The Life of David

A challenge to digest perhaps for the intellectual lazy,but well worth the effort. As some one already summed " About a Poet,For a Poet,By a Poet" In short Mr. Pinsky, Bravo!

All you could ever want to know about David and a little more...Fascinating insight and information such as the fact that David may have been/probably was related to Goliath... It's a shame it couldn't have been presented in a more readable style. That diminishes the book, but doesn't offset the value of reading the book to learn more about David, one of the Bible's most intriguing, most human characters. Still, the best discripton of David comes from the Psalms, one not written by him: "He ruled with integrity of heart..." Doesn't say he was a perfect person or that he was anything but human...but he had "integrity of heart..." That says a lot about David's life condition and, we hope, ours, too.

This is in a way a surprising work. One would have expected a poet like Pinsky to have somehow concentrated on the work which was the Jewish Tradition attributes to King David, the work which is arguably the greatest body of religious poetry ever written, Tehiilim( Psalms). Instead Pinsky retells the whole story of David chronlogically.He retells the story and often artfully reinterprets it .He does this by making wide-ranging and often telling literary comparisons. In the course of this he rejects a basic apologetic line which sees David only as king of virtue, and ancestor of the Messiah to come. He tries instead to see David whole in all his flawed greatness. In the course of reading this work I learned much about David some of which I should have known about before. I believe that the great share of readers will find much to learn here not only about David, but about the Biblical world of which he is a part. Nonetheless there are essential perhaps most essential elements in the life of David , that I believe are not fully treated here. Above all David's relation to G-d , a relation so intensely and powerfully given in Tehillim is not really studied here.

Reading Robert Pinsky's work, one finds great difficulty placing the book in any particular genre. Biographic analysis of biblical characters seems something of a rage at the moment, some excellent, some not. "The Life of David," however, does not fit well with the genre. Unlike the Biblical scholar Baruch Halperin's brilliant "David's Secret Demons" Pinsky eschews footnotes or deep textual analysis. Instead, taking a poet's view, we see here a sort of emotional/artistic portrait of this most complex of biblical characters. Some may find frustrating the way the author moves over the story often moving down strange tangents only to circle back later. To call the prose of a former laureate poetic may seem odd, but one must consider how well Pinsky textures his words. Perhaps given David's own poetic nature, only one who shared his great love of language could bring the King of Israel to life. While the trip may on occasion grow strange, those who wish to deepen their understanding of King David will find much here to give food for thought.

This latest by Robert Pinsky is perhaps his best work. The author's goal is to understand the complex, paradoxical life of David, not to deconstruct David according to post-modern analysis, biblical hermeneutics, or text-criticism. It's a lovely book to read since its subject is actually Pinsky's love affair with the biblical portrayal of David. As others have loved David, despite his faults, so too does the author. Part of the charm of this volume is Pinsky's luxurious prose. Thus, for example, the author comments on David's lament when David learns that his general Abner has been murdered: "Where the lament for Saul and Jonathan is like a fountain, this poem is like an engraved amulet, implicit and enigmatic, where the earlier dirge is full-throated. A lament for one who is betrayed rather than one who falls in battle..." If the reader is looking for analysis of what the Bible "means", this is not the book for you. For those who have always been irresistibly attracted to the Bible's poetry and want to find a soulmate, this is a volume to read and treasure.