The Sins of King David: A New History

I would like to add that this book contains comparison text, maps, timelines, and glossaries which makes it a wide-ranging account of King David; it's not like he is plucking ideals out of the air...he uses the biblical text and a bit of common sense (coming from a foundation in the historical context of the time). The ideal that the biblical accounts of King David seems to be `apologetics' passages and parts of the story seem to be out of chronological order is not new; it's been observed by biblical scholars beforehand.

I planned to write a pithy review of this book and move on, but when I saw some of the negative comments here I decided to offer a bit more than that. One reader here takes the author, Gary Greenberg, to task for indulging in historical speculation. But THAT is the point, isn't it? Of course we have no outside material to rely on to refute or alter the biblical tale that has come down to us. But Greenberg's point is obviously to look at the text itself, in light of its extensive inconsistencies, redundancies and apparent errors, to try to sort it all out. What he succeeds in doing is not telling us the way it really was but rather how it might have been, constructing an alternative scenario which attempts to straighten out the peculiarities in the original text. And these are legion. We're told, for instance, that Saul was made king at two different times in two different ways, once during a lottery conducted at a tribal gathering and once after he heroically defeats Nahash of Ammon on the eastern side of the Jordan River. Saul falls down and prophesies twice, too, once early on in his career and once later, and each instance, it is suggested, is why the proverb "Is Saul too among the prophets?" came into common usage. Samuel breaks with Saul twice, too, in very similar circumstances: the first time during Saul's conflict with the Philistines, when he takes certain priestly prerogatives for himself (i.e., sacrificing to the Lord before Samuel, who is late, can arrive to officiate); the second time when Saul fails to follow Samuel's instruction to slay ALL the Amalekites including their women, children and beasts . . . in fact Saul spares the king and cattle to sacrifice later and Samuel announces that Saul will lose his kingdom because of this failure to fully effect the genocide he was ordered to commit. But the oddities don't stop there. Saul meets David for the first time twice, too, and on the second occasion he and Abner, his general, have no idea who the young shepherd boy, David, is . . . even though we were previously told David was a heroic man of war inducted into Saul's entourage for his musical talents and to serve as the king's personal armor bearer. But suddenly he's a boy again and Saul and Abner have no idea who he is? Of course we read that David slew Goliath in the original text but that same text also reports, much later in David's career, that Elkhanan, one of King David's champions, was the slayer of Goliath. In Chronicles, the slain Philistine warrior killed by Elkhanan is reported as Goliath's brother instead, though his description matches the terminology in the earlier descriptions in "Samuel I and II" of Goliath (same spear "like a weaver's beam", etc.). When Saul hunts the fugitive David, we get two remarkably similar incidents in which David sneaks up on Saul and has the opportunity to kill him but magnanimously refrains from doing so. In the course of his flight from Saul, David also manages to run a protection r

The Sins of King David: A New History by Gary Greenberg (Sourcebooks) An important radable popularization of recent biblical criticism and historical reconstruction. Throughout the Old Testament there has been no more popular name, no more beloved biblical figure, no greater icon than King David. Through the millennia he has been portrayed as a pious and humble man, a goodly king whose heart was with the Lord, a monarch who composed lyrical poetry, divine music, defeated a giant and warded off the enemies of the ancient Israelites.The Sins of King David creates a different and altogether fascinating and thrilling portrait of the man. Gary Greenberg shows King David for what he really was-deceitful and corrupt, a tyrant and a murderer. From the slaughter of seven sons of Saul, whom he hung, and the death of Goliath, whom he did not slay, to the murder of one of his most loyal lieutenants, whose wife he seduced, he was not the man that history has embraced.Follow King David and his subjects, successors and usurpers on a fantastic journey of discovery, and trace this unusual story through the written clues unearthed in one of the most holy texts.The Bible offers two contradictory stories of David, one written by his allies, and the other by his adversaries. Only in the last century have scholars belonging to the Literary-Critical school of biblical analysis taken a fresh look at those conflicting stories, attempting to unravel the written skeins that weave through the biblical texts. This book is the fruit of those scholars' works, and the author's own endeavor, in which he attempts to portray David as the people of his time saw him and actually knew him.