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.

Foreskin Wars

You’ve probably heard the question – or perhaps you’ve asked it yourself – why Christians get hung up over certain passages in the Book of Leviticus, but ignore others.  The Levitical prohibitions against eating shellfish or wearing polyester/cotton blends are usually the ones mentioned.  The official answer involves drawing a distinction between Ceremonial Law and the Moral Law, and seems a bit hair-splitting.  And maybe it is.

But the question has been around for a while.  Some Jewish scholars have held that certain parts of the Law of Moses will be superseded in the Post-Messianic Era; although they disagree which parts those might be. There are instances where the Learned Rabbis, unable to come to a consensus on the interpretation of some point of the Law, have deferred a definitive ruling until the Messiah comes.

The early Christians, believing that the Messiah already had come, didn’t have that out; and so they needed to determine how much of the Law of Moses Christians need to follow.  This formed the core of the Church’s first major controversy.  For the sake of a snappy title, I’m going to call it the Foreskin Wars.

As the Early Church spread out from Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria and to the Ends of the Earth, as the fellow said, more and more Gentiles became attracted to the Message of Christ.  This posed a problem for the Church leaders.  How should they deal with these new Gentile converts?

For one faction in the Church, the answer was obvious:  to join the community, one would first have to become a Jew.  For that reason, the Church has come to call this group the “Judaizers”. I’m not sure if I like that name; it sounds like a Hebrew Arnold Schwartzenegger.  Elsewhere, Paul refers to them as “the circumcision party” because in order to become a Jew, one must first be circumcised.

Circumcision, the cutting off of the male foreskin, was established as part of God’s covenant with Abraham way back in Genesis chapter 19.  It was required not only of Abraham and his male children, but also of all the males in his household, even his slaves and servants.  It was a physical sign of belonging to the Tribe of Abraham.

The Gentile response to this, of course, was “You want me to cut off my WHAT???”

Some  members of the circumcision party came to Antioch, the city in Syria which Paul used as his home base.  Paul and his partner Barnabas disputed the claim that converts needed to be circumcised in order to receive salvation.  The local church decided to send a delegation including Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem to get a ruling from the apostles and the elders of the Church as to who was right.

Here the text makes a remarkable statement, one that I don’t remember noticing in previous readings of the passage.  Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses.” (Acts 15:5)

If you’re like me, you’re probably used to thinking of the Pharisees as the Bad Guys in the Gospels; and yes, the Gospels describe several clashes between Jesus and Pharisees over interpretation of the Laws of Moses.  But he had more in common with the Pharisees than he did with the Sadducees, the faction among the Jewish leaders most prominent in the Temple organization.

A lot of Jesus’ moral and ethical teachings are similar to those reflected by the Rabbis of the Pharisaic school.  His rhetorical question “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?” (Matthew 12:11) is an example found in rabbinical discussions on the Sabbath; and perhaps Jesus’ most famous teaching, “do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets,” (Matthew 7:12) is a restating of the Rabbi Hillel’s famous summary of the Law a generation earlier:  "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn"

It is not completely surprising that there were some adherents of the Pharisaic traditions among Jesus’ followers.  But it is even less surprising that of his followers, these would be the most concerned with maintaining the Law of Moses.

Which brings us back to the Council.

The apostles and elders met to consider this question.  After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them:  “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe.”  (Acts 15:6-7)

Peter was alluding here to an incident recorded in Acts chapter 10, where he received a vision from the Lord with which prompted him to accept an invitation by Cornelius, a Roman official who was curious to hear Peter’s message.  This led Peter to an important understanding:  “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.” (Acts 10:34-35)

At the Council, Peter went on to say,

“God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us.  He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.  Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear?”  (Acts 15:8-10)

Peter’s mention of the Holy Spirit was a potent argument.  The church in which I grew up tends to downplay the Holy Spirit except when unavoidable like on Trinity Sunday or the Feast of Pentecost because we Lutherans tend to be suspicious of extreme outbursts of enthusiasm, but the Book of Acts mentions frequent occasions where believers and new converts had ecstatic experiences which they attributed to the presence of God.  That these Gentile converts also experienced this same thing seemed to Peter and the other Apostles irrefutable evidence that God approved of them.

