- 2 days ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:01He was the shepherd boy who became a king.
00:05The young warrior who slew a giant.
00:10David, the celebrated founder of modern Israel.
00:15At least, that's the David of tradition.
00:20But new evidence is changing the picture of this legendary character.
00:24This man was a master of politics. He was not a saint.
00:30Now, historians and archaeologists are stripping away centuries of myth-making about this biblical hero.
00:37Blood, guts, deceit, treachery, they're all part of the David story.
00:47The man they reveal is so different that it begs the question, who was the real David?
01:00According to tradition, David lived in the 10th century BC, about 3,000 years ago.
01:13He's said to come from Bethlehem, the same village where, a thousand years later, Jesus was born.
01:19The events of his life have become the stuff of legend.
01:23When people think of David, based on the Bible, the thing that leaps to mind is his battle with Goliath.
01:33His cracked troops are said to have crawled through an underground water system to take over Jerusalem, and make it their capital.
01:43One of the things that we remember most about David is that he was the character who brought together the northern part, called Israel, the southern part, called Judah, and firmly under his control united them into a single powerful state, the state of Israel.
01:59His story is famous, but archaeologists have found little concrete evidence that David ever existed.
02:06If it weren't for the Bible, few would even know his name.
02:09With a lot of things that we remember most about David is that he was the character who brought together the northern part, called Israel, the southern part, called Judah, and firmly under his control united them into a single powerful state, the state of Israel.
02:18His story is famous, but archaeologists have found little concrete evidence that David ever existed.
02:25If it weren't for the Bible, few would even know his name.
02:29Without the Bible, we might not know that there was such a figure as David.
02:34We certainly wouldn't know the name, and would know almost nothing about his life.
02:40But that all changed in 1993, when an archaeological dig in the ancient city of Dan in northern Israel ended for that year.
02:50Gila Cook was the surveyor.
02:53On that particular day, I had some measurements to finish off.
02:56I'd been working about an hour and a half, and then from the bottom of the hill came this booming voice saying,
03:05Gila, time to go.
03:07Gila packed her bags for the day and was coming down the hillside when she stopped to rest.
03:17I finally get to this very low wall, and I dropped the stuff out of my left hand, and then I went like this as I put it down.
03:25And I looked again, and there was a stone that I really hadn't noticed before.
03:32And I'd do a double-take.
03:33On closer inspection, Gila found something remarkable.
03:39And I said, oh, that's a kuf.
03:42It's one of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Aramaic alphabet, one of the few that I can identify just like this.
03:49And so I knew that this was an inscription.
03:54I couldn't read it.
03:56I didn't know what it said, but inscriptions of this kind are very, very rare.
04:07What Gila had found was one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century.
04:11The moment of finding this thing, it was phenomenal.
04:19It was part of a monument recording a victory over the Israelites.
04:24It's said the defeated king was from the house of David,
04:31a descendant of David's royal family.
04:33Well, here we have Beit David, the house of David.
04:43And here we have Melech Yisrael, the king of Israel.
04:51Critics have long claimed that the Bible's story of David is a legend, made up by Hebrew scribes.
04:57But for biblical scholar Steve McKenzie, this inscription changes everything.
05:05I think it's important as a way of indicating that the probability is that there was actually a figure named David.
05:15Now, it doesn't tell us anything about the details of his life,
05:19but it does kind of tip the scales in favor of David's historical existence.
05:23But if a king called David did exist, what kind of man was he?
05:36The Bible portrays him as a shepherd boy who rose to become king of all Israel.
05:42A young warrior who made his name in combat with a giant.
05:46It's one of the most famous battles of all time.
05:56The young Israelite shepherd against Goliath, the champion of their sworn enemies, the Philistines.
06:06But how well does the biblical image match the historical reality?
06:09Military historians accept that one-to-one combat between warriors was a recognized battle tactic.
06:26Single combat in ancient warfare was quite common, especially before two armies joined battle.
06:33Champions from one side would come forward, the sort of the heavyweight champion of X would go out and challenge the champion of Y.
06:45The Philistine champion Goliath is described as heavily armored, a claim that's consistent with the archeological evidence.
06:55Ross Voss has spent the last 20 years excavating the Philistine city of Ashkelon in southern Palestine.
