David Was Born a Stranger in His Father's House

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Adam Lay Unformed Across the World

Before Adam had a shape he had a size. God made him unfinished and enormous, a body stretched from one end of the earth to the other, east to west and north to south, filling even the empty places, lying there like a landscape while the work of making him went on.

And while he lay there, God walked the future past him.

Every generation that would ever live came by in order. Their scholars. Their judges. The men who would argue for a lifetime over the meaning of one letter, the leaders, the ones who would be remembered and the ones who would not. Adam watched them file across his own unfinished body, and every one of them had already been written down in the book.

Then a small one came past with almost nothing next to his name. Three hours. That was the whole allotment.

A man who has been promised a thousand years does not usually stop over three hours. Adam stopped.

The Deed Signed by God and Metatron

Adam had a thousand years coming to him. He asked for seventy of them to be taken off and given to the boy with three hours.

It was not done as a kindness between friends. A deed of gift was drawn up and signed, and the second signature on it belonged to the angel Metatron. Seventy years were conveyed out of one man's account into another's, in writing, witnessed. Adam attached conditions to the transfer, the way a man does when he hands over something he cannot get back. The years were to arrive with beauty. With rule over other men. And with the gift of song.

The boy's name was David.

The Night Nazbat Took the Slave's Place

Jesse was a righteous man, and one night his own household beat him. A slave girl in his house caught his eye and he made up his mind to have her.

Nazbat, his wife, the daughter of Adiel, worked it out before he did. She did not confront him. She dressed herself as the slave and went to him in the dark, and Jesse, certain of who he was sinning with, spent the night with his own wife.

She conceived. Then she had to decide what to tell him.

The truth would mean telling her husband that she had caught him mid-sin and tricked him out of it, and leaving him to live with what he had intended to do. So she said nothing. The child was announced as the son of the slave, who was set free, and the household believed it, and Jesse believed it. That is how the boy grew up in his father's house: born a stranger inside it, counted as a servant's son.

Seven brothers ate inside. The eighth was the one they sent out with the flock, and he stayed out with it, in the hills above Bethlehem, weeks at a stretch, because nobody in that house could say for certain whose he was and nobody wanted the question asked out loud at the table.

The Son Nobody Sent For

Years later the prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem with a horn of oil and told Jesse to bring out his sons.

Jesse brought them. Eliab first, the tall one, and Samuel looked at him and was certain. Abinadab next. Then Shammah. Seven sons walked past the prophet and the answer each time was no.

Samuel asked whether that was all of them.

There was a pause before Jesse answered. Then he said there was one more, the youngest, out with the sheep. Samuel refused to sit down to the meal until somebody went and fetched him. They brought him in from the field, flushed from the run and smelling of animals, the son of the servant woman, and God told Samuel to get up and pour the oil, because this was the one.

He had seventy years to spend, and a voice, and a face men followed, all of it signed over to him before the world had finished making the man who gave them away.