James the Brother of Jesus, who later tradition named James the Just to differentiate him from other Jameses and who had become an important leader among the elders of the Church by this time, stepped in with a compromise.  I get the feeling that he sympathized with the circumcision party; his epistle certainly emphasizes that Christians have an obligation to do Good Works just as Moses had commanded.  But James could not deny the evidence of Peter and Paul either.

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God,” he said. (Acts 15:19)  He recommended that the new converts not be required to be circumcised, but to have them abstain from a few practices common among the Gentiles which are prohibited by Mosaic Law:

(1) food polluted by idols

(2) sexual immorality

(3) the meat of strangled animals

(4) eating blood

Of these prohibitions, the first is largely obsolete; idolatry takes on more subtle forms these days and doesn’t usually involve sacrificing food.  The last two are based on the Levitical view cited by Doctor Van Helsing that “The Life is In the Blood” and that it is therefore uncool to consume it.  Animals killed for food were to be drained of blood as much a practical before being cooked.  These prohibitions have been largely ignored in cultures that enjoy blood sausage.

The second one, so broad and vaguely-worded, is the one that the Church has obsessed over for the past two millennia.

I suspect that Paul found even these bare-bones prohibitions more restrictive than he liked.  In his First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 8:1-13) we find him finessing the rule about food sacrificed to idols, and he devotes much of his Epistle to the Galatians to insisting that Salvation is not predicated on following certain rules.  One of the sad ironies of Paul is that although he argued forcibly against legalism in Galatians and many of his other letters, his writings have also been used to justify most of the legalistic practices that have burdened the Church ever since.

James’ compromise was a big turning point in the development of the Church.  It averted the Church’s first major schism, and made the message of Jesus more accessible to the wider Gentile audience, but at a price.

Up to this point, the followers of Jesus could consider themselves a Jewish sect.  Heck, they were Jewish.  But with the Council of Jerusalem, that changed.  You can argue that this was the true source of the enmity between Judaism and Christendom:  not the blame for the Crucifixion, nor the blasphemous claim of Christ’s Divinity, but rather this decision by James and the other Apostles that the Jewish Identity as defined by the Laws of Moses no longer mattered.

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus … There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.  (Galatians 3:26, 28)

That was Paul’s ideal of Christian equality; but in practical terms, the Church could either be a Jewish one, or a Gentile one; and when it made circumcision and the Law of Moses optional, the Church ceased to be Jewish.

Oh, the Leaders of the Church tried to have it both ways.  Even Paul urged his student Timothy, a young man with a Jewish mother but a Greek father, to become circumcised in order to demonstrate that he was not advocating Jews to reject the Law.  He did not make that request of his student Titus, a Greek.

When Paul visited Jerusalem for his last time, James and the elders of the Church warned him that rumors had spread that Paul was teaching Jews to turn away from Moses and to stop circumcising their children.  They suggested he accompany some men who going to perform a purification ritual at the Temple, to show everyone that he was fine with following the Mosaic traditions.

A good plan, but it didn’t work.  Some troublemakers stirred up the crowd at the Temple, claiming that Paul had brought a Gentile into the sacred Temple grounds.  The text calls them “some Jews from the province of Asia”.  These might have been the Jewish Christians of the circumcision party whose teachings prompted Paul to write his letter to the Galatians, or they might have been some of the members of the local Jewish community who opposed Paul when he traveled through Asia Minor.  The text doesn’t specify.

Either way, they started a riot which brought in the Roman authorities to quell the disturbance.  Paul was arrested, in part for his own protection, and remained a prisoner for two years while the Roman judicial system tried to figure out what to do with him.

In the end, Paul requested to have his case heard by Caesar; which was his right as a Roman citizen, but which further emphasized the rift.  Henceforth, the fate of Christendom would be linked to Rome, not to Jerusalem; and the Church would be a Gentile religion, not a Jewish one.