07:06In our excavations, we actually found some fragments of scale armor, which gives us a perfect example of what this kind of protective element was like.
07:17And the scales we have here, for example, can show you that they're individual plates of metal with little holes that can be sewed on and overlapped one another.
07:28That would then be sewed onto a leather jerkin or jacket to provide extra protection.
07:33With all that armor, no wonder this confrontation has gone down in history as the ultimate mismatch.
07:44But now, there's evidence that David may not have been as vulnerable and inexperienced as the story suggests.
07:50David, the Bible says, refused to wear armor to battle.
08:06This would have allowed him to be more mobile than his opponent.
08:09Especially since Goliath's armor is thought to have weighed over 120 pounds.
08:20David is wearing no armor. Goliath is weighed down under a ton of it.
08:25Goliath keeps saying to David, come on, come on, come on.
08:29Why does he keep saying, come on, get near, get near?
08:31Because David can't be caught.
08:33He is dancing around Goliath. He's uncatchable.
08:36In fact, Goliath's size may have worked against him.
08:44He's described as a giant, a man about nine or ten feet tall.
08:53Now, modern medicine can explain that what may have caused Goliath's great height
08:59could have hidden a great weakness.
09:01That's 230, please.
09:06Right ahead.
09:10Chris Greener is one of the tallest men in Europe.
09:13He stands at more than seven and a half feet tall.
09:17Cheers.
09:20When I left primary school at the age of ten, I was taller than most of the teachers.
09:23I was certainly the tallest pupil, no two ways about it.
09:26When I left school, I was measured, I was about six foot seven.
09:30And seven years later, when I was named tallest man in Britain, I was seven foot five.
09:35So in seven years, I grew ten inches.
09:39Doctors have a name for Chris's condition.
09:41Acromagallic gigantism.
09:47Chris has travelled to Oxford to meet up with one of his former doctors.
09:51Hello, Chris.
09:53Hello, Johnny. How are you?
09:54I'm Will.
09:56Nice to see you.
09:57It's been a few years, hasn't it?
09:59It has.
10:00Come in.
10:01Gigantism is excessive growth.
10:03And that is usually caused by a pituitary tumour, where too much growth hormone is made,
10:09and this circulates in the blood and causes the bones to grow to an excessive length.
10:14Gigantism is very, very rare, and in the United Kingdom, we have no accurate figures,
10:19but I would have thought there were a couple of handfuls of people who are giants.
10:24Experts have been aware of the condition since the late 19th century,
10:27but they believe it's been around a lot longer.
10:32I think it's been around since time immemorial,
10:35because we're going back a long way if we're talking about Goliath.
10:39Goliath's height will have almost certainly been a result of gigantism
10:43and a tumour making too much growth hormone.
10:46There's really nothing else that causes that degree of enormity.
10:52In the Bible, Goliath's size gives him an unfair advantage over David.
10:58Doctors now believe that, left untreated, gigantism can cause handicaps.
11:04When it started, you had some problems with your vision, didn't you?
11:08Yeah, I had double vision. That's what kicked it all off 30-odd years ago.
11:12But you know why you get that, don't you?
11:16Can I show you some x-rays?
11:18Yeah, sure.
11:20As the pituitary tumour grows, it starts to press on the optic nerve.
11:26That is a pituitary which is normal in size,
11:31and that pituitary is not touching the eye nerve, as you can see.
11:34Yeah, yeah.
11:35Whereas this particular patient has a large pituitary tumour, which you can see here.
11:41And if it goes into the side, you can actually get double vision,
11:45but if it goes upwards like that, you lose fields of vision,
11:49so you can't see out of the sides of your eye.
11:51All right.
11:52OK.
11:53I want to ask you about your re-ambulance.
11:56Goliath had the psychological advantage because of his tall stature,
12:00but David actually had the advantage because Goliath, unbeknown to David,
12:05had visual field problems probably, which will have not only impaired his vision,
12:09but likely to have impaired his mobility as well.
12:13David didn't just have mobility on his side against Goliath.
12:17The Bible says he was the king's armour bearer.
12:19Being an armour bearer to someone of importance, the king or the king's son,
12:25was a very, very privileged position,
12:28and it meant that that person had some considerable military capability.
