.

At one time, Michal loved David. There aren't a lot of relationships in the Bible where the text says anything about how the woman felt; this might be the only one. Then David was absent for so many years, and Michal married off to some other guy. By they were reunited, they must have become strangers to each other; she was no longer David's first love, but rather an addition to his existing collection of wives.

I think the incident of David's dancing brought home to both of them that their relationship was over. He put her aside, with the other trophies of his old victories, but never again loved her.

A bitter ending to what started out as a storybook romance.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Prequel

Ages ago when Atlantis was young and the World still flat, when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Reagan occupied the White House, I drew a black & white parody comic about a bullwhip-wielding, fedora-wearing adventurer named Arizona Schwartz the Lost Archaeologist.  And yes, the comic did bear some resemblance to a certain movie of that era

In the movie, of course, the Nazis are trying to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant and bring it back to Germany for Hitler, and the Hero is trying to stop them.  But it occurred to me as I wrote the comic that perhaps the hero would have done better to let Hitler just have the Ark.  Because the Nazis weren’t the first to try to steal the blessed thing.

When Moses received the Law on Mount Sinai, he also received instructions to build a tabernacle, a word meaning “dwelling place”; a large tent that would serve as a portable place of worship for the Israelites.  And he received instructions for the making of various furnishings that would go into the Tabernacle, the most important of which was the Ark.

The Ark was a large chest, about 3 ¾ feet in length and 2 ¼ feet wide and tall.  It was covered inside and out with an overlay of gold, and had rings fastened to the corners through which long poles were inserted which were used to carry the Ark when the Israelites moved their camp.  The cover of the chest was called the Mercy Seat, (or the “atonement cover” in the NIV translation; Mercy Seat sounds better).  Placed on the cover were two cherubim fashioned of gold, one on each end, with their wings spread over the cover.  (Exodus 25:10-22)

Within the Ark was placed the original stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.  According to the New Testament Book of Hebrews and later Jewish Tradition, it also contained a jar of manna, the staff of Aaron, and maybe Moses’ baby pictures and some other stuff as well.

The Ark was kept in the innermost part of the Tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, (or Sanctum sanctorum in the Latin Vulgate version, from which we get the term “Inner Sanctum”), apart from the general public worship area.  Only the priests and Moses himself were permitted in the Innermost Sanctuary of the Tabernacle.  When God spoke to Moses in their subsequent travels, he did so from the Mercy Seat, between the two cherubim, (which is why in the movie Belloq insists that the Ark was “a… transmitter, a radio for speaking to God!”)

Whenever the Israelites moved their camp, the Ark led the procession, carried by four Levites.  It also accompanied the Israelite army when they went into battle during Joshua’s campaigns against the Canaanites.

Once the Israelites were settled in the Promised Land, the Tabernacle was set up near the city of Shiloh, roughly in the center of the territories of the Twelve Tribes.  There the Ark remained for a good long time.

Several generations passed since the time of Moses and of Joshua.  A man named Eli and his two sons, Hophni and Phineas, were priests at Shiloh, in charge of performing the sacrifices at the Tabernacle.

Eli seems to have been a decent enough geezer, but as is sometimes the case with preacher’s kids (present company I hope excluded), Hophni and Phineas were jerks.  The text says that  “they had no regard for the LORD.” (1 Samuel 2:12)  When people came to offer sacrifices at the Tabernacle, they defied the traditional procedure for determining the priest’s portion of the sacrifice, and demanded their “cut” up front before it was even offered.  They also made a practice of sleeping with the women who served at the Tabernacle.  Eli tried pleading with his boys to cease abusing their priestly position, but they ignored him. They knew Pops was a pushover  and they didn’t take him seriously.(1 Samuel 2:22-25)

At about this time the boy Samuel, who grew up to be an important prophet, was brought to Eli to serve in the Tabernacle.  One night, Samuel hears a message from the Lord, telling him that he was going to lay down some big-time judgment on the House of Eli; “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle.”  (1 Samuel 3:11).  Eli would not be exempt from this judgment, because he had the power to curtail his sons but did not and therefore he bore part of the responsibility for their wickedness. Apart from his duties as a father, as chief priest, he had a professional obligation as well.  When a superior turns a blind eye to the misdeeds of his subordinates, he takes on their blame as well.

