The Day David Nearly Abandoned God in the Desert

What His Own Son Did

David had survived Goliath, Saul, the Philistines, the plague that killed seventy thousand people for a census he had taken against God's warning. None of it broke him. What nearly broke him was Absalom.

When his own son raised a rebellion and drove him from Jerusalem, the city David had conquered, where David had brought the Ark, where David had built everything he had built. Something happened inside the king that the plain text of the Torah does not fully record. The traditions that came later did. They said David was not just grieving when he walked out of Jerusalem barefoot with his head covered. He was on the edge of something far more dangerous than grief.

The Idol at the Top of the Hill

The road out of Jerusalem passed a site where there was an idol, an image that people in that area turned to in the old way, as a petition to something other than the God of Israel. David came to that place in his flight from his son, surrounded by his followers, weeping, bare feet on the dust of the road, and he nearly stopped.

He had been utterly abandoned. His son wanted him dead. His counselor Ahithophel, the wisest man in his court, had gone over to Absalom's side. The people he had governed for decades were watching to see which way the wind would blow. In that moment, the idol on the hill represented something that had nothing to do with theology. It represented a place to put the weight he was carrying.

A man named Hushai appeared at the top of that hill, robe torn, dust on his head, and came toward David. David looked up and the moment passed. Whatever had been pulling him toward the idol was interrupted by the sight of someone who had come to suffer with him rather than to petition something that did not know his name. David sent Hushai back to Jerusalem to undermine Ahithophel's counsel. The task ahead redirected what had almost happened at the top of the hill.

The Stranger in the Land

Among the Psalms attributed to David, the tradition preserved a verse that the rabbis read as the direct record of this period: I am a stranger in the land; do not hide your commandments from me. Midrash Tehillim, the rabbinic commentary on the Psalms, asked what David meant by calling himself a stranger. He had lived in Israel his entire life. He had been born there, had fought for it, had been its king for years.

The answer the midrash gave was theological rather than geographical. David felt like a stranger to his own covenantal identity. He was a man who had been close to God his entire adult life, who had composed prayers in the wilderness as a shepherd, who had danced before the Ark with such abandon that his wife had despised him for it, and now he was walking away from Jerusalem with his sandals off and an idol on the hill. He felt like someone who no longer recognized himself in the covenant he had been born into. Do not hide your commandments, he was saying, because I cannot find them from where I am right now.

What David Claimed When He Had Nothing Else

In the wilderness of his exile, David came back to the most basic version of what he had always known. The tradition preserves a reading of one of the Psalms as a record of David's declaration during this period: God is my portion. Not the throne. Not the city. Not the reputation that had preceded him for forty years. The inheritance is God himself, and everything else, the kingdom, the dynasty, the Temple he had dreamed of building, was contingent on that one thing.

The Psalms he composed during his flight from Absalom were among the most unguarded documents he ever produced. He had written boldly when he was winning. He wrote more honestly when he was losing. The God he addressed in those psalms was not a patron or a commander. He was the only thing left.