Prophets, Kings, and Terrible Men with Aaron Higashi

Aaron Higashi Stories of David and Goliath, stories of David dancing in front of the ark. That's the image that you have of David in your mind as a child, and you try and come back to these stories as an adult, and you find all these stories are compromised. There's not a single one of these classical stories that is not, in some way, overshadowed by these issues that you're probably going to pick up on as an adult. So what now? How can we take something from this story now that our more adult perspective on these characters has sort of come to light?

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher It's not 110 where I live, so things are doing pretty good. Oh, good. I'm pretty happy.

Dan McClellan It's 76, which I have sweat beading up on where my hairline used to be- ... when it gets this warm, but at least it's not 76 inside. Yeah.

Dan Beecher But where it is warmer is Phoenix, which is the homeland currently- Homeland, yes ... of our guest, Aaron Higashi, returning champion. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Aaron Higashi Long time listener, second time caller.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan Well, we appreciate you calling in today. We had something entirely different planned, but Aaron's kind of a hard guest to get rid of, so. No. Hopefully.

Aaron Higashi I hope so.

Dan McClellan Aaron is here to talk about a book you've got coming out shortly, entitled "First and Second Samuel," or "One and Two Samuel," if you're nasty. "For Normal People." Part of the Bible For Normal People empire. Yeah. "A Guide to Prophets, Kings, and Some Pretty Terrible Men." Yes. And this comes out, you messaged me and said, "Hey, I got this coming out on July 23rd." And I was like, "Hey, that's my birthday."

Aaron Higashi I'm going to be turning 44 the day your book- I'll get you a copy. I'll send it to you.

Dan McClellan That was part of the deal, I thought, but I would appreciate that very much.

Dan Beecher I also have birthdays. So, I'm just throwing that out there.

Aaron Higashi That's exciting. I'll send you one too.

Dan Beecher I would love it. Me too, and my mom, I think that's it.

Dan McClellan And that's it? Okay. How many copies has Pete given you? Did you get a deal from Pete?

Aaron Higashi I've just gotten the one so far. Really? Yeah, this is the one before they actually send it off for- Okay. Yeah, got you ... mass printing or something.

Dan McClellan Well, I wanted to say congratulations on the book. Didn't know you were even working on this book, but this is an exciting volume because First and Second Samuel are not the books that get very popular commentaries on them.

Aaron Higashi There are commentaries out there on them, but there are other books that have a lot more commentaries, and First and Second Samuel is chock-full of interesting stuff, interesting stories, and there's a lot that people don't understand about it. So, I enjoyed reading through this- Well, and super important stuff ...

Dan McClellan and I'm excited for it to get out. Yeah. Yes. I think so. Super important stuff.

Aaron Higashi Stuff that's often told to children, too.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly. Yes.

Aaron Higashi Stuff we get exposed to very early on, often.

Dan Beecher Whether it should be or not, it is told to children. That's right. I want to start us off by saying that in, let's call it preparation for this interview.

Dan McClellan Let's call it that. It's not real prep work, but yeah.

Dan Beecher Look, I do what I can. You guys did post-graduate levels of prep work. I hit Google, and one of the things that I googled was summary of Samuel I and summary of Samuel II, and I want to hit you with what the first idea of... So then there was a thing that said, "What is the main message of 1 Samuel? What is the main message of 2 Samuel?" And I'm just going to start by throwing these out at you and just seeing how you respond to them. Okay. Because I think they might have nailed it, and I just want to see. So, this article says that the main message of 1 Samuel, or the key theme of 1 Samuel is, "God is king of the universe and always has been." And always has been. Does that feel right?

Aaron Higashi Kingship is a major theme in 1 and 2 Samuel. One of the big features of the narrative is a transition from before this, we had these charismatic warlords, the judges- Oh ... and people like Joshua, who are conquerors, and people like Moses, who are also, to a certain degree, conquerors as well. But now we have this transition to a monarchy, and a lot of the text is trying to navigate that difficulty of, well, if we have a human king, what role then does God have? Is God our king also, or are we displacing God as king? And that requires a whole new set of theologies to be worked out, how we balance the sovereignty of the human versus the sovereignty of God. So, I probably wouldn't say it so triumphantly as that. But it is, who is in charge, and what does it mean to be in charge of this people?

