Search

In this chapter, David’s behaviour whilst living amongst the Philistines is considered (1 Sam 27), along with the two accounts of the death of Saul (1 Sam 31 and 2 Sam 1). While some have considered David’s slaying of the men and women of various tribes (including Girgashites and Amalekites) whilst raiding in the Negev (1 Sam 27) as either pious (herem) or bloodthirsty, it is argued here that it is reported as exceptional and purely pragmatic. In the first account of the death of Saul (1 Sam 31), his armour-bearer’s reluctance to kill him is seen to reflect the sanctity of the king, while Saul’s taking of his own life reflects his ongoing disregard for illegitimate bloodshed. Finally, the peculiarly penetrative violence suffered by Saul invites comparison with the killing of Abimelech for shedding innocent blood, while the exposure of the Saulide remains is noted for future reference (2 Sam 21). In the second account of Saul’s death, David’s interrogation of the Amalekite who claims to have killed him suggests that, because he is a sojourner in Israel, David holds him responsible for raising his hand against the LORD’s anointed. As a result, David orders the Amalekite’s execution and invokes the illegitimately shed blood of Saul on the Amalekite’s own head.

In this chapter, David’s killing of Uriah and the divine response to it are explored. When David makes Uriah’s wife pregnant and cannot persuade him to sleep with her, he orders Joab to contrive Uriah’s death in battle with the Ammonites. Instead of David being angry at the collateral deaths of his servants required by Joab’s adjustment of the plan to kill Uriah, David callously and disingenuously dismisses these as the inevitable cost of warfare. When confronted by Nathan with a parable, David hears it as an indictment of Saul’s taking away of Michal from him. However, the oracle which follows makes clear that while David has successfully avoided ‘bloods’ per se by using the ‘sword’ of warfare with the Ammonites rather than his own sword to kill Uriah, his active contrivance of Uriah’s death has invited divine judgement. The LORD strikes down David’s son, promises to raise up evil from David’s own house, and also inflicts upon David’s house the curse of ‘the sword forever’ (2 Sam 12:10). To underline the message that innocent blood matters, even when ‘bloods’ have been avoided, the LORD promises David consequences strikingly similar to those David himself invoked upon Joab for killing Abner (2 Sam 3). Crucially, however, the LORD’s additional requirement that David’s child must die in his stead, suggests that because David has merely cursed Joab rather than executed him, David’s house still remains at risk from the unremedied ‘bloods’ of Abner.

In this chapter, the focus is on the killing of Saul’s general, Abner, and Saul’s son, Ishbosheth and David’s responses to these killings. It is argued that in the battle recounted in 2 Sam 2, Abner seeks to minimize loss of life, including that of Asahel, brother of Joab, who refuses to give up his pursuit of Abner and ends up killed by him. Abner’s fear that Joab will not forgive him for this is confirmed when Joab refuses to accept David’s peace-making with Abner and kills him in cold blood. David avows his own and his kingdom’s innocence of Abner’s blood for all time. He then, in the same breath, invokes Abner’s ‘bloods’ on not only Joab but his father’s house, including perpetual bloodshed. David then goes still further by explicitly invoking the LORD to repay the wicked, which must include the sons of Zeruiah. This seems to hint that such vows alone may not be sufficient to neutralize the threat of ‘bloods’ to David’s house, given his unwillingness to execute his nephew(s). Indeed, David’s worry that even execution may be inadequate to do so is suggested by his abandoning of the Beerothite brothers, Rechab and Baanah, to the birds and beasts, after executing them for assassinating Saul’s son, Ishbosheth. This episode illustrates David’s increasing agency in avenging illegitimate bloodshed. However, it also casts into high relief his failure to take similar action against his own kinsmen, the sons of Zeruiah, and the danger that this failure may pose to his own house.

Of all the characters bequeathed to us by the Hebrew Bible, none is more compelling or complex than David. Divinely blessed, musically gifted, brave and eloquent, David’s famous slaying of Goliath also confirms that he is a redoubtable man of war. Yet, when his son Absalom rebels, David is dogged by the accusation than he will lose his kingdom because he is not merely a man of war, but a man of ‘bloods’— guilty of shedding innocent blood. In this book, this language of ‘innocent blood’ and ‘bloodguilt’ is traced for the first time throughout David’s story in the books of Samuel and 1 Kings. The theme emerges initially in Saul’s pursuit of David and resurfaces regularly during the rise of David and the fall of men like Nabal, Ishbosheth, Abner, and Saul. Innocent blood and bloodguilt also turn out to be central to David’s reign. This is seen in a surprising way in David’s killing of Uriah but also in the subsequent deaths of his sons, Amnon and Absalom, his general, Amasa, and even in David’s encounters with Shimei. The problem rears its head again when the innocent blood of the Gibeonites shed by Saul comes back to haunt David’s kingdom. Finally, the problem reappears when Solomon succeeds David and orchestrates the executions of Joab and Shimei, and the exile of Abiathar. Attending carefully to the text and drawing extensively on previous biblical scholarship, this book suggests that innocent blood is not only a pre-eminent concern of David, and his story in Samuel and 1 Kings, but also of those responsible for its final shape.

