David
KingDavid(d. ca. 961 BC) was, according to theHebrew Bible,thethird kingof theUnited Kingdom of Israel.
Quotes
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- Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a treek planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers
- Psalm1:1-3
- Wash me O Lord for my iniquity, and cleanse me from mysin.For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight. That you may be found just when you speak, and blameless when you judge.
- Psalm51:2-4
- Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, lead me in the way everlasting.
- Psalm139:23-24
- I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
you were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
more wonderful than that of women.- 2 Samuel 1:26 (TNIV)
- Thyservantkept his father's sheep, and there came alion,and abear,and took alambout of the flock: [...] The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of thisPhilistine.
- Thou comest to me with a sword, and with A spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. [...] And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with the sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hands.
- בני אבשלום בני
בני אבשלום
מי יתן מותי אני תחתיך
אבשלום בני בני- Beni Abshalom, beni!
Beni Abshalom!
Mi yitten muthi ani thachteicha.
Abshalom, beni! beni!- O my son Absalom, my son,
my son Absalom!
would God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son, my son!- 2 Samuel 18:33 (KJV)
- O my son Absalom, my son,
- Beni Abshalom, beni!
Quotes about David
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- And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even hissword,his bow and his belt.
- 1 Samuel 18:3-4 (TNIV)
- And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.
- 1 Samuel 20:41 (New American Standard Bible)
- (Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.) The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been 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 ofSaulreturned not empty. Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!
- 2 Samuel 1:18-27 (King James Version)
- Wheneverlovedepends on someselfishend, when the end passes away, the love passes away; but if it does not depend on some selfish end, it will never pass away. Which love depended on a selfish end? This was the love ofAmnonandTamar.And which did not depend on a selfish end? This was the love ofDavid and Jonathan.
- Pirkei Avot5:15; as qtd. in,"Struggling in Good Faith: LGBTQI Inclusion from 13 American Religious Perspectives",edited by Mychal Copeland, MTS, D’vorah Rose, BCC. (2015) p.94-95.
- Saulis eventually overthrown by his son-in-law David, who absorbs the southern tribes of Judah, conquersJerusalem,and makes it the capital of akingdomthat will last four centuries. David would come to be celebrated instory,song,andsculpture,andhis six-pointed starwould symbolize his people for three thousand years. Christians too would revere him as the forerunner ofJesus.But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseledpoetwho plays a harp and composes thePsalms.After he makes his name by killingGoliath,David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extortswealthfrom his fellowcitizensat swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: thewomenin his court are singing, “Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.” So Saul plots to have him assassinated. David narrowly escapes before staging a successfulcoup.When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab “wasted the country of the children of Ammon,” David “brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows ofiron,and with axes.” Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens.
- Steven Pinker,The Better Angels of Our Nature(2012)
- Within the royal family, sex and violence go hand in hand. While taking a walk on thepalaceroof one day, David peeping-toms anakedwoman,Bathsheba,and likes what he sees, so he sendsher husbandto be killed inbattleand adds her to his seraglio. Later one of David’schildrenrapesanother one and is killed inrevengeby a third. The avenger,Absalom,rounds up an army and tries to usurp David’s throne by having sex with ten of his concubines. (As usual, we are not told how the concubines felt about all this.) While fleeing David’s army, Absalom’shairgets caught in atree,and David’s general thrusts three spears into hisheart.This does not put the family squabbles to an end. Bathsheba tricks asenileDavid into anointing their sonSolomonas his successor. When the legitimate heir, David’s older sonAdonijah,protests, Solomon has him killed.
- Steven Pinker,The Better Angels of Our Nature(2012)
- The Bibledepicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. Peopleenslave,rape,andmurdermembers of their immediatefamilies.Warlordsslaughter civiliansindiscriminately, including thechildren.Women arebought, sold, and plundered like sex toys.AndYahwehtorturesandmassacrespeople by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of theOld Testament,the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, fromAdam and EvethroughNoah,the patriarchs,Moses,Joshua,the judges,Saul,David,Solomon,and beyond. According to the biblical scholarRaymund Schwager,the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others.... Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violentpunishments,and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.”Matthew White,a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s majorwars,massacres, andgenocides,counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in2 Chronicles 13because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundatedthe planetand incinerated itscities,but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions.Historianshave found no mention inEgyptianwritings of the departure of a millionslaves(which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor havearchaeologistsfound evidence in the ruins ofJerichoor neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from theEuphratesto theRed Seaaround the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.
- Steven Pinker,The Better Angels of Our Nature(2012)
- Still,sportshistoryis filled with famoustrash talkers.One well-knownathlete,a young man named David, was able to use a verbal attack to his benefit in a battle with a heavily favored foe. "I will strike you down and cut off your head," David proclaims to his much larger enemy, Goliath, in the first chapter of the biblicalbook of Samuel.And the rest is trash-talking history.
- Jason Silverman,"The Art of Trash Talk",Psychology Today,(September 1, 1999).
- You may search through all the greatliteratureof the world and you will find no words extolling marital infidelities. While it is true that the “sins of the flesh” have always been more readily forgiven to husbands than to wives, all human societies have taken a very harsh view of men who seduce—orrape—thewivesordaughtersof the men of their own society. When theTrojan,Paris,ran off withHelen,wife of theGreekKing Menaleus,Greecefought a seven-year war against Troy, to protest the seduction and abduction of Helen.King David’s abduction and seduction ofBathsheba,the wife ofUriah,theHittite,scandalized his court. It also caused that God-fearingmonarchgreat agonies ofrepentance.In passing, King David’s repentance producedsome of the world’s greatest poetry—perhaps, an early proof ofSigmund Freud’s theory that all the creative works of man—all hisart,poetry,architecture,even his proclivity formoneymaking,political power,andEmpire building,are au fond, sublimations of his consciously orsubconsciouslyrepressed sexual desires.
- Clare Boothe Luce,“Is the New Morality Destroying America?” May 28, 1978
- If you want me to say it simplistically, I'm proud that this nobody from nowhere became the center of Western tradition.
- Israel Finkelstein in Robert Draper"Kings of Controversy",National Geographic,December 2010