Dan Beecher I love that. Well, I'm going to jump into the main message of 2 Samuel. We'll see if you agree with this also. It says, "The book of 2 Samuel is all about leadership, choices, and Jesus." Okay.

Aaron Higashi There is some leadership, and some failures of leadership. There are a lot of choices, many of them not good. I have not seen Jesus anywhere in 2 Samuel. What? But I- What? You always have- ... can give it another read.

Dan Beecher You are arguing with the internet, sir. How dare you?

Aaron Higashi That happens. It's a hazard of the job. Yeah. That might actually come back again later in the conversation. I think there is an expectation when you buy a lot of lay level commentaries, which is what this aims to be. A lot of people who buy these commentaries are interested in, "How do I find Jesus?" A lot of these are Christians who are buying this. "How do I find Jesus in these texts?" And if that's the question you're going into it with, it can be a very difficult task because there's not a lot of Jesus going around in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, but especially these texts where there's so many tragic things happening, so many immoral things happening. There's nothing edifying in these texts really, especially at first glance. And so people are paying big money essentially to get a book to tell them, "Here's where Jesus is in the text." And I think it's worthwhile to tell people Jesus is not here in this text. And if you really dig and wanted to try and find Jesus in this text, I give a suggestion later in the book, and it's an unexpected one, I think. The only characters in this text who really suffer for the sins of other people are many of the women who suffer at the hands of David and his poor leadership and poor choices. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Those are prominent stories in the David story. Of course, one jumps immediately to Bathsheba, but there are other places where women kind of get the short end of the stick.

Aaron Higashi So many places. First and Second Samuel have a startling number of named women characters, who get to do a wide variety of things, and who are often much more than just mother figures. They have ambitions. They're trying to survive difficult circumstances. But with that large number of named women characters comes a large number of named women characters who are also suffering, almost always as a result of the immoralities of the men who are around them. Mm-hmm. So you sort of get to have lots of women in a lot of different social environments coming from a lot of different social classes. You get to see all these women characters. But unfortunately, it's usually in tragic circumstances. But it's almost a shame that we-- It's good that we think of Bathsheba and the terrible things that are done to her. It would be nice if we also knew a little bit more about all the rest of these women in these stories, too, because it is the quantity of them that is surprising, and worth remembering as well.

Dan Beecher And- Do you have a couple favorites that you want to just highlight right now?

Aaron Higashi All of David's wives, even the ones that we often think about or maybe we're preached to about that are examples of faith, like Abigail, for example, are also victims of David's violence. Rizpah, who doesn't get talked about very much, who is one of Saul's sort of secondary wives/concubines, and then taken away from Saul, first by his general, Abner, and then eventually taken into David's household and has all of her sons executed later in 2 Samuel, for reasons that don't even make sense in the narrative. But she suffers tremendously as well. But she also gets to have this moment where she stands vigil over the body of her sons, and that standing vigil convinces David to give her sons a proper burial. So again, it's that this woman is suffering terribly, but nevertheless, in the circumstance, manages to find a moment to express her agency, and persuade some of these powerful men to at least have a modicum of respect for her.

Dan McClellan But we even have figures like Abigail, you mentioned, who is represented as this virtuous, discerning woman- Yes ... who's married to a guy whose name is Idiot, basically. Yes. But even there, the story has been twisted to represent her as supportive of David's rise to power, when in reality, this sounds an awful lot like a story where David just came in, killed the husband, took the wife, and then the story is told in a very different way that makes it sound like he was not just a warlord who was raping and pillaging. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi That's David's preferred way of acquiring wives- ... is by killing whatever man is involved and then taking them. You could go through a list of David's wives. He's married to Michal first, who is Saul's daughter, who he sort of purchases at the cost of Philistine foreskins. Saul is trying to get rid of David, so sends him out on this, what's supposed to be like an impossible quest to kill a bunch of Philistines and bring back their foreskins. But then wins Michal as a prize for this. But then eventually, when he goes on the run from Saul, has to leave Michal behind, but then shortly afterward, takes Abigail and kills Nabal as a result. Takes a woman named Ahinoam, who may or may not also be the wife of Saul, who's also named Ahinoam. There's only two characters in the text named this way. Marries a woman named Maacah, who is a princess, the daughter of a king in Geshur, which was probably some sort of peace negotiation, the marriage to her as a result. Bathsheba, of course. But all these women are plucked away from other circumstances and taken by David. So it's a pattern. A whole parade of red flags.

