David’s Women

April Westbrook’s “And He Will Take Your Daughters” takes its title from 1 Samuel 8, the prophet Samuel’s warning speech to Israel about the dangers of kingship. Westbrook shows that the stories of both Saul and David bear out the warning. The “woman stories” in 1-2 Samuel not only expose David’s weakness as a man, but also force the question of his skill and success as a king. Each story, she argues, poses the question, Will the king do justice? Usually, the answer is No.

When you put all the episodes involving David’s first wife Michal together, the result is an appalling sequence of abuse. Michal is Saul’s daughter, but like her brother Jonathan is willing to break ranks with her father to cling to David. Like Jonathan, she loves David. She helps him escape and lies for him,, saving his life. Yet after this episode, “Michael is not heard of again until much later in the narrative. In the process, what does become quite clear is the fact that David completely abandons this woman who has loved and saved him. He does not insist that she come with him, nor does she ever attempt to return for her, even after he has assembled a sizeable war band” (60). 

While Michal is left behind to face Saul on her own, David begins to acquire a harem – Abigail and Ahinoam (61). Michal reappears at the beginning of 2 Samuel. She has married again, but David demands that she return to him – not because he reciprocates her love and loyalty but because it will help him legitimize his kingdom to have a daughter of Saul in his palace.

It’s not surprising that Michal criticizes David as he dances before the ark. Westbrook nicely observes that Michal observes David from a “window,” reminding us of her heroic effort to save David through a window (107, fn 67). Westbrook argues that Michal’s barrenness is not a divine punishment, pointing out that the text never says it is. The point of the passage, she thinks, is to emphasize the death of Saul’s dynasty. She thinks that Michal’s criticisms of David’s dancing are on target (106-8). Whether or not that is altogether convincing, the overall thrust of the David-Michal story is unmistakable, and not flattering to David.

And we haven’t even gotten to Bathsheba and Tamar, whose connected stories Westbrook summarizes thus: “David uses his power as king to take sexually the pious woman, Bathsheba, and then murders her husband to add her to his sizeable harem. In the wake of these events, and in parallel fashion, David’s son violently rapes David’s daughter within the royal house. David knows and he is angry. As king and as father, he holds the responsibility and means by which to respond to Tamar’s cry for justice, a cry that has become necessary because the apparent future king is already using power to violate others for his own self-interest. . . . David does nothing. Tamar is silenced.” When David flees from Absalom, he leaves his concubines behind – as he left Michal – and they become prey to his amoral son (226-7).

Throughout these and other stories, Westbrook emphasizes that the woman stories represent the failure of justice in the Davidic kingdom. As king, he is specifically responsible to protect the vulnerable, to respond to the cry of the damaged. Women are among the damaged and vulnerable; far from responding to their cries, David is often the one who makes them cry.

There are missteps. I don’t think we have to be so cynical about David’s motives as to believe his refusal to kill “the Lord’s anointed” is self-serving (75). Abigail is certainly as “politically savvy” as David, and like Odysseus and Penelope they are “a well-matched couple” (77). But Westbrook makes this seem ominous. Must one be politically naive to be good? The theological questions with which she concludes the book also distort 1-2 Samuel. She suggests that Yahweh Himself is responsible for the injustices of David because He could have prevented Israel from having kings. She doesn’t think “YHWH’s use of power and justice” is “clear-cut” (229). God’s culpability for injustice is a long-standing theological problem, but it doesn’t arise from the text of Samuel. If the kings that God gave were bad kings, it is an act of judgment and discipline, a “giving over” of Israel to her political desires. As such, it is justice of an almost mathematical precision.

Westbrook’s overall argument, though, is convincing, and I conclude with a few reinforcements and extrapolations. First, the king of Israel is symbolically the husband to the people, and so the woman stories are properly taken as commentary on the kings’ practice of royal justice. We could add here that the temple is also conceived as feminine, which implies that kings’ attention to the temple signifies attentiveness to the bride, Israel. Second, Westbrook’s account of 1-2 Samuel indicates that the history can be taken as a form of wisdom literature – instruction in good rule. It is wisdom literature of a specific form, like the wisdom of the Song of Songs, simultaneously and inseparably erotic and political wisdom. Third, we can spin off Christological allegories Westbrook’s thesis: By highlighting the failures of David (and later kings) to do justice to women, to the bride Israel, the Old Testament encourages expectation of a better king, who will be also a more perfect Lover, who does justice by hearing the cries of women.