David Lay Sick in Bed for Thirteen Years Waiting for Mercy

The enemies were already whispering about the funeral.

When will he die and his name perish (Psalms 41:6). That is the line David preserved in his own songbook, preserved it as a direct quote, because the men around his bed had said it inside his hearing and David had wanted history to remember the sound. He was sick. He had been sick for a very long time. Aggadat Bereshit, the Geonic midrash compiled in the ninth or tenth century in Babylonia, says the illness lasted thirteen years. Thirteen years of a bedridden king. Thirteen years of a body that had once killed lions and giants reduced to a shape under blankets that nobody could get warm.

The rabbis of Aggadat Bereshit did not treat this as an isolated episode. They read David's thirteen years through the frame of another thirteen, one that had been laid down in the story of the patriarchs two thousand years earlier.

The Binding of Isaac, the Akedah, is the most famous scene in the Book of Genesis. Abraham is told to take his son, his only son, whom he loves, Isaac, and offer him on a mountain that God will show him (Genesis 22:2). Father and son walk three days together. Isaac carries the wood. Abraham carries the knife and the fire. They speak once. Where is the lamb for the burnt offering? God will see to the lamb, my son. They keep walking. The scene is unbearable to read at a normal reading pace, and the rabbinic tradition has spent two thousand years trying to slow it down even more.

The rabbis of the aggadic tradition count the tests Abraham endured before the Akedah. They come up with ten, or twelve, or thirteen, depending on which compilation you are reading. The Mishnah's tractate Avot says ten. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a midrashic work compiled in the eighth or ninth century in Palestine, says ten. Other traditions count every hardship in Abraham's life as a test and arrive at twelve or thirteen. The binding, in all these counts, is the last one. The final test. The one that proved everything.

Aggadat Bereshit picks up the count at thirteen and runs it into David's bedroom.

David, the midrash says, had been through his own sequence of tests. Goliath. Saul. The years in the wilderness with Saul's armies at his heels. Absalom's rebellion. The death of the first child with Bathsheba. Each one a hardship. Each one an ordeal. And then the thirteenth test, the last one, the ordeal that proved everything David had said about God in the Psalms was actually what David meant.

Thirteen years in a bed.

The midrash is unusually specific about the physical details. Seven sheep were brought to the king every day and laid beside him, so that the warmth of their bodies might restore the warmth of his. It did not work. The king shivered under the seven living lambs. The court physicians did everything they knew. The blankets were piled higher. The braziers were brought closer. The king's sons and generals looked in at the doorway and turned away. The midrash says David composed his lowest psalms from that bed. All night I drench my bed with tears. I soak my couch with weeping (Psalms 6:7). My eye wastes away because of grief (Psalms 6:8). Weary am I with my groaning (Psalms 6:7). These were not performances. These were the notes of a man trying to make sound into something God would recognize as a cry for help.

The rabbis read Abraham's thirteen tests and David's thirteen years as the same structure. The righteous are tested, Aggadat Bereshit says, in exact proportion to the capacity they have to bear the test. Abraham was tested until the very last ounce of his capacity had been spent. The knife was in the air. The angel called his name twice, because the father was so deep inside the act that a single call could not reach him (Genesis 22:11). David was tested until his capacity had been spent too. Thirteen years in a bed is not a lesson. It is the edge of a man's endurance.

And then, in both stories, the rescue comes from exactly the place the person being tested was no longer strong enough to look.

Abraham lifted his eyes, the Torah says, and behold, behind him, a ram caught in a thicket by its horns (Genesis 22:13). Behind him. The ram had been there the whole time. Abraham had not been able to see it because he was facing forward, facing the knife, facing the son. The rescue was waiting in the direction Abraham had not been allowed to look.

David, lying in his bed, turned his face to the wall and wept and prayed. The rabbis of Aggadat Bereshit say the recovery came in a single moment. No physician was credited. No treatment was effective. The king simply began to warm. One day the blankets were enough. The next day he could sit up. By the end of the week he was standing. The thirteen years ended the way Abraham's three days on Moriah ended. Not with a slow convalescence. With a voice from somewhere David had not been looking, saying, enough.

The prophet Isaiah, writing a full three hundred years after David, wrote the sentence the rabbis attached to this moment. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:31). The image of the eagle is not about power. Aggadat Bereshit insists on this. The eagle does not flap its wings in the updraft. The eagle spreads its wings and the wind does the flying. The secret of the verse is that renewal comes at the exact moment you stop trying to fly under your own strength.

Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, published between 1909 and 1938, gathers the story of David's thirteen-year illness from several rabbinic sources and connects it to a quieter claim the rabbis made about the Akedah. Isaac, the rabbis said, did not climb down from the altar unchanged. His soul left his body at the moment the knife came down, and the angel's voice called it back. The Isaac who walked back down the mountain was not the same Isaac who had walked up it. He was a man who had been inside the fire and was wearing the fire under his skin for the rest of his life.

David, in the rabbis' reading, had been inside the same fire. Thirteen years of it. And when he stood up from the bed, he walked out of his bedroom the way Isaac walked down Moriah.

Still shivering. Still warm.

Still here.