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Life in the pastures, savannahs and deserts of the Near East has never been easy. The climate alone has been treacherous to this often dry region’s populace. But at no time was Israel’s turmoil greater than during the rule of kings, beginning with a mad King named Saul and his successor who has been lauded by historians as the “Poet King.” It might originally have been the people who wrought this turmoil, in their demand for temporal leadership, but it was the leadership they were given which inevitably led to the tumultuous age of Kings, and the eventual exile into Babylon.
Best remembered of all the Kings of Israel is King David, the Poet-King, but the era of war and peace brought on by his struggle to be king of a united Israel starts not with David, but with his predecessor, and the beginning of kingship among the Jews. It was only after the people began clamouring for a king that the prophet Samuel, following orders from Yahweh, anointed Saul as the first King of Israel. From this act came the tradition of a priest anointing the head of the king, which lasted through the Middle Ages as a universal acknowledgement of divine right. But Saul, according to the Bible, ran afoul of Yahweh’s will, and for it he was punished. His punishment was that his kingdom would not last, and that another, a man “after Mine own heart” would sit upon the throne of Israel, instead.
After this judgement, Saul became increasingly neurotic, and his people felt the pinch of his madness. As Saul lost sleep and sank into an incurable stupor, his suspicious nature and temper increased, and his tolerance decreased. His punishments were often brutal and without adequate proof of guilt. By the time David, already secretly anointed by Samuel, came onto the scene to calm Saul’s mind by means of song and harp, Saul was almost completely insane. For a time, however, Saul’s madness was soothed by David, his secret successor, and life improved for the people of Israel as David found favour with Saul.
Then, after David slew the giant Goliath in the most immortalised battle in history, and began gaining praise among the people, Saul’s paranoia not only returned, but also intensified ten-fold. According to the histories of the day, even David’s music could not ease Saul’s neurosis. Eventually, this inner conflict of Saul’s would lead to more pain for the people of Israel, as he became embroiled in battles against an exiled David for the throne of Israel.
After Saul’s violent, and self-inflicted, death, David rose to power as a highly-popular king. He was zealously religious, and often swept away into divine frenzies, at the start of his reign. But David was a spoilt child of God, elevated to the highest mortal post in all of Israel. Scholars and historians in the millennia since have questioned whether David was truly meant to be a king, or simply elevated to the one place where he would have the means to father Solomon, and to bring about the prophesy and birth of Christ.
Life in David’s Israel was far from easy, and the Golden Age wouldn’t arrive until Solomon’s time, but no one had it harder than the women. Not only was it an age and region of the world which tended to view women as mere adornments and status symbols, but women were a particular vice of David’s, as well as being important to his reign.
Understanding exactly how vital women were to David’s reign, from start to finish, means examining the personalities of a few of his eight wives, how they came into his life, and how they either added to or took away from his prestige.
The first, and perhaps the most notably motivational of David’s wives was Saul’s own younger daughter, Michal. Her story begins in her father’s palace, where a neurotic Saul found solace in David’s harp music. Many years of war, deceit, and pain later, her story would end with Michal as a hard-mouthed woman saying bitter words to King David when he was made dizzy by music not of his own making. The events between those two points make up books of their own, but it was Michal’s strength of spirit and initial understanding which led to David’s kingship. Later, her emotions would cloud that understanding and harden that spirit, when she would be torn between two men, leading to her bitterness when David called her back to his side after she remarried.
Michal’s response to her forced return to David showed a personal strength not often seen in that era. Women were viewed as little more than possessions by most men, and they learned to abide their role as homemaker and babymaker, without complaint, from early childhood. By the laws of the day, David, as King, could demand whomever he chose as wife, even a former wife who had since remarried. It was this right which David exercised to get Michal back. But that right would not save him from his ultimately fatal mistake.
While the laws of the day declared that the King might take any woman, be she another man’s wife or not, as his own wife, they did not permit him to simply sleep with another man’s wife. That act would break one of God’s sacred commandments, given to Moses. But David, spoiled by his sudden elevation from country peasant to King of Israel, and his eye for beautiful women constantly roving, would break that commandment when he bedded Bathsheba, the wife of one of his loyal soldiers. David would compound that crime with another, deliberately causing the death of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, in an act of desperation. For these crimes, not only did David and Bathsheba suffer, but all of Israel would feel the lash of God’s retribution, for the reign of David’s line, which began in exile and bloodshed, would end in the same.
After the wise and just rule of Solomon, the line of David became weak and corrupted, as one bad king followed another, until the Jews were overrun and driven into exile in Babylonia. And so, for the crimes of the kings which they had so fervently demanded, the Jews would once again find themselves strangers in a strange land, tossed amongst conquerors for centuries. And that was to be the end of the Age of David.
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