David Carried Three Griefs That Never Left Him

What the Psalms Are Actually About

The psalms are read as David's victories: his faith in the valley of the shadow, his praise when delivered from enemies, his songs of ascent toward Jerusalem. They sound like a man who came through. The rabbis read between the lines and found something different. They found a man living under three weights he could never put down.

Midrash Tehillim, assembled in the land of Israel between the fifth and seventh centuries CE, builds its commentary on Psalm 18's opening phrase around a cluster of three sorrows that shaped David's inner life throughout his reign. They are not the same kind of loss. Each one cuts differently. Together they make the psalms legible as something other than hymns of triumph.

The Temple He Would See Destroyed

God told David that he would not build the Temple. The reason appears in 1 Chronicles 22:8: David had shed too much blood. The Temple would be built by Solomon, a man of peace. David accepted the decree. He gathered the materials, drew the plans, organized the Levites, and handed everything to his son before dying.

But the Midrash records a grief that went beyond not building it. God showed David what would happen to the Temple after it was built. He would not live to see its construction, and what he would see instead was its destruction. The foreknowledge of the Temple's fall was built into the consolation for his exclusion from its construction. He accepted the decree knowing that the thing he was preparing, the thing Solomon would build with his plans and his materials, would one day stand in ruins. He arranged the stones for a building he would never enter and that would eventually burn.

Bathsheba and the Forgiveness That Did Not Erase

The second grief was the Bathsheba affair. Nathan's confrontation, the dying child, the confession in Psalm 51: David had done what he had done and it could not be undone. The Midrash records that David's grief over Bathsheba was not primarily about punishment. He had been forgiven. God, through Nathan, told him directly that his sin was put away and he would not die. The forgiveness was real.

What the forgiveness did not do was remove the memory or the consequence. Uriah was still dead. The child was still dead. The forgiveness covered the sin before God. It did not cover it in David's own recollection. The Midrash on Psalm 18 reads the phrase the cords of death encompassed me as David's description of living with what he knew about himself: a man after God's own heart who had arranged a loyal soldier's death for a woman. The forgiveness and the knowledge coexisted. They never resolved into something simpler.

Absalom

The third grief was the death of his son Absalom, who had led a rebellion against him, forced David out of Jerusalem, slept with his concubines in public view on the palace roof, and been killed in battle by Joab against David's explicit orders. The story ends with one of the most famous lines in the entire Bible: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would that I had died for you, Absalom my son my son.

David said his son's name seven times. The Midrash counts each repetition. Some sources hold that the seven repetitions lifted Absalom from seven levels of the underworld to which his rebellion had consigned him, one level per utterance of the name. The grief was not simply a father mourning a son. It was a father mourning the son he had failed to reach while he was alive and mourning the son's eternal status simultaneously, using the weight of his own grief as intercession for a young man who had done enough to be beyond intercession.