David Mocked Madness and Had to Beg God for It Later

David was young when he asked God the wrong question. He had just read a line in Ecclesiastes, or the line that would later become Ecclesiastes, or the thought that would eventually be written down there. He has made everything beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Everything. David wanted to know if that was really true.

The midrash preserved in the Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval compilation of rabbinic material assembled by Rabbi Shimon HaDarshan in thirteenth-century Germany from earlier Talmudic and midrashic sources, opens one of the strangest stories in the whole cycle of David and Saul with a theological objection. David stood before God and said, Master of the universe, everything You have made in Your world is beautiful, and wisdom is the most beautiful of them all. But what use is madness? A madman tears his clothing in the marketplace. Children laugh and chase him. Adults mock him. Is that also beautiful to You?

It is a child's question asked by a king's son who has not yet had to live.

God's answer comes back short. David, are you challenging foolishness? By your life, one day you will need it. One day you will beg for it. And until that day you will not understand why I put it in the world.

David shrugged and went back to his harp.

The Yalkut then fast-forwards through a life he had not yet lived. The stone in the forehead of the Philistine. The friendship with the king's son. The growing roar of the women in the towns as they sang that Saul had struck his thousands and David his ten thousands (I Samuel 18:7). The king's first sideways glance. The first spear thrown at a boy in his own court. The hiding. The running. The bread from the priest at Nob, given and eaten and eventually paying for the priest's death at the king's hand. And then, in the middle of the flight, David makes the decision no midrash can forgive him for quickly. He decides to hide from Saul inside Philistine territory. He crosses the border and walks into the court of Achish, king of Gath (I Samuel 21:11).

Achish is the king of the city where Goliath was born.

The Yalkut cannot believe David made this choice. The midrash has God Himself interrupt the narrative to complain about it. David, the blood of Goliath has not yet dried on your sword, and you are walking through the gates of the city where his brothers live? Achish's personal bodyguards are Goliath's four giant brothers. The brothers recognize the boy who killed their kin the moment he steps into the throne room. They go to Achish and say, with the studied calm of professional assassins, Is this not David the king of the land? Let us go and avenge our brother.

Achish hesitates. He is a Philistine king who knows something about protocol. He points out the legal precedent. Your brother Goliath agreed to the terms of single combat. He stipulated that if the Israelite beat him, the Philistines would serve the Israelites (I Samuel 17:9). If David defeated Goliath under those terms, then by the words Goliath himself spoke before the fight, David is already the king of your land. You are already his servants. The giants receive this news with a peculiar calm of their own and turn the argument back on Achish. Fine. Then step down from your throne. David is king. We will serve him instead.

That is when David understands what he has walked into. He is standing in a throne room in which a dead man's brothers have just made a legal case for murdering him. The Yalkut says he turned to the only direction he had ever turned in his life when the ground gave way beneath him. He began to whisper to God. On the day of my fear, I will trust in You (Psalms 56:4). He asks for help. God answers in an almost amused tone. What do you want? And David, remembering suddenly the conversation he had had years earlier, says the thing he cannot believe he is about to say.

Give me a little of that thing. A little of the madness.

God's voice comes back with the sting of an old wound. Did I not tell you once that a man who despises a thing will one day be pawned to it? Solomon, David's own son, would write the rule down in Proverbs decades later, catching his father's moment in a single line. He who disdains a thing will be injured by it (Proverbs 13:18). The verb in Hebrew carries the image of a debt. Whoever laughs at something will be held hostage to it later. David had laughed at madness in the safety of a palace. Now the note was due.

The story is almost unbearable in its small detail. David in the court of the Philistine king, four giants closing in, begging God for a gift he had once called ugly. And God, at last, grants it. The Yalkut says madness came upon him the way a cloak comes over the shoulders of a man stepping out of a storm. His eyes went loose in his head. He began to scrawl senselessly on the doors of the gate. He let saliva run down into his beard. He acted out every ugly detail he had once catalogued in his complaint. He became the man he had mocked.

And Achish, watching, said the words that saved his life. Behold, you see the man is mad. Why have you brought him to me? Do I lack madmen that you have brought this one to play the fool in my presence? Shall this one come into my house? (I Samuel 21:15 and 21:16). The giants lowered their weapons, because their king had just ruled that this was not the David who had killed their brother. This was a street beggar someone had dragged in by mistake. Achish shooed him out of the throne room with the wave of a hand. David walked out alive.

The moment he was clear of the city he composed the psalm that has been sung in synagogues ever since. I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall continually be in my mouth (Psalms 34:2). Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, his seven-volume synthesis of rabbinic tradition published between 1909 and 1938, preserves the connection the rabbis drew between the psalm and the scene in the throne room. David is not blessing God for the harp or the crown or the beauty of the Jerusalem hills. He is blessing God for the one thing in creation he had once called worthless. At all times, he sings. Even in the time he did not believe in.

The Yalkut ends the episode with a small, dry line the old preachers loved. From that day forward, whenever David looked at a man tearing his clothes in the marketplace and mumbling to himself, he did not turn away. He bowed his head a little. He remembered the afternoon in Gath. He knew what beauty looked like when it saved your life.