Dan Beecher It does feel like you're taking a beloved character. We talked about David a couple weeks ago on the show, and the- Yeah ... historicity and/or not of him. But it seems like you're taking a beloved biblical character and maybe not painting him in quite the best of lights. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi One of the things I wanted to do with this book is Comment on the characters in a way that adults who are reading this more skeptically are still going to get something positive out of that. And so I say in the opening chapter, the way that we're going to do that is we're going to treat these characters as hostile witnesses. We're going to interrogate them, and we're going to end up, in many cases, finding what's ennobling in doing the opposite of whatever it is that they do. And that's sort of a strategy of reversal so that we can still get something meaningful out of this at the end that also is able to recognize how terrible so many of these characters are. Because if you're coming back to this text after a long time and coming back to some of these stories that perhaps you never read but you just heard about growing up, stories of David and Goliath, stories of David dancing in front of the ark, stories of David playing music to soothe Saul, that's the image that you have of David in your mind as a child. And you try and come back to these stories as an adult, and you find all these stories are compromised by immoralities of David or ambitions of David or the plotting and scheming of other characters. There's not a single one of these classical stories that is not in some way overshadowed by these issues that you're probably going to pick up on as an adult. So what now? How can we take something from this story now that our more adult perspective of these characters has sort of come to light? And so a big part of the commentary is trying to be accurate and finding something worthwhile even with that accuracy.

Dan McClellan Now, I notice in the beginning of the text, you introduce two frameworks that you say are going to be significant throughout the discussion, fatherhood and ambivalence. Yeah. Can you explain the significance of these frameworks for your discussion of 1 and 2 Samuel? Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So if you're going to write an academic book, you have to have an angle, right? Any academic book has to have an angle. So I wanted to find an interesting angle that I hadn't seen done before. I chose fatherhood and ambivalence, a political theological ambivalence, because those are reflective of my life right now. I'm a father of three daughters, spend a lot of my time and emotional energy trying to be a decent father, and I'm also sitting in a very difficult political landscape where I find myself with all these political convictions, but it's very difficult to act on those convictions, very difficult to turn those convictions into any actual change in the world. And those are themes that I think we can see a lot of in these texts because 1 and 2 Samuel covers a period of 100-ish years, because it's a multi-generational story, and we're introduced to Eli, who is a parent figure to Samuel, who then anoints Saul, who is of the generation above David, and then we get to see David's children, right? We get to see all these generations unfold. Because of that, we get to see how these characters are fathers. We get to see how they interact with both the generation before them and the generation after them. We get to see how they have inherited negative habits from the generation of men who have come before them and how they replicate those habits in the generation that comes after them. There are very few new sins in 1 and 2 Samuel. It's almost always a recycling of old pains and traumas that have been handed down. And that idea of what I'm trying to do in my own personal life is to do better than the generation that came before me, and I am seeing these characters struggle and so often fail to do that. So it resonated with me to talk a little bit about fatherhood, and that theme of fatherhood expands out to parenthood in general towards the end of the text. So it's not hyper-fixated on being a man, but on parenting in general. And then ambivalence, a political and theological ambivalence. How does God's sovereignty, God's will, how is that manifest in the world, if at all, and where, and how can I find it? And those are questions that loom large over the texts of 1 and 2 Samuel. Because this is a story of a transition from a more tribal affiliation to having a monarchy, there are big questions there about what is God's relationship to the king? Is the kingship something that God approves of? And there are some passages that very strongly say, "Yes, absolutely. God has handpicked these people. This person, this man is going to be your king. I have said so." And then you will turn the page, and you'll have a character say, "God hates having a king. Why did you ever think this was a good idea? Having a king is sinful. How dare you ask me for a king?" And then you'll turn the page and, "Man, thank God we had this king because this king just saved us from this terrible thing," and everybody seems to be on board with it. And then you turn the page and it's, "This is the worst king in the world, and God is going to get rid of this king and replace him with somebody else." So that kind of whose side is God on in these stories is terribly ambivalent, and again, that ambivalence matches a lot of people's attitudes.

