When David Begged God for the Madness He Once Mocked

Most people picture David as the warrior-poet who never flinched. The Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, a thirteenth-century compilation of older midrash, remembers a different David. One who told God a piece of creation was a mistake, and lived long enough to need that mistake to save his life.

The verse David could not accept

It started with one line from Ecclesiastes. He has made everything beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 131 stages David lodging a complaint with the Master of the world.

Everything beautiful? What about madness? The madman tears his clothes. Children chase him with stones. People laugh in the marketplace. Where is the beauty in that.

God answered with a sentence that should have chilled the future king. By your life, one day you will need it. Proverbs knew the principle. He who disdains a thing will be injured by it (Proverbs 13:18). The rabbis read yichabel lo two ways at once. Injured by it. Pawned to it. David had just put himself in debt to the thing he found ugliest.

Running to the enemy with Goliath's sword

The debt came due fast. Saul was hunting him. David ran. The first place he chose for refuge was Gath, hometown of the giant he had killed, and he was still carrying Goliath's sword. The midrash imagines God watching this and asking, almost incredulous, Yesterday you killed Goliath. Today you walk into his brothers' city with his blade in your hand. The blood has not dried.

The Philistines recognized him at once. Is this not David, king of the land (1 Samuel 21:12). They wanted him dead. Achish, the king of Gath, tried to defend him. His own courtiers told Achish that if he would not act, David would take the throne out from under him.

The man who once asked God why madness existed was one wrong word away from execution in a foreign court. He prayed. In the day of my fear, I will trust in You (Psalm 56:4). The psalm even carries a superscription tying it to this crisis at Gath. God answered. What do you want?

What is the going price of foolishness?

David's answer, as the rabbis read it, is one of the strangest in Samuel. Give me a little of that thing. Madness. The gift he had told God He should not have made.

God, in the midrash, almost smiles. He who disdains a thing will be pawned to it. Are you really asking for foolishness now? David was. He scribbled gibberish on the city gates. He claimed Achish and the queen owed him impossible sums. He let drool run down his beard. The Yalkut adds a haunting detail. Achish had a mad daughter at home, and David's performance was good enough that the king thought he was watching her twin.

Achish finally threw up his hands. Do I not have enough madmen already (1 Samuel 21:16). David walked out of Gath alive because the thing he had once mocked carried him through the gate.

The joy that left when the madness left

The midrash holds the most painful note for last. In the moment of escape, David rejoiced. When the madness lifted, the joy lifted with it. He had borrowed a tool from God's toolbox after declaring it worthless, and the borrowing left a bruise that did not heal cleanly.

This is how the midrash aggadah teaches its hardest lessons. Not with a verdict. With a king sitting outside a Philistine city, alive, ashamed, suddenly aware that the parts of creation he had ranked as ugly were the parts that had just kept him breathing.

Why the same compilation tells the story of Abraham at night

A few hundred sections later, the same compilation opens another scene about night. On my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves (Song of Songs 3:1). The Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 986 attaches this verse to the night before the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac. The compilers who recorded David's humiliation at Gath picture Abraham the night before Moriah as a man who could not sleep, searching the dark for the God who had just asked him for his son.

The Yalkut keeps returning to the hour when its heroes have nothing left but prayer. Abraham at night with a son to bind. David at noon with a sword that was already a confession. The midrash on Song of Songs 3:4, I held him and would not let him go, then jumps to David buying the threshing floor of Aravnah where the Temple would stand. Even the soil refuses to release the moment.

From the night of Egypt to the night that never ends

The Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 1026 closes the loop. It sets two scenes side by side. In one, Moses stands at the sea and watches God deliver Israel (Exodus 14:30). The sea sees them and flees. The Jordan turns backward (Psalm 114:3). Creation itself moves out of the way.

In the other, Jeremiah sits in the ash of the burned city. God has put me into the hands of those I cannot withstand (Lamentations 1:14). The cry that follows is not awe. It is people shouting away, unclean, away at the survivors (Lamentations 4:15). Same God. Different night. The Yalkut twists Song of Songs 3:1 a third time. In the past, it shone for me between the night of Egypt and the night of Babylon. Now night is joined to night with no morning between.

That is the line the Yalkut keeps pressing on. The traits Israel disdains, the nights Israel fears, the foolishness Israel ranks as useless. They are the ones the tradition will ask Israel to walk through next. David learned it in a throne room. Abraham learned it on a mountain. Jeremiah learned it in a burned city. The compilers set the scenes side by side so no reader could pretend the lesson was for someone else.