12:34Not yet a fully-fledged warrior, but an apprentice warrior.
12:45No-one denies that David faced Goliath with only a sling as a weapon.
12:50On the face of it, hardly a match for the giant's sword and spear.
13:00But sling stones found on battlefield sites across the Middle East
13:05show that slings could be extremely dangerous.
13:07We know from the biblical record that David just picked up a natural pebble
13:13from the valley floor in the area where he confronted Goliath.
13:17But from our own excavations, we've discovered many, many stones that were of flint
13:23that were made into spheroids and used exclusively to be weapons of slings.
13:27This is a flint, and you can see it's been chipped on all sides to produce the little spherical shape,
13:35and it has quite a weight.
13:37And thrown from a sling, it could have a lot of velocity and a lot of impact.
13:41In fact, slings were one of the most lethal weapons in antiquity.
13:47Alan Birkbeck is an expert in ballistics at Glasgow University.
14:03He has acted as an expert witness in court on injuries inflicted by weapons.
14:15He and his colleague, Ron Thompson, have designed an experiment to test the speed and power of the sling.
14:21Using a high-speed camera, they can measure just how fast the sling stone travels.
14:31Well, we set it up using the small optical CCTV camera,
14:35which is connected to the digital motion recorder system.
14:39It allows us to record at high speed the images between the two-metre upright posts
14:45and calculate the damage that would be caused by the object arriving at the target.
14:51Alan has to sling the stone between the two upright posts for the camera to capture its flight.
15:05Get one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
15:14The final calculations show just how deadly the sling can be.
15:18Ron found that the stone reached about 30 metres per second.
15:23That's nearly 80 miles an hour.
15:26Well, the results are quite surprising.
15:29Given its fairly heavy mass, it would have a kinetic energy, say an impact energy,
15:32that's on a par with a medieval long-low arrow or even a modern 2-2 bullet.
15:38Now, these are certainly killing devices.
15:40They would go through soft tissue.
15:42They would certainly crack bone.
15:43They'd possibly penetrate bone.
15:45And if they hit the right spot, they would certainly be lethal.
15:47As David and Goliath met in battle,
15:54it was the shepherd boy, not the giant who had the upper hand.
16:01With one blow, David is victorious.
16:15Then a final act reveals him to be very knowledgeable of the battle traditions of his day.
16:24David took the head of Goliath and Goliath's weapons as trophies of the defeat of the enemy.
16:38A trophy is taken for display to terrify the enemy,
16:43to demonstrate the power of us who killed the other guy.
16:47There's more to David's battle with Goliath than meets the eye.
16:56And that's true of almost everything about this man.
17:02The latest research shows that he may have been more ruthless and ambitious than the Bible portrait allows.
17:09We look at David typically through the lens of a canonization that's taken place over millennia.
17:15And so David becomes a sort of a plaster saint.
17:20But the historical David is a character who was willing to take chances.
17:26He didn't get to power without running through a lot of other people on the way.
17:32To find out what kind of person he really was,
17:35scholars are now looking at the stories in a revolutionary way.
17:39They've found that modern politics can shed light on biblical events.
17:46The reputations of today's politicians are managed by spin doctors,
17:52who manipulate information to persuade us to accept their version of the truth.
18:01Historian Steve McKenzie believes the same may be true of the biblical writers.
18:06The biblical writers are often compared to spin doctors.
18:13Spin doctors paint a picture, a portrait of a politician, of a politician's words and ideas and motives and so on.
18:21And also control, to some degree, release of information.
18:24That would have been true even more so in the ancient world, which didn't have newspapers and so on.
18:33In order to get to the David behind the spin, historians believe it's essential not to take the Bible's account at face value.
18:40Why dig beneath the surface of the biblical account? Because the account that we read is an interpretation, a spin on a series of events that occurred in the 10th century BC.
18:59I'm a historian, and the historian's job is to undo the spin.
19:08Using this method, historians are now taking a closer look at the biblical claims about David.
19:13One of the most famous is that he was a master musician. His instrument was the lyre, a small harp.
19:30Bo Lauergren is an expert in recreating musical instruments of the ancient world.
19:35Although no actual lyres from the time of David survive in Israel, contemporary illustrations from Egypt have given Bo enough detail to recreate the kind of lyre he believes David would have played.
