David the King Who Wrote That He Was Lonely

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The King Held the Army Where It Stood

David had the army assembled and would not let it move.

The Arameans were waiting on one border and the Philistines on the other, and the men were armed and standing in the sun, and their king sent to the Sanhedrin instead of sending them forward. Go back through the covenants, he told the court. Find out what these two nations can actually claim.

The judges went into the old agreements. The Philistines had one on paper: Isaac had sworn peace with Philistines in his lifetime, and their descendants were owed that peace. The court read the genealogies and came back with an answer. These were not those Philistines. The people holding that coastline now had come over from Cyprus generations later and had walked into a treaty that was never made with them. The claim was worth nothing.

The Arameans had a better case and had spent it. Their claim to gentle handling had been forfeited twice over, first under Balaam, who was hired against Israel, and again under their king Cushan-rishathaim, who held Israel down until Othniel broke him. A nation that has attacked twice does not get to invoke a courtesy.

Only then did the king let the army go.

The Bird of Prey Over Abraham's Pieces

Rabbi Joshua traced that man back to a field where an old childless herdsman stood over a row of carcasses with a sword.

Abraham had cut each animal down the middle and laid the halves facing each other across a gap. Had he left them whole, the world could not have gone on standing. Cutting them weakened whatever was in them, and setting half against half held the two strengths against each other. The young pigeon he did not cut. There was only the one bird there, and it stayed alive.

Then the carrion birds came down out of the sky on the meat, to scatter it and finish it.

The bird of prey coming down on the divided kingdoms, Rabbi Joshua said, is David son of Jesse. A prophet had already put the name on him: a speckled bird of prey. The boy with the sling and the shepherd's confidence and the harp, seen from the far end of the covenant, comes down out of the sky onto the nations laid open in Abraham's field.

They Are Many and I Am Alone

The same man wrote: turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.

He was the seventh son of Jesse, chosen when six older brothers were passed over in front of him. He commanded the armies. He had taken the tribes and made them one country. Nobody in the kingdom had less reason to describe himself as alone and hard-pressed, and he said it anyway, out loud, in a song people were expected to sing.

What he meant, he said plainly to God. Since You appointed me king over Your people, their eyes are on me and my eyes are on You. They are many. I am one man against all of them.

And then the part that had a splinter in it. My enemies watch me and their numbers grow and they hate me for nothing at all. Esau hated Jacob over a stolen birthright, and even Esau had a grievance he could take through a court. These nations had no such grievance. David had sent judges into old treaties before he would let a spear move, and he was hated anyway, by people with nothing to point at.

There was no one over him to appeal to. That is what a man means when he is king and calls himself alone.

The House He Was Not Allowed to Build

He wanted to put up a house for God, and he was told no. Too much blood on him, too many campaigns, too many fields like the ones he had held the army back from and then released it onto. Somebody else would build it. A son, later.

He built it anyway, in every way a man is able to build something he is forbidden to build. He bought the ground. He collected the gold and the silver and the bronze and the iron and the cut stone and the cedar and stacked it up. Rav Chisda taught that there is no gap at all between the sanctuary below and the sanctuary above, that the house in Jerusalem answers to a house already standing over it, and David spent the last of his reign assembling the lower one on the ground so precisely that his son would only have to lift it into place.

A day in Your courts is better than a thousand anywhere else, the sons of Korah sang. I would rather stand in the doorway of the house of my God than live inside the tents of the wicked. And in the same breath: God settles the solitary in a house.

He Gave the Credit to a Man Who Slept on a Stone

On the day the people brought their donations for it, they gave with their whole hearts and were glad, and the king watched them do it and was gladder than any of them.

Then he stood up in front of the entire congregation to bless God, and everyone there knew the formula. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. That is how it is said.

He did not say it that way. He said: blessed is the Lord, God of Israel our father.

Rav Huna caught it. One name, not three, and the one he chose was Jacob, because Jacob was the man who first stood up out of the dirt beside a stone he had used for a pillow and vowed that the place would be a house of God. The vow in the Torah is written in the singular, Rabbi Yehuda pointed out, one man swearing, not a nation. Israel the elder.

So the king with no equal above him and no peer beside him, standing in front of the largest pile of treasure his country had ever assembled, for a building he had been told he could not build, handed the credit backward to a fugitive sleeping alone on a rock in the open country.