The Ruddy Shepherd They Would Only Call the Son of Jesse

The oil in the horn should have leapt toward the boy. Instead the prophet stepped back.

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The Prophet Steps Back From a Red-Skinned Boy

Samuel had come to Bethlehem to find a king hidden inside a shepherd's house. He passed over the tall sons and the broad sons, the ones built like soldiers. Then Jesse sent out to the field, and they brought in the youngest, and the boy's face was ruddy, flushed so red it looked as if the sun had settled under his skin. Samuel looked at him and felt his own stomach turn. He half rose from his seat. He had seen that color once before, on a child born generations back who came out red all over like a hairy mantle, and that child had grown into Esau, a man who lived by the sword and by his own hunger. This one too spills blood, Samuel thought. He did not want to pour holy oil over another hunter.

The Word That Turned Esau's Blood Into a Court's Sentence

Then a voice reached him, and it belonged to the God who had sent him. "Look at his eyes," it said. The boy had beautiful eyes, and the whole difference between this red and Esau's red lived exactly there. Esau killed by his own consent, on his own word, whenever the mood took him. This one would spill blood only after a court of seventy judges had weighed the case and handed down its sentence. The same color, two different men. One a murderer, one a king who would take a life only by the law.

"Rise and anoint him," the voice said, "for this is the one." Samuel rose from before the boy and let the oil run down. This is the one in this world, and this is the one in the world to come.

The Name They Would Not Give Him

The oil dried, and the years did not soften. Long after the horn had touched his head, the boy stayed, in every mouth that mattered, only the son of Jesse. Not David. The son of Jesse. His enemies turned the phrase into a weapon and threw it at him in the open. "May the son of Jesse hand out fields and vineyards to you all," they sneered, as if he were a pretender buying loyalty he had never earned. "As long as the son of Jesse walks the earth, not one of you is safe, and no kingdom of yours will ever stand." They said it to hollow him out. A man's name in that world was his essence, his destiny, the proof that he existed as himself and not as some appendage of his father. To call him only the son of someone was to say he was no one. "And I have no name," he answered, and felt himself erased.

They pressed harder. "God has abandoned him," they said. "The Presence has left him. The crown will never return to his house." David heard them chase these lies and threw the question back. "You love emptiness. How long will you run after things that are hollow?" He would not let their doubt become his own. He would not believe that his stepping aside for a single moment could bring the whole kingdom down.

The Traveler With Two Coins

And yet, alone, David said a stranger thing. "I am a stain," he said. Not to his enemies. About himself.

He told it as a small story. Picture a traveler with two coins in his fist and a long road at his back. He comes to two inns. One is laying out fish on silver, course after course. The other sets down plain meat. He looks at the fish and his throat tightens, because he knows what happens if he sits at that table and then cannot pay. So he goes to the innkeeper and says only, "Give me food for two coins." The innkeeper laughs. What can I bring you for so little? And the traveler answers, "Have you not heard the saying? According to my purse, I dance." He asks for exactly what he can afford, and not a crumb more.

David weighed himself on the same scale. He would not push in among the great. He pictured Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seated together in an inner room, Moses and Aaron in the chamber just outside it, and himself standing at the far edge, on the threshold, asking for nothing more than to be let in the door.

The Threshold of the House

"I would rather crouch at the doorway of God's house," he said, "than sit in comfort anywhere else. And if they will not even grant me the threshold, still I will not leave the inn." He did not want a chair among the patriarchs. He wanted to be near them, even at the door, even on the stone at the foot of it.

His enemies believed that grand offerings bought God's favor. David knew the counter. Balaam built seven altars and God turned away from the smoke. The wicked man's sacrifice is a thing God cannot stomach. What God wants is the prayer of the upright, the low and honest voice, the man who names himself a stain and still lifts his face toward the door.

So the red-cheeked boy the prophet had feared, the youngest son with no name of his own, the traveler counting out two coins, stood at the threshold heaven had already chosen for him, and asked only to stay there.