19:55David's lyre probably looked like this model I have here.
19:59It is made of wood, entirely wooden arms, curved arms, wooden body, a hole in the bottom, that would be the zoned hole, a wooden bridge, and tuning collars made of some kind of rope.
20:17It's difficult to know exactly what David's lyre would have zoned it like.
20:21It depends on many things. For example, the composition of the string. Is it gut? Is it linen? Or what is it?
20:27The thickness of the string and the tension in the tuning collar up here.
20:34So the sound that you hear here
20:39is probably very similar to David's lyre, but we can never be sure it's exactly the same.
20:48David's lyre playing has shaped his legendary image as the music-loving hero.
20:52But some historians are reading between the lines of the biblical accounts.
21:01They believe that David's lyre playing sheds light on his true ambitions.
21:08They were in politics.
21:10Israel in 1000 BC was not a unified country.
21:18The Bible says it was divided between Judah in the south and an area known as Israel in the north.
21:26David lived in the south.
21:28But they came together to fight their joint enemy, the Philistines.
21:43Israel had chosen a king who led these ongoing battles.
21:46The Bible calls him Saul.
21:53He was known as a great warrior who suffered from dark moods.
21:57David was brought to court to play for him.
22:01It was his music that was said to lift Saul's spirits.
22:12We know from today's music that music can have a great influence on our emotional life.
22:19We can have exciting music, we can have calming music.
22:23So it's very likely that it also happened during King David's time.
22:27But what the Bible doesn't say is that David's music brought him huge political benefits.
22:34In the biblical story, David's musical skills get him to the court.
22:39And his musical skills are specifically medicinal.
22:43They exorcise Saul's demons.
22:45They cure Saul of whatever is possessing him.
22:48This gives David enormous leverage at the court because he is indispensable to the king.
22:54Of course, David didn't gain power with his musicianship alone.
23:05The shepherd boy was becoming a man.
23:09The battle with Goliath turned him into a hero.
23:12People even started to suggest that David was better than King Saul.
23:16Feeling threatened, Saul started to make attempts on David's life.
23:29So, the Bible says, David fled to the far south of Israel, then known as Judah.
23:35At this point, the Bible portrays David as the victim of Saul's paranoia.
23:46But modern research suggests that he used his exile for political purposes.
23:51The Bible has it that Saul chased David from the court in a jealous rage.
23:57The reality has to be that he was in the south organising a group of brigands, irregular forces, to build his power base.
24:08He was there to accumulate money, power, influence.
24:11The most powerful man in Judah at the time was a clan chief called Naval.
24:20And yet, within only a short time, David had become undisputed ruler.
24:26The Bible insists that David did nothing to instigate his own rise to power.
24:31His only link with the clan chief was to send a delegation of men to ask him for provisions.
24:48Naval apparently refused.
24:52When the men returned empty-handed, an enraged David threatened to kill Naval.
24:57But before he could act, the Bible says that Naval was struck down.
25:07By God.
25:10David replaced him as the most important man in Judah.
25:14Scholars believe that the biblical account is all too convenient.
25:20It's hard not to suspect in reading that story
25:24that David may have been involved somehow in getting rid of Naval,
25:29simply because he had so much to gain, and in fact did gain so much,
25:33from Naval being out of the way.
25:36It's a pattern which becomes increasingly familiar as David's career progresses.
25:43There's going to be a series of deaths of important characters,
25:48a trail of bodies, as it were, on David's road to the throne.
25:51And in each case, David is the primary beneficiary.
25:55If you look at the biblical text carefully,
25:58you can see that David, in reality, was not the David the tradition had developed.
26:04He wasn't the David of Michelangelo.
26:06He was a real human being in a rough racket in a rough neighborhood.
26:11He had to fight his way to power.
26:15In the Bible, David does win power.
26:17He replaces Saul as king of Israel after Saul meets a tragic death on the battlefield.
26:28The story goes that David never actively challenged the king's power,
26:33but his actions suggest otherwise.
26:35In a surprising move, David goes to work for the sworn enemies of king Saul, the Philistines.
26:50The Bible is adamant that David remained loyal to the king.
26:59But joining the Philistines could be read as a treacherous move.
