Read King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) for Free Online Page B

are never actually told what David looked like. The Hebrew word conventionally rendered as “ruddy” suggests to some translators that David was a redhead, 5 and the Hebrew phrase translated as “handsome to the eye” is understood by others to mean both thatDavid was pleasing to behold and that David himself had beautiful eyes. 6
    The passages that describe David's physical appearance represent yet another strand of biblical authorship in the tapestry that makes up his life story. As a rule, the Bible is candid about the physical flaws of even the most exalted men and women in the sacred history of Israel—the matriarch Leah, for example, suffered from poor eyesight, and Moses was a stutterer—but now and then a biblical figure suddenly looms larger than life. Bible critic Robert Alter characterizes the more fanciful episodes in the Bible as “folkloric embellishments,” 7 and the life story of David is richly decorated with heroic exploits and romantic encounters that owe more to folklore and fairy tale than to history
or
theology.
    For example, Samuel's search for the new king suggests the story of Cinderella and the glass slipper. Even the number of sons that Samuel ruled out before finally reaching David seems slightly fanciful: seven is a richly symbolic number throughout the Bible, and seven sons is a common motif in folk traditions. 8 And the sense that we are being told a tall tale is heightened by the contradictions that can be teased out of the biblical text; the Book of Samuel, for example, describes David as the youngest of
eight
sons of Jesse (1 Sam. 16:10–11, 17:12), but Chronicles refers to him as the
seventh
son. (1 Chron. 2:13–15) Clearly the various biblical authors did not know or could not agree on something so basic as how many brothers David had, and they supplied their own resonant numbers.
    The fact that David is both the youngest
and
the worthiest of the sons of Jesse, by the way, is another example of an ironic subtext that runs throughout the Hebrew Bible. The principle of primogeniture, by which the firstborn or eldest son is supposed to succeed to his father's title and property, began in distant antiquity, and the Bible formally embraces the superior rights of the eldest son in the elaborate rules of law that are embodied in the biblical text. Yet the Bible can be understood as a saga about the surprising success of
younger
sons: Isaac prevails over his olderhalf brother, Ishmael; Jacob over his earlier-born twin, Esau; Joseph over all of his older brothers. Each of these stories may have been intended to prepare the Bible reader for the successes of David. When we finally encounter him, we are not at all surprised that the last-born David beats out his six or seven older brothers for the blessing of God.
    “And the elder shall serve the younger,” God revealed to Rebekah about the fate of her twin sons, Jacob and Esau. (Gen. 25:23) The same will be true of David and his son and successor, Solomon.
    All of the earliest exploits of David are filled with the sparkle and glow of a fairy tale. Soon enough we will begin to see David as an ambitious tribal chieftain at war with a reigning king, an outlaw who shakes down the wealthiest of his countrymen for protection money, a mercenary who puts himself in service to Israel's worst enemy. All of these personal characteristics seem historical rather than fanciful precisely because they are so much at odds with what we expect of a fairy-tale prince. For now, however, the Bible engages in a kind of narrative backing and filling to provide David with a tale of origin that fits his political and theological stature: “As often happens with great men, popular imagination supplied charming legends,” observes Bible commentator Robert H. Pfeiffer, who points out that the incidents of David's early life create “an atmosphere of make-believe and the illusion of a mirage.” 9 Or, as another scholar once wrote of Homer, “he was given suitable