The Life of David
by Robert Pinsky
(Nextbook-Schocken, 209 pages, $19.95)
The scene is both comical and deadly serious. Israel’s first great
king is fleeing from Jerusalem — David has left the City of David
— along with his armies and scores of loyal able-bodied followers,
to avoid giving his son Absalom an easy target. The hot-headed
prince has declared himself the new sovereign and aims to do to his
father what he had already done to the king’s eldest son and likely
heir: to kill him and take his place and rank.
When David’s procession comes to the settlement of Bahurim, they
encounter an energetic heckler. Shimei is a member of the house of
the late King Saul, and he is none too happy about the sometimes
brutal way that David has dealt with the family of his predecessor.
The man “came forth and cursed still as he came. And he cast stones
at David and at all the servants of King David: and all the people
and all the mighty men were on his right hand and on his left.”
Shimei called the fleeing king a “man of Belial” and said that
David was only reaping the fruit of his own actions. God was now
turning his favor from the king, “because thou art a bloody
man.”
In The Life of David, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert
Pinsky sees David’s reaction to Shimei as a turning point in the
attempted coup. One of David’s soldiers asks his liege why he
allows the half-mad rock-thrower to chatter on and requests
permission to “go over” and “take off his head.” The unpredictable
king stays his soldier’s sword. He orders, “[L]et him alone and let
him curse; for the Lord hath bidden him. It may be that the Lord
will look on mine affliction, and that the Lord will requite me
good for his cursing this day.”
Pinsky puts on his literary critic cap and explains that in the
“curving, secret logic of all narrative…this moment of restraint
is like an assurance that David will triumph over the rebellion.”
From the perspective of pure statecraft, “David knows that the
spectacle of the unseemly cursing will create his moment of
sympathy, a longing for a restoration of the king’s dignity” by all
of his followers. In a sense, their dignity is bound up in his, and
they will now fight harder to win it back.
But there was a ring of truth to Shimei’s indictment. King David
may have been loved by God and by his people but he was also a
bloody man. His great debut was an act of spectacular violence: the
young, unarmored stone slinger brained the huge Philistine soldier
Goliath and used the giant’s own oversized sword to sever his head.
As a reward, King Saul offered his daughter as a wife and suggested
one hundred Philistine foreskins as the bride price. David replied,
why not make it two hundred?
The Israelite maidens were said to chant, “Saul has killed his
thousands, but David has killed ten thousands,” but the young
warrior was only getting warmed up. In one incident that Pinsky
regards as inexplicable, King David conquered the Moabites and then
had the people of his grandmother Ruth lie down in three lines of
equal length, and then ordered his army to slaughter two of them.
Even on his deathbed, David’s instructions to his heir Solomon
sound a bit like Don Corleone looking to settle scores from beyond
the grave.
Of his great, murderous general Joab, David instructs Solomon,
“[L]et not his hoar head go down to the grave in peace.” And he
hasn’t forgotten the rock-throwing Shimei either: “I [swore] to him
by the Lord saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword.
Now therefore hold him not guiltless…but his hoar head bring thou
down to the grave with blood.”
Pinsky dabbles with historiography but looks at David as a
character in an epic poem, which makes for less than ideal reading.
It isn’t until about the last 70 pages — the story of David’s
later years: his decline from warrior-tactician who could do no
wrong to embattled monarch to his colorful afterlife in nationalist
legend — that the narrative and the analysis really start to hold
together.
The text indirectly contributed to the choppiness. Pinsky chose
to use the renderings and the quirky punctuation of the King James
Version of the Bible to place distance between modern readers and
the Iron Age monarch. It works, but there’s an unfortunate
side-effect: The poet leans on the lyrical wordplay of the
translators far too often, and so the book limps along for quite a
ways before it can find its legs.