Dan McClellan And is this a reflection, in your opinion, of the coming together of different traditions within 1 and 2 Samuel as a product of multiple authorship? Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Higashi There are very clear examples of instances in which you get the same story told multiple times, and that kind of literary, not necessarily doublet, but unnecessary repetition is a telltale sign of original independent compositions that have then been edited together. So a great example of this, starting in 1 Samuel 9, you get a story about how Saul becomes king, 9 and the first few verses of 10. And this is one of the pro-monarchical stories where God says, "I'm going to pick somebody to be king." God picks Saul to be king. He is anointed by the prophet Samuel. And it seems like that's the only story you need to tell about how Saul became king. But then, and you get to the end of 1 Samuel 10, now Saul is chosen to be king again by casting lots. So this random process of divination where they roll dice or pick sticks or draw straws or something like that in order to figure out who's going to be king. And that casts a much less flattering light on Saul because he's hiding from this whole process, doesn't want to be picked to be king. But then you turn the page, and then in 1 Samuel 11, Saul is empowered by God in the very same way that many of the judges are in the previous book, to sort of take up his arms and lead an army spontaneously against somebody who is trying to subjugate the people of Israel. And again, that one ends with this sort of sweeping charismatic incident. Everybody in the land is like, "Oh, Saul has got to be our king, and he seems like a very effective leader." And that so any one of these stories would've been enough by itself to explain how Saul became king, but we have three very different traditions with very different theologies trying to explain this process. So it seems like they were written apart from each other.

Dan Beecher Well, we'll get more into that in just a minute. Right now, we're going to take a break. For those of you who are patrons of the show, it'll go straight on. The rest of you, we're going to pay some bills, and we'll be right back.

Dan McClellan Welcome back, everybody. I hope that break was as productive for you as it was for us. One of the things that I wanted to talk about is the fact that this is not a technical academic book. This is something that you notice immediately when you begin the book. This is intended for a more popular audience, but it's also an entertaining book. I loved how- It's so fun ... you scattered some very funny footnotes throughout. You're kind of mocking the genre a little bit and having fun with the narrative as well. As you mentioned to us off air, this was intended to be a very character-driven story, and you think the story is entertaining. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like for an academic to write something where you were able to kind of unleash your comedic chops a little bit?

Aaron Higashi That's really an opportunity that the organization, The Bible for Normal People, gave me. This is only the kind of book that could be written by them and put out by them. The goal of the entire series for X Book for Normal People is to bring the best in academic biblical scholarship to everyday people. So it's written by me, who is an academic, a semi-serious academic with formal academic training. It's read by academics. It's edited by an academic. All the praise on the back is by academics. So it comes from an academic environment, but it's not for academics, right? This book is not going to advance the state of the field. Nobody's going to hold a special SBL session. Nobody's going to put this in my festschrift someday or something like that. It's not that kind of heavy academic book, but it comes from that place. And so I think part of the benefit of that is that an average everyday reader can have confidence in reading this, that everything that they see in this text is going to be something compatible with biblical scholarship, right? They're not going to read some commentary later on and be like, "Oh, no, that thing I heard in 1 and 2 Samuel for Normal, that's not true," right? "It's been debunked," or something like that. No, this is coming from the best biblical scholarship that we have available to us. And because it's for a lay audience, I didn't know what to do with the footnotes originally. Like, footnotes are usually there to very carefully and very exhaustively justify claims that you make to show that you've read a breadth of material, right? That you are engaged in whatever subject matter you're studying. And to make sure that what you're saying is going to fit in with what other academics are saying in your field. But I don't need to do that because if I started citing obscure German texts, nobody who's reading this would care. Right. Right. They're never going to look these things up. So I was at a loss for what to do with the footnotes for a while, and then I ended up sort of jokingly making them silly puns and commentary that's really just jokes and vibes and stuff like that. And occasional Gen Z slang that I only know because I teach undergraduate students. And then I just ended up leaving them, and that just became a feature of the book. So there are three serious footnotes that explain some cultural conventions at some point, I think. You snuck them in. Yeah, I did sneak. My editor was like, "You actually need one here for this." And I was like, "All right, that's fine."

Dan McClellan Well, I'm actually looking right now at one of the notes. It says, "My editor would like me to point out that ritual purity and impurity don't have any moral connotations in these texts," so. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi A great suggestion by Carolyn Blythe who edited the book. So there are a handful of serious ones. Mm-hmm. But otherwise, I just got to use them to play, and I think that helps. I think a little bit of levity is helpful in reading 1 and 2 Samuel because otherwise, these can be very depressing stories. They're great stories in a literary sense. These are some of the Bible's most compelling characters- Mm-hmm ... some of its most intricate arcs. But many of them are also quite sad. Yeah.