27:04David's alliance with the Philistines opened a new front against Saul.
27:15The southern hill country became hostile to Saul in a way that it hadn't been when there was no David in it.
27:23Saul managed to hold out against the Philistines for a while.
27:29But scholars believe that their alliance with David turned the tables on the king.
27:34When he had to confront the Philistines to his west and David to his south,
27:41that ultimately led to his demise. It weakened him.
27:43I think David was the thing that did tip the balance and caused Saul's ultimate defeat.
27:55Conveniently for David, Saul was killed on the battlefield and David became king in his place.
28:01Suspiciously, the Bible insists that David played no part in Saul's death.
28:23It says David was so distraught at the news that he composed a lament in the king's memory.
28:28But experts are skeptical at just how genuine David's grief really was.
28:35David laments Saul's death, but David laments the deaths of all his enemies.
28:40Maybe he really composed that poem, but if he did compose it,
28:45he must have been laughing all the way to the bank,
28:48because he was the one who stood to pick up the pieces.
28:51The Bible's statements of David's innocence are so frequent,
28:55many scholars now believe they may instead point to David's guilt.
29:02Over and over and over again, the author seems to emphasize
29:06that David had nothing to do with Saul's death.
29:09David is far away from Saul when Saul dies.
29:11Why all this emphasis on David not having anything to do with Saul's death,
29:19unless perhaps the truth of the matter was that he was involved in some way?
29:24The Bible claims that David did not commit a whole series of murders.
29:34To deny one murder might be unfortunate.
29:40To deny two murders, coincidence.
29:43To deny eight, ten, twelve murders, it's likely a pattern of behavior.
29:47You don't deny something of which you are not accused.
29:53Therefore, David was being accused of committing these murders.
29:57I hate to say it, but it's true.
30:01The Bible's denial is almost an admission of guilt.
30:06Exactly what role David played in Saul's death, we may never know.
30:11But what is clear is that David succeeded him to become Israel's most famous ruler.
30:21It's a defining moment in the story of David.
30:25It's the first time that the tribes in the north and south have been ruled by one king.
30:29The Bible says David begins to formally unify the two regions.
30:37The act for which he'll be remembered and celebrated down the centuries.
30:42But this unified nation needs a new heart,
30:46a new capital to satisfy both north and south.
30:50So David chooses an insignificant fortress, roughly in the center of the land.
30:55He calls his new base the city of David.
31:03We know it by another name, Jerusalem.
31:16David could have picked anyone of a number of towns in the vicinity of Jerusalem to administer from,
31:20but Jerusalem offered the greatest defensive advantages.
31:29This was an area from which you could unite two populations,
31:33and therefore it was a strategic location to hold and operate from.
31:37But the city was under the control of a hostile people, the Jebusites.
31:47And it was never going to be an easy conquest.
31:50Jerusalem was a pretty difficult place to capture.
31:53High citadel, strong walls, determined defenders.
31:57David is determined to get it.
31:58He has got to think his way inside it.
32:03Blockade would be terribly long drawn out.
32:06Frontal attack would be ruinously expensive in manpower and would demoralize the Israelites.
32:13So David looks at the site and thinks,
32:17how am I going to get into it?
32:18Is there some way up onto the citadel mount other than charging at the gates?
32:29David is said to have captured the city in a surprise attack through the town's water systems.
32:34And then turned it into a great city full of splendor.
32:44But there's a problem with the traditional version of events.
32:48Up until the 19th century, no archaeological evidence of the water tunnels had ever been found.
32:54The first tantalizing glimpse of a breakthrough came as long ago as 1867, with the discovery of a deep water shaft below Jerusalem.
33:09Today, guides lead tourists through this popular site.
33:14A British explorer named Captain Charles Warren comes to this area.
33:17He begins exploring the lower Gihon Spring, which is just beneath my feet.
33:2313 meters down in the bottom of the shaft is the Gihon Spring.
33:27Captain Charles Warren and his assistant Bertels enter the spring.
33:31They crawl through on their knees and enter the area around you.
33:35And Warren says to himself, behold, I have discovered the shaft used by King David to capture the city.
33:41An exciting discovery, but with a problem.
33:48No one could date the tunnel.
33:51The pottery fragments needed for dating had been accidentally lost.
