The Words That Bound the Royal House of David

A king's words do not die when he does. They wait. Midrash Shmuel, an aggadic midrash on the book of Samuel assembled around the eleventh century, watches the words of David travel down the generations of his own house like a fuse already lit. He cursed a murderer, and the curse landed on his great-great-grandchildren. He swore a man to death over a flood, and the man hanged himself anyway. The Temple he was forbidden to build still answered to his name. This is a story about how much weight a sentence carries when a king is the one who speaks it.

The Spade That Struck a Shard

Start underground. God had told David two things that seemed to cancel each other out, "Shall you build?" and "You shall not build" (I Chronicles 17:4). The sages of Midrash Shmuel read the contradiction as a single ruling. David would not raise the House with his own hands, but it would carry his name forever. So David did the one part left to him. He dug. Rabbi Chunya, citing Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, says he drove the foundations down fifteen hundred cubits to reach virgin earth, soil never worked, never broken, not so much as a single potsherd in it.

His spade hit a shard. "All this labor," David cried, "and now this?" Then the Holy One gave the shard a mouth. "This is not my place," it warned. "When the earth split open at creation, I sank down here to cap the abyss. Beneath me lies the deep." David lifted it anyway. The tehom (תהום), the primordial deep, came roaring up to drown the world. You can read how David dug the Temple foundations and woke the deep in full, and the detail that turns it from miracle to warning is what David says next.

A Sentence Spoken in Panic

Standing over the rising water, David made a vow. "Whoever can speak the word that stills this deep and does not speak it, let him be strangled." Ahithophel was there. He knew the word. He spoke it, and the waters sank back into the dark. He had every right to walk away clean. He had saved the world. But the king's sentence had already left the king's mouth, and a king's sentence does not unsay itself. Years later Ahithophel betrayed David, his counsel failed, and the verse records the end with brutal economy, "And he gave charge concerning his house, and strangled himself." Rabbi Yose drew the lesson the sages wanted you to carry out of the cave, beware the curse of an elder, even one let fall for nothing.

The Five Curses on Joab

Now follow a different sentence David spoke. When Joab, his fiercest general, shed innocent blood, David called down five plagues on Joab's line, "May they fall upon the head of Joab and upon all his father's house" (II Samuel 3:29). One with a discharge. One a leper. One who holds a spindle. One who falls by the sword. One who lacks bread. It sounds like grief talking. The sages of Midrash Shmuel insist it was prophecy.

They traced every curse to a descendant, and here is the sting, the descendants are David's own kings. The discharge surfaced in Rehoboam. The leprosy in Uzziah, struck white at the altar. The spindle, a curse of weakness, in Joash, cut down by his servants. The sword in Josiah, whom Rabbi Mana says the archers pierced with three hundred arrows until his body was a sieve. The want of bread in Jehoiachin, eating his ration at a Babylonian captor's table. David aimed at Joab's house. The arrows curved back into his own. You can trace Joab at the altar and the five curses David decreed generation by generation.

The Altar Gave No Cover

When Solomon's throne rose, Joab ran for the one place he thought no blade would follow, "And Joab fled to the Tent of the LORD and took hold of the horns of the altar" (I Kings 2:28). He had misread the law. The altar in Jerusalem grants no asylum, the sages taught, nor does its roof. Only the six cities of refuge shelter a fugitive, and Joab had fled to the wrong sanctuary. Solomon sent word, accept the judgment. Joab answered with David's own curses, accept those first and I will accept mine. Then Benaiah struck him down, and they buried him "in his own house" in the wilderness. Was his house in the wilderness? No. When Joab died, the sages say, Israel itself became a wilderness, because he had plundered enemies to feed the sages and their students, and the praise of his praises was his.

Who May Sit Before the LORD

One question still hangs over the whole dynasty. When God promised David an eternal house, the verse says David "came and sat before the LORD" and asked, "Who am I, O LORD God, and what is my house?" (II Samuel 7:18). But the courtyard had a strict rule. Rabbi Chiyya taught that no one sits there, no one except the kings of the House of David alone. To David's line, and to no one else, that honor was given.

Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish would not grant even that. Not even David's kings may sit in the courtyard, he ruled. They threw the verse back at him, David sat. Rabbi Aivi bar Negri answered for him. David did not lower himself to the ground at all. He settled himself with words, composing his prayer, steadying his heart before the Holy One. And there was proof the courtyard demanded standing, the first watch of priests would go out and sit only on the Temple Mount, outside the walls, so within those walls every man stood on his feet. You can weigh whether the kings of David's house may sit in the Temple courtyard for yourself. Either way, the house David could not build was the only house in which his sons were allowed to sit, and the words he spoke standing in it outlived every king who came after. For more from this collection, see the aggadic midrash on Samuel.