King David's Spin Doctors

Bill Clinton was not the only comeback kid of the 1990s. King David enjoyed a remarkable revival as well. In 1993 he, or rather his name, made an unexpected reappearance with the discovery of the famous "House of David" inscription at Tel Dan, the earliest reference to David outside the Hebrew Bible, soon followed by the decipherment of the same phrase in two other previously known inscriptions.¹ The discovery energized debate over whether King David really existed and about the nature of his kingdom. Three years later, in 1996, the State of Israel commemorated the three-thousandth anniversary of David's founding of Jerusalem, an elaborately planned event that included exhibitions, conferences, and a sumptuous feast at "King David's Table" for a few thousand lucky diners. The festivities were overshadowed by Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, but for a time, they elevated the ancient king to the status of trendsetter.

For biblical scholars, all this was an invitation to revisit David and his story in 1-2 Samuel. The resulting works, a slew of biographies, biblical translations, and commentaries, all boast new insights, even though—the "House of David" inscription notwithstanding—we really know nothing more than scholars did in the eighties or the seventies. Still, every generation of scholarship operates from a distinct vantage point, noticing things that predecessors missed, and new approaches inevitably mirror the predilections and blind spots of the age. Recent attempts to recover David reflect the debates of contemporary biblical scholarship—the struggles between minimalists and maximalists, historians and literary critics, die-hard positivists and decontextualizing postmodernists. These efforts also reflect broader cultural trends—the values, fashions, and habits of our time.

One of these broader cultural influences is none other than the defining figure of the age: Bill Clinton, a cunning reader of King David's story himself. No longer able to deny his affair with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton turned to the story of King David for spiritual solace and, apparently, for a way out of his political troubles. By confessing his sin, David had been able to survive a sex scandal of his own and had gone on to establish an enduring political dynasty. Clinton seems to have had this precedent in mind when he addressed an assembly of religious leaders at a national prayer breakfast on September 11, 1998. His speech is studded with biblical allusions to Psalm 51, a confessional prayer imputed to David after Nathan denounced his affair with Bathsheba.² Many Americans may have missed the reference, but not Clinton's allies among American religious leaders, some of whom ventured to make the David analogy explicit even before the speech. "King David did something that was much worse than anything that President Clinton did," wrote the pastor of the church that the Clintons attended. "And King David, if I read my Bible correctly, was not impeached."³ Clinton's evocation of David was a masterful act of spin, a confession to sin with no admission of legal guilt. What figure could more effectively have aided his rehabilitation in the eyes of God—and in public opinion polls?

The notion that 1-2 Samuel constitute a work of self-serving propaganda is an old one in biblical scholarship. In 1926, L. Rost proposed that 1-2 Samuel were edited together from two apologetic works, one celebrating David's rise to power, the other legitimizing Solomon's succession.⁴ Two recent attempts to reconstruct the historical David, Steven McKenzie's King David: A Biography and Baruch Halpern's David's Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King, essentially argue the same idea, but with a Clintonian twist, treating 1-2 Samuel as spin. McKenzie goes so far as to describe...