34:00But a second breakthrough in 1996 by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich yielded the vital missing dates.
34:08We started about eight years ago, started to dig through and first went through about eight or nine meters of the ancient city dump.
34:19And then landed on these constructions made of huge stones.
34:25You can see each one of these stones weights two to three tons.
34:30The stones were part of a huge fortification guarding the entrance to the Warrenshaft spring.
34:35Next to them, Ronnie Reich found the essential shards of ancient pottery to date the tunnels.
34:42These stones are associated with pottery, with floors and pottery sherds.
34:49And by the pottery we could date them to the Middle Bronze Age too, which is about 3,800 years ago.
34:55That's 1800 BC, proof that the water system existed long before the 10th century when David lived.
35:08The discovery was consistent with the story that David and his men crept into Jerusalem through these tunnels.
35:14If anybody could, in ancient times, climb up these rock walls, which are very steep, very smooth and very high, then this is a possible candidate for his entrance.
35:31The method of attack would have been in keeping with military tactics of the time.
35:41It happens at other places in the ancient world, people getting into cities through water channels, through aqueducts.
35:48It is a recognized means of gaining access to a city.
35:51So this is an entirely plausible story.
35:58King David and his troops enter the Gihon Spring down below, where they wade and run through water in their capturing of the city.
36:05They climb up a vertical shaft into the tunnel we're standing in now, and now they run up the last bit of stairs, entering into the middle of the enemy city.
36:19They go up to the guards at the gate, cut their throats, open the gates, and a few attachments of Israelite troops into the city.
36:36David may well have captured Jerusalem just as tradition says, but the claim that he built a palace there has been much harder to support.
36:44But despite digging there for over a hundred years, the archaeologists have found very little.
36:55But there may be a good reason for that.
36:58When we think today of a palace, what do we have in mind?
37:02Buckingham Palace in London.
37:03Nothing of this type ever has been built here, certainly not in relation with King David.
37:13So I imagine that if he has built here a palace, it is not more than a larger private house.
37:20Instead of living in splendour in a great palace, David may have settled for a much humbler dwelling.
37:26Typical of a village or poor town.
37:31Ronnie Reich believes the Bible writers may have attributed more to David's reign than in reality he achieved.
37:38When you are writing a text, well, the sky is the limit to your imagination.
37:44You can describe whatever you like.
37:46So we have here a contradiction between the text and between what really was created on site.
37:57Throughout the account of his rise to power, the Bible takes great pains to protect David's image.
38:03But once he arrives in Jerusalem and becomes king of a unified Israel, the tone changes.
38:12For the first time, the Bible is surprisingly open about a major scandal.
38:20A mystery scholars are only now beginning to unravel.
38:22One of the biblical sources for David records his blatant abuse of power involving a woman called Bathsheba.
38:41David is at the height of his power.
38:42And he's up on the palace wall one evening, and he looks out, and there below him is this beautiful visage, this Bathsheba, in her afternoon bath.
38:57Bring me Bathsheba.
39:00Bathsheba arrives at the palace.
39:03And before we know it, Bathsheba is seduced.
39:07Bathsheba is pregnant.
39:08Unfortunately, Bathsheba was already married.
39:14And at the time of David, adultery was a crime with serious consequences.
39:21Not only is David in a dicey situation because of his adultery with Bathsheba,
39:26but Bathsheba is in a dicey situation.
39:29If she has clearly committed adultery, and it is clearly proven,
39:33she's in a terrible predicament, because she can be stoned to death.
39:38The Bible is also frank about the way David deals with Bathsheba's husband.
39:44The narrator has David bring Bathsheba's husband back from the wars.
39:52In an attempt to have him cohabit with his wife, and then one could say that the child that is about to be born is really the child of Bathsheba and Uriah, her husband.
40:11But it doesn't work.
40:15Uriah refuses to sleep with Bathsheba while his troops are still out in the field.
40:30Although this plan fails, the story says, David soon comes up with another.
40:33David sends Uriah back to his troops with a letter to the other officers there, telling them to put Uriah at the forefront of the battle to make sure that he's killed in battle.
40:54And this happens.
40:59So David is guilty then of adultery and of murder.
41:08Having worked so hard to build up the character of David, it's puzzling that the writers of the Bible should now begin to reveal his flaws.