Eli’s sons have been walking all over him for so long, that Eli has really developed a fatalistic attitude towards everything.  When young Samuel relays this message to him, Eli sighs, “He is the LORD; let him do what is good in his eyes.” (1 Samuel 3:18)  He should have done something earlier to keep his boys from going out of control, but it’s too late now.

During this period, the chief rivals of the Israelites were the Philistines, who dwelt to the west.  They are believed to be originally a tribe of the Sea Peoples, a group that swept across Greece and the Aegean Sea region during the Bronze Age.  They tried invading Egypt as well, but were repelled by Ramesses III and settled in some of the coastal cities of Palestine, around present-day Gaza.  From the late period of the Judges through the reigns of Kings Saul and David, the Philistines are depicted in the Bible as the Arch-enemies of Israel.  Although largely subdued in the time of David, they retained their independence until ultimately absorbed by Assyria in the 7^th Century BC.  In modern usage, the term “Philistine” has been used synonymous with “uncouth barbarian”, but the Philistines had plenty of couth, thank you, and seem to have been superior in technology and weaponry than the Tribes of Israel.

After a particularly humiliating defeat by the Philistines at a place called Aphek, the elders of Israel asked what went wrong and somebody remembered the Ark, and how in the time of Joshua, the Israelites were unbeatable when they carried the Ark before them.

When the soldiers returned to camp, the elders of Israel asked, “Why did the LORD bring defeat upon us today before the Philistines?  Let us bring the ark of the LORD’s covenant from Shiloh, so that it may go with us and save us from our enemies.”  (1 Samuel 4:3 NIV)
 

So they tried again, this time carrying the Invincilbe Ark before them into battle; and…

The Philistines once again beat the snot out of them.  Even worse than before.

Some people, even religious people; perhaps especially religious people; seem to think of God as being like a video game where all you have to do is enter the right cheat code and you’ll get what you want.  The sons of Eli and the Israelites seem to have thought of the Ark of the Lord as a kind of magic talisman, +5 vs heathens.  It didn’t work that way.

Not only did the Philistines once again send the Israelite army running, they killed Hophni and Phinehas, who were with the Ark and probably helping to carry it, and they seized the Ark itself.

Back in Shiloh, Eli sat waiting by the side of the road for word of the battle.  He had a feeling in his gut that things were going to go badly.  He was ninety-eight years old and he could barely see, but his gut was working just fine  A runner came from the battlefield with the bad news:  the loss of the battle, of Eli’s sons, and of the Ark.  Upon hearing the last, Eli fell backwards out of his chair and broke his neck.  He had led Israel for forty years; he would lead it no more. (1 Samuel 4:12-18)

On top of everything, the text tells us that the pregnant wife of Phinehas went into labor upon hearing the bad news.  It was a difficult delivery, and she lived only long enough to name her baby Ichabod, meaning “no glory”, because “The glory has departed from Israel.” (1 Samuel 4:19-22)

The Philistines returned with their spoils of war back to the city of Ashdod, one of the five cities of Philista.  They placed the captured Ark in the temple to Dagon, a Canaanite deity which the Philistines had adopted and which seems to have been their chief god. Although originally a fertility deity, Dagon is often depicted as part fish, perhaps partially because his name resembles the Semitic word, “dag”, for “fish; and partially because the Philistines were sea-going coastal dwellers.  H.P. Lovecraft borrowed the name in a couple of his stories involving the Deep Ones, eldritch monstrosities from beneath the sea.