This chapter examines David’s efforts to persuade Solomon to eliminate existing ‘bloods’ and avoid adding to them in 1 Kgs 1–2. David emphasizes that Joab’s killing of Abner and Amasa has ‘set bloods of war in peace[-time]’ (1 Kgs 2:5). Because of this, Joab must not be allowed to die a peaceful death in old age (1 Kgs 2:6) lest this pre-empt the remedying of the ‘bloods’ Joab has incurred through his repeated misuse of war. Accordingly, after David dies, Solomon executes Joab, assuming that this will facilitate ‘peace from the LORD’ for him and his successors. It is also argued that Solomon’s exiling of Abiathar, and David’s instructions regarding Shimei and the sons of Barzillai reflect David and his son’s anxiety to avoid incurring further ‘bloods’. David’s earlier sparing of Shimei (2 Sam 19) is now attributed to his desire to avoid killing him under the guise of war. Thus, Solomon’s ‘wisdom’ is now required to eliminate Shimei in such a way that he is ‘not considered innocent’ (2:9), whilst ensuring that Solomon and David’s house remain so, by avoiding ‘bloods’. This transpires when Shimei is executed for failing to keep a vow made to Solomon. The narrator’s concluding affirmation that ‘the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon’ (1 Kgs 2:46) invites the reader to share David and Solomon’s view that Solomon’s actions here have solved for the moment, the problem of illegitmate bloodshed which has so exercised David and the narrative from the beginning.

In this chapter, the focus is on passages which return the reader to the days of David’s rise to power at Saul’s expense. First, Saul’s bloodthirstiness proves problematic for David when ‘bloods’ incurred by Saul’s illegitimate slaying of the Gibeonites causes a famine in David’s land. It is argued that the Gibeonites’ solution of impaling the seven Saulides as a means of expiating the ‘bloods’ is predictable given the penetrative violence associated with remedying ‘bloods’ in the killings of Absalom and almost certainly Rechab and Baanah. Moreover, the association of post-mortem exposure and potential predatory ravaging with remedying of ‘bloods’ in the latter two cases, seems to explain Rizpah’s protection of the slain Saulides’ remains. David responds to Rizpah’s care for her kinsmen and subversion of his efforts to expiate the ‘bloods’ by taking advantage of the memory of Saul and Jonathan’s impalement and post-mortem exposure in 1 Sam 31. His repatriation of their bones from Jabesh Gilead as a suitable expiatory substitute for the seven Saulides, allows David to both overcome Rizpah’s obstruction and underline his own allegiance to the house of Saul. Further allusions to that earlier period (2 Sam 22:21–25 and 23:14–17) also remind the reader that the future of David’s house depends not only on eliminating Saulide ‘bloods’, but also on avoiding killing more Saulides illegitimately.

In this concluding chapter, the problem of innocent blood in David’s rise, reign, and succession is summarized before some final reflections are offered on the nature and pervasiveness of the theme. To these are added some tentative suggestions regarding how it relates to the wider history and who might be responsible for its presence in the David story. It is argued that ‘innocent blood’ is not to be understood categorically but is better interpreted as blood shed without sufficient cause and hence illegitimate or unauthorized bloodshed. It is suggested that various unwelcome consequences are understood to arise from this kind of behaviour, including but not limited to the incurring of guilt. Whether construed in terms of vengeance, redemption, or expiation, the remedying of unwarranted bloodshed in David’s story invariably involves the shedding of further blood. It is argued that the narrator sees the Davidic problem of ‘bloods’ as solved by Solomon’s actions in 1 Kings 2. However, his failure to endorse Solomon’s view that this will ensure ‘peace forever’ for David’s dynasty reflects both the curse of the sword forever, and a likely awareness that the problem of innocent blood recurs at the end of the history (2 Kgs 21, 24) and leads to the exile. This might suggest the hypothesis that those who attributed the violent fall of David’s dynasty to the problem of ‘innocent blood’ may have found and traced the beginning of this problem in David’s own story.