41:15Steve McKenzie believes that this could be one occasion where the spin doctors didn't quite have the last word.
41:29The Bathsheba story is kind of a mystery, because it's so different from the surrounding material.
41:35After the spin doctors have painted their picture of David, then somebody else has come along and inserted this story of Bathsheba in that work.
41:43Exactly what the motivations of the person who inserted the Bathsheba story were, I don't know for sure.
41:51It may have been a way of saying, this is what happens when you get a king with supreme power.
41:58They commit faults.
42:00I think the irony is, I love the Bathsheba story.
42:03It may be my favorite part, because he's not the innocent David.
42:08He's the David who is guilty of adultery, who has his flaws.
42:11But that's the David that we identify with.
42:16The Bible writers may well have believed that David's reputation could withstand a bit of scandal.
42:29After all, he had achieved what must have seemed like an impossible feat, the unification of Israel.
42:35The irony is that today, scholars are less sure that David did truly unify the country.
42:42The incident that casts the most doubt on David's achievements is a revolt.
42:57Led by the king's own son, Absalom.
43:04The beauty of the Absalom revolt in historical terms is that it shows us that David was hugely unpopular.
43:17The entire population of Judah and Israel rise up against him.
43:22This man was hated, widely hated, and probably did not have widespread control of the countryside at the time.
43:30The Bible plays down the revolt, blaming it all, in a rather modern twist, on poor parenting skills.
43:37It hints that it was David's leniency towards his children that enabled Absalom to rebel.
43:46I think that the way that the spin doctors are using that element is to paint this portrait of David as gentle.
43:53Somebody who's too gentle to harm anyone certainly would not harm his own son.
43:57The image of a gentle David makes some scholars doubly suspicious.
44:05Because just as the revolt is stopped, Absalom is killed on the battlefield.
44:13The reason why I'm suspicious at that point is because we have the same pattern here that we had with some of the earlier figures who stood in David's way.
44:23Namely, somebody dies violently, the text goes to lengths to say David had nothing to do with it, and when David finds out about it, he mourns profusely.
44:34That's exactly what happens with Absalom.
44:37And so, again, I think David is probably the one who's ultimately behind it.
44:44The death of Absalom is a good indication of just how David held on to power.
44:49The biblical story portrays the unification of Israel as an elective process.
44:57The people come together and they choose David to be their king.
45:02In reality, he was more of a conqueror than an electee.
45:06He governed by force, he united the people, sheerly by force of arms.
45:11David's unified kingdom was not such a golden age after all.
45:24But the fact that it was unified at all may finally solve one of the greatest puzzles of this whole story.
45:30What drove the biblical spin doctors to paint such a glowing picture of David and his reign?
45:38The history of Israel is a very long one, and it changes.
45:46And so by the time that the chronicler writes, Israel is no longer a united nation.
45:51They have been dispersed by foreign powers.
45:55And the chronicler is writing to try to unite the people who claim to be Israelites, unite them into one nation.
46:05And that's where David becomes kind of the model.
46:08This is who we want to be, who we once were, a united people, under one ruler, serving our God.
46:25David died after 40 years as king, leaving his son Solomon to inherit the throne.
46:31Whilst the biblical David is a hero who unified Israel, the David of history emerges as a very different figure.
46:42The David of tradition is a saint. The David of history was much more human.
46:48He ruled by terrorizing his people because he was a Near Eastern king.
46:54And no Near Eastern king stayed on the throne long, except by dint of force.
46:59It's an image of David that's more in line with the realities of the ancient world.
47:07And it's not so far removed from our own times.
47:11To a large extent, we recognize in the historical David that human beings haven't changed over millennia.
47:21We're still grappling with the same problems and still struggling with the same issues.
47:25And one of those is people who grasp for power and hold on to it, and the extent to which they're willing to go.
47:32David probably had all the flaws of the ambitious and the powerful.
47:43Perhaps these flaws may detract from the image of him as biblical hero.
47:50But without them, he may never have secured his place in history.
47:58THE DAVID CHILDREN
48:01THE HOSPEL
48:02THE HOSPEL
48:04THE HOSPEL
48:08¶¶
48:38¶¶
Recommended
49:15
|
Up next
41:14