The next morning, when the acolytes of Dagon went to the temple, they found the great statue of Dagon toppled over, face down, in front of the Hebrew Ark, as if the god was worshipping it.

Well.  That was freaky.  But they righted the statue and went back to business.

The morning after that, the same thing had happened, only this time Dagon’s head and hands had broken off the statue and were lying on the threshold of the temple.  (The writer of the text comments that for this reason, the priests and worshippers of Dagon will not step on the threshold when entering the temple.  Next time I meet a Philistine, I’ll have to ask if this is true.) (1 Samuel 5:1-5)

Dagon wasn’t the only one to suffer.  The people of Ashdod began to suffer from hemorrhoids.  Or something.  The King James Version call them “emerods”, but many more modern translations call them “tumors”.  Some commentators have suggested that they might have been the swellings of the lymph nodes in the groin which are symptoms of bubonic plague.

The people of Ashdod blamed the Israelite Ark for their affliction, so the rulers of the Philistines decided to move it to another city, Gath.  The emerods broke out in Gath too, afflicting both old and young in their private places, and people began to panic.  Once more, the Philistine rulers moved the Ark, this time to the city of Ekron.  Another town, another outbreak, and by this point people were starting to die from the affliction, which to me suggests that it was something like the Plague and not simply a problem that could be relieved with Preparation H. (1 Samuel 5:6-12)

The Philistines were rapidly running out of cities.  This had been going on for seven months now, and so the leaders of the Philistines consulted their priests.  “Give the sucker back to the Israelites,” the Priests said, and they also advised giving an offering of gold with it, by way of apology.  They suggested that the gold be fashioned in the form of five golden tumors, representing the five cities of Philista and the tumors caused by the plague, and five golden rats, because they’d been suffering from a rat plague too.  Rats?  Why didn’t they mention the rats before?  Sounds like Bubonic Plague to me.

How they pull off the transaction is kind of interesting too.  The Philistines put the Ark and the gifts in a cart, to be pulled by two cows that have calved and have never been yoked.  Then the cows with the cart will be let loose near the border of the Israelite’s territory.  If the cows go by themselves to Beth Shemesh, the nearest Israelite town, then it will be a sign that the Israelite god had afflicted them; if the cows went back into Philistine territory, then the plague was a coincidence and the Israelite god had nothing to do with it.  (1 Samuel 6:1-9)

The people of Beth Shemesh, in the middle of harvesting their wheat, were delighted and surprised to see the ox cart carrying the Ark of God wandering across their filed.  They built an altar on the spot and offered the cows up as a burnt sacrifice to the Lord, (which, if the Philistines really had been suffering from the Plague, might have saved the people of Beth Shemesh from contracting it themselves).

The Philistines observed all this from a distance, and went back to their cities.  Some Levites came to take charge of the Ark.  It was taken to the city of Kiriath Jearim and Eleazar, the son of Abinadab, was consecrated to guard it.

All ended happily.  Well, except for about seventy men of Beth Shemesh (most Hebrew texts say 50,070, but that looks like a copyist’s mistake), who peeked inside the Ark and were struck down for it.  (v.19)  Which is probably why Indy told Marion not to look when the Nazis opened the Ark in the movie.  Did those 70 guys’ faces melt and their heads explode?  The text doesn’t say.

The text also doesn’t say if the Philistines got over their genital emerod problem.  Presumably the affliction ran its course and was over.  The writer of the text is more interested in the Ark.

I ended my comic parody of the movie by noting that if Hitler had gained possession of the Lost Ark, Germany might have suffered the same kinds of misfortunes that the Philistines did, and Nazi Germany might never have become a threat to the world.  And that shortly after the story takes place, the US economy, which had been struggling out of the Great Depression, suddenly took another nosedive.

After which, I said, a mysterious crate was taken from a maximum security warehouse in Washington D.C. and loaded onto a plane bound for British Palestine.  The plane disappeared somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, and its cargo never recovered.