In this chapter, it is argued that Saul’s offer of his daughters to David suggests that if he can tempt David to fall in battle against his Philistine enemies, the problem of ‘bloods’ will be avoided for Saul. Jonathan’s own anxieties that Saul will succeed in killing David (1 Sam 19) confirm that Saul will not be protected from guilt by commissioning his own son or his servants to do what the Philistines fail to do. In warning his father, Jonathan suggests that blood (in this case, David’s) is deemed ‘innocent’ if it is shed without sufficient cause. While Saul appears to be persuaded of this, the immediate resumption of his efforts to eliminate David suggest otherwise and lead to the episode in which Ahimelech and the priests and people of Nob are slaughtered at Saul’s command. The Israelite servants’ refusal to do so themselves suggests that Saul has shed the Nobites’ blood without sufficient cause, whether because as priests they are somehow sacrosanct or because any wrong they have done has not been sufficient to warrant their deaths. That David, rather than Saul, admits indirect responsibility for these deaths offers further evidence of Saul’s increasing disinterest in the problem of innocent blood, and the first evidence of David’s anxiety regarding this problem.

In this chapter, 2 Sam 15–20 is examined with particular attention being paid to Absalom’s war against David, his death at the hands of Joab, as well as David’s encounters with Shimei and Joab’s killing of Amasa. Shimei’s cursing of David as he flees Absalom’s coup (2 Sam 16) is a reminder that innocent Saulide blood has not been forgotten. While David accepts his guilt, when he rejects Abishai’s offer to kill Shimei, it likely reflects David’s mounting fear that if another Saulide is killed under the illegitimate guise of war, further Saulide ‘bloods’ will fall upon David’s house. In taking up the fate of Absalom and his war, the narrative confirms the fulfilment of the curse of the devouring sword (18:6–8). At the same time, the peculiarities of Absalom’s killing and Joab’s desire for it to be reported to David suggest that David’s failure to kill or curse Joab reflects his recognition that Joab’s killing of Absalom has redeemed Amnon’s blood. When Abishai offers again to kill Shimei on David’s return, David insists that Shimei be spared, lest his killing now add to the Saulide ‘bloods’ incurred by David’s refusal to execute Joab for killing Abner. David’s replacement of Joab with Amasa seems intended to check the threat of further ‘bloods’. However, when David fails to take action after Joab kills Amasa, it confirms how little Joab has to fear from his rival or David himself and that David’s fears of further bloodguilt are fully justified.

In this chapter, the reader is introduced to the topic and to the book. After noting the peculiarity of the language of ‘bloods’, a brief review of scholarship suggests the increasing tendency to read the stories of David as a whole. It is further suggested that it is reasonable to ask what the David story is about, that it might be about some things more than others, and that this ‘aboutness’ is reflected in the notion of its theme(s). After outlining the relevance of previous scholarly discussions of the David story in relation to bloodguilt, retribution, homicide, and ritual violence, this chapter concludes by summarizing the approach of the book. This summary touches on the methodological considerations and the key research questions, and offers an outline of the chapters of the book to come.

In this chapter, the problem of innocent blood is traced in Absalom’s killing of Amnon (2 Sam 13) and David’s grudging restoration of him (2 Sam 14). Given Tamar’s understanding of Amnon’s rape of her as a humiliation and an egregious violation of a customary norm (Nebalah) akin to what may be seen in Judg 19, it is not surprising that Absalom views his killing of Amnon as fully justified. However, while David evidently views the rape as reprehensible, the unmistakeable resonances of Amnon’s killing with the account of Nabal (1 Sam 25) suggests that David spares Amnon for the same reason he was persuaded by Abigail to spare Nabal. It is argued that David does so because ‘violations’ however egregious should be left to divine justice, lest ‘bloods’ be invited upon one’s house and kingdom for killing without sufficient cause. It is small wonder that Absalom flees immediately to Geshur given David’s tendency to execute those whom he sees as guilty of illegitimate bloodshed. Joab seeks to restore Absalom by enlisting a Tekoite woman, who appeals to David to spare her fictional fratricidal son in order to persuade him to spare his own son by leaving Amnon’s blood unredeemed. When David allows Absalom’s return and eventual restoration, it is argued that David’s kissing of him signals not his forgiveness, but merely his willingness to leave Amnon’s blood unredeemed, in the hope that these further ‘bloods’ will not come back to haunt David and his house in the meantime.