David's Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 149–152 B O O K R E V I E W S HALPERN, BARUCH, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King. The Bible in Its World. Grand Rapids, Mich. and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2001. Pp. xx Ⳮ 492. Baruch Halpern is a brave soul to write this book in the early twentyfirst century. Biblical studies is certainly in a state of crisis now—it is difficult to find a single issue that would garner consensus. The most difficult, and most debated, issues center on the topic of Halpern’s book, namely, reconstructing the history of Israel, and most specifically the early monarchy. Halpern has participated in these debates. In this book and in his previous writings he is critical of the Copenhagen school, the group of scholars who deny much of the historicity of the Bible. Yet despite the criticism of Halpern and others, many scholars have begun to adapt the observations of the Copenhagen school and have become much more tentative in their reconstruction of the history of Israel, especially the history of the early monarchy.1 Viewed within this broader framework, a work that deals with David as a historical figure and outlines a reconstruction of his reign is daring. Even more courageous is Halpern’s admission that this work is part of his forthcoming History of Israel. The publication in 1986 of A History of Ancient Israel and Judah by Miller and Hayes created a crisis of sorts precisely because it was nuanced and reflected on the difficulties of writing such a history.2 That book and its reviews caused a paralysis in the business of writing histories of ancient Israel, and it is remarkable, and significant, that Halpern is now engaged in such a venture. The history of David that Halpern produces is nothing like the history found in most textbooks, one that is properly critiqued by the Copenhagen school. Such history is largely constructed by rewriting biblical texts and by replacing divine with secular causality. Halpern’s approach is much more nuanced and complex and is created by painstaking analysis of the text of Samuel in conjunction with detailed archaeological analysis. It uses all of the tools of modern biblical scholarship—source analysis 1. See most recently William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 2001), and Lee Levine and Amihai Mazar, eds., The Controversy of the Historicity of the Bible (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2001). 2. See the reviews and observations in JSOT 39 (1987): 3–63. 150 JQR 94:1 (2004) (following the analysis developed in Halpern’s earlier work, of an A and a B source in sections of Samuel), text-critical analysis, ancient Near Eastern comparisons, and other tools used by the modern historian when looking at ancient evidence. It interrogates the biblical text well. Halpern correctly notes, for example, that the modern historian of ancient Israel must constantly ask: ‘‘Why do we have this text? What was its purpose? Who wrote it?’’ (p. 57). It is, however, difficult to evaluate the reconstruction that Halpern produces, beyond saying that it is clever and sophisticated and plausible. The simple fact, too often minimized by Halpern, is that we know too little about many aspects of these texts. Thus, any reconstruction must be based on conjectures based on assumptions based on possibilities. Given that this is the case, as I have argued elsewhere, history should be reconstructed on the basis of weighing various possible reconstructions.3 Halpern has failed to do this. For example, he would have produced a much more convincing work had he compared his reconstruction with McKenzie ’s recent biography of David.4 He might have examined the way that each work understands the history of the composition of Samuel, and the goals or Tendenz of each of its authors, and highlighted what the two share, and where, and especially how and why they differ. Such a work would have argued in...