Dan Beecher You point out in the book that these stories, we have way more ink spilled about Moses, and yet we don't know. You mention in the introduction that we have no idea what Moses actually looked like because none of it was spent actually sort of- Setting the scene, giving us a description.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Any of that sort of stuff. First and Second Samuel are unique in the sense that for biblical literature, it actually gives us some of that. It sets the table a little bit for us. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi This really is peak biblical literature. This is the best literary prose writing that the Bible has to offer, in my opinion, and in the opinion of several of the scholars that I drew upon for this book. Because we get to spend time with characters, we get to see their ambitions, we get to see them strive for things and fail, we get to see them strive for things and succeed. We get to see them make very human judgments, right? Moses has a lot of space dedicated to him in the Bible. The second through fifth book, he is the main protagonist. But a lot of that is God says, "Moses, do this," and Moses does that, right? So you don't get to spend a lot of time in Moses' head. You don't understand any of his motivations, really. You don't see him struggle much internally. He doesn't get to play off very many other characters, right? And all that is essential for characterization. Right. But we do get to see that for Samuel and Saul and David, and many of these major characters in these texts. And that's really what brings a lot of these characters to life.

Dan McClellan I wanted to ask briefly, one of the things that I always think about when I'm in 1 and 2 Samuel is historicity. There's a lot of arguments within biblical scholarship about the historical David. Dan mentioned we talked about that in a recent episode. You think Saul really existed? Was that the actual first king of Israel, or do you think this is a literary creation whose name is playing on their role within the narrative?

Aaron Higashi I think Saul or somebody like him probably existed, because he is deployed in two very different ways, at least, by what seem to me to be two very different authors. First Samuel 9, and then a little bit in 11, is kind of pro-Saul. It takes a more positive perspective on Saul, and then all the rest of the material about Saul is very negative, right? So this is a character that's being played with in a couple different ways. He doesn't seem to be the literary invention of a single author inventing them for polemical reasons long after the fact. But a couple of different people have their hands on this tradition of Saul, and I don't think two different people would invent the same character for two different reasons. That seems less plausible to me than there was an actual person named Saul, may have done some of these things, and then it became useful to sort of project different agendas on him after the fact, rather than just, why not just invent a different character? If you need a good first king, invent somebody else. If you need somebody just to play off of and be like a foil to David or be the person David overcomes, invent a different character. But why is this all baked into the same character? And so, we have no archeological, there's no epigraphic evidence for Saul. It's unlikely, I think, that we would ever discover some. It's remarkable that we have any for David, the little bit that we do have. So it'll probably always be a literary historical question rather than an archeological sort of settleable question. Talk a little bit about the seeming multiple authorship.

Dan Beecher Talk about, first of all, who is presumed or has been traditionally presumed to be the author of these works, and then how we react to that now. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi The presumed traditional authors, both in the Talmud and in early Christian tradition, and even to a certain degree in the Bible itself, because later in Chronicles it'll be identified this way, are the prophets who are featured in here. So the prophet Samuel himself, and then Nathan, who shows up a little bit later and has a major role in 2 Samuel, and then the prophet Gad, who is active in both books to a more minor degree. So tradition ascribes it to these prophetic figures. And that's the tendency for ancient tradition to develop around assigning texts to inspired figures. That's why Moses eventually came to be associated with the Pentateuch or the Torah, why David comes to be associated with the entirety of the Psalmic tradition, and why Solomon comes to be associated with the wisdom tradition. It was just easier for ancient people, who often didn't have the texts themselves sitting in front of them in any workable form, to just think of them in terms of inspired figures.

Dan Beecher That- Just sort of autobiography. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Or just to have the nearest person ostensibly in contact with God. Mm. It must've been them, right? They must've played some role. It's never somebody who doesn't play a significant role. It's not like, "Oh, this was authored by Steve." Who's Steve?

Dan McClellan Just a guy who wrote this. He doesn't show up. He was taking notes the whole time. Right.

Aaron Higashi It's almost never a scribe. Ezra is one of the few people who tradition is associated to a figure who also has an actual scribal role in the narrative. But generally speaking, yeah, it's just one of the major characters, right? It's got to be them or associated with them. Generally speaking, biblical scholarship has disregarded this hypothesis entirely as far as authorship is concerned. There's a great diversity of perspectives on who might have written 1 and 2 Samuel. And when we're talking about who wrote 1 and 2 Samuel, we're always talking about parts of 1 and 2 Samuel. And so there are competing theories about how to break up the text- Because we have an initial opening section that focuses on the house of Eli and Samuel's birth and sort of his early prophetic activity. Then we transition drastically to this ark narrative where the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant and bring it back to the Philistine city-states for a while, and then eventually the ark makes its own way back to the lands of Israel in a rather miraculous and somewhat funny story until a bunch of people end up dying at the end. And it's funny right up until that moment. But that seems to be a completely separate thing, and that may or may not connect to the ark story later in 2 Samuel. And then we flash back to the story of Samuel himself, and now the people are coming to him and asking him for a king. And then the story breaks up into these voices that are in favor of a monarchy, and then voices, at least one voice, if not more, that are opposed to a monarchy for different reasons. Some of these reasons are very old-sounding. In 1 Samuel 11, where Samuel talks about the sins of a kingship, that echoes very strongly something that Gideon said in the Book of Judges, which is a very old sort of tradition where he says the same thing, "I can't be your king. God is your king." And Samuel says the same thing in 1 Samuel 8, and then later in 1 Samuel 11 sort of doubles down on that same idea. So that seems to be sort of an old tradition. But then we also get this later voice that seems to be coming from who biblical scholars call the Deuteronomist, the Deuteronomistic historian, who seems to be writing later in Babylonian exile, having seen the failure of the monarchy in Israel, also opposed to having a king, but for very different reasons. Not so much because the king is displacing God, but rather because kings are so prone to idolatry, and this has disastrous consequences for the nation as a whole. So that inclines biblical scholars to not only dice up the text in a wide variety of different ways, but then to assign a variety of dates. I think in the opening, I say sometime between 950, that's the earliest possible, that's the earliest serious argument I've seen. Joel Baden, in his book on the historical David, argues for a very early date for the composition of the stories in the middle of the 10th century BC, all the way up to in the midst of exile. And there are arguments even later than that. John Van Seters thinks that it's a Hellenistic text, that these stories about David gallivanting around in the wilderness with a sort of band of merry military men, that this seems a lot like Greek stories. And the authors of the Bible wouldn't have access to Greek thinking and Greek-style stories until the end of the 4th century BC at the earliest, and probably even later than that. So that's a huge spread. Yeah. And then not only that, you could do this for a while. When we see the Septuagint translation, that's radically different in some places. In the famous story of David and Goliath, in the Septuagint, it's missing big chunks of that story. A lot of the parts of the story that characterize David as young and as naive and as being introduced to Saul for the first time, a lot of that is missing in the Septuagint version. And that might be reflective of an earlier tradition. That might be an innovation of that text. It's difficult to tell. So this text is in flux for a long period of time. We don't get a settled version of this until very late in the process. So that's the generation after generation of people coming back to these stories and saying, "You know what? I have something else to add," or perhaps, "I have something to take out." Right? They feel committed to David and his legacy, and they want a say in how the monarchy began. They want to put their views in here. And for hundreds of years, that's what people did.

Dan McClellan Now, something that I like to talk a lot about is rhetorical goals. And you've talked a little bit about that. You mentioned the Deuteronomist. Ultimately, it comes together within a much larger project. Yes. But if one of the main rhetorical goals, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, is to validate David's rise to the throne, or at least claim to the throne, how do you see that informing where we think this is coming from? What other rhetorical goals do you see operating within the text?

Aaron Higashi Yeah, it could be a couple different things. Going back to the Baden text, it could be the case that late in David's life, as he's facing a variety of threats from within, civil wars, there were serious questions about his legitimacy and where he came from and why he has the right to rule. He is essentially a usurper to the throne. He's not Saul's son. He took it by force. He was aligned with the Philistines at the time that Saul was fighting the Philistines. And so Saul's death is very fortuitous for David's rise. There would be serious questions. Why do you get to sit on the throne? Why do you get to be in charge not only of the South, but the stories claim also the North? Why do you get to be in charge of this entire expansive terrain? And so some of these stories could have been