David Prayed Against His Enemy, and Heaven Named Saul

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The Word He Chose Because It Had No Face

David wrote the line at night with the door shut. "My enemies will be exceedingly ashamed and frightened."

Enemies. Plural, and therefore nobody. A plural has no address, so it cannot be delivered to anyone, and a man can put every year of his life into it and still swear afterward that he meant no one in particular. He had the years to put in. There had been a spear in a palace, and caves, and a crown that kept not arriving.

The mouth is the one instrument the animals were not given. God made them with eyes like a man's and ears like a man's and then silenced them, nidmu, and left the human mouth open on purpose. So the favors a person cannot even count begin with the ability to say anything at all, which is why a curse is not merely an ugly noise. It is the gift turned around and pointed at the giver.

Ears on the Road, Ears to the Wall

Do not curse a king even in your thought, and do not curse the wealthy man in your bedroom, because a bird of the heavens will carry the sound and a winged creature will tell the matter. Rabbi Levi put it without any decoration. There are ears on the road and ears to the wall.

The carrying does not even wait for a bird. When a man is asleep his body tells his soul what it did that day, and the soul tells the spirit, and the spirit tells the angel, and the angel tells the cherub, and the cherub tells the winged creature, and the winged creature tells the One who spoke and the world came into being. Nothing has to be overheard for the report to arrive. The chain starts inside the man who thought he was alone.

David slept in a shut room and was reported by his own body before morning.

The Question That Named Saul

The rebuke came back as a question, which is worse than a verdict, since a verdict is finished and a question waits for an answer. Who was your enemy? Was it not Saul?

David did not answer. In the pause where an answer should have gone, the plural came apart in his hands and one man stood up inside his own prayer, wearing the crown, the same man he had refused to touch in the cave when refusing had cost him everything a kingdom is worth. He had prayed shame down onto that head. He had chosen a word specifically so that no head would be under it, and the word had been read back to him with a name in it.

Heaven did not argue with the history. The spear had been real and the caves had been real. What was taken from him was the plural.

A Song of Straying

He asked for the lightest available category. Count it among the shegagot, the unwitting sins, not among the deliberate ones. That is a plea, not a defense, because a man who pleads shegagah has already conceded that the thing happened.

Then he wrote Psalm 7 and headed it shigayon, a song of straying, which is a strange thing to call a psalm unless the writer wants the error kept in the title where nobody can lose it.

The poem was accurate. It was still only a poem. Words had started the fire, and more words, however honest, are not water.

Water on the Fire

Ben Sira knew what the water was. Waters quench flaming fire, and righteousness makes atonement for sin, which is not a trick and not a purchase. Tzedakah is the giving of what a man has to a man who has less, and it works the way water works on a flame, by being the other thing.

Whoever does good, it shall meet him in his ways, and in the time that he totters he shall find a stay. The good done in the strong years turns into something under the hand in the weak ones. A man who spends those years cursing builds no rail at all, so when the knees go there is nothing on the wall to grab.

Ben Sira does not leave it there, because the easiest way to feel righteous is to give a coin and keep the tongue. Mock not at the life of the poor, he says, and make not the soul of him that is poor and bitter of soul to pine. A man already thin does not need salt put in him. The mouth that shames him is pouring oil on the fire with one hand while carrying water in the other.

Saul was still alive while David wrote all of this. Still crowned, still hunting him through the same hills. He went on running from a man he had already prayed against, and the word enemies would not stay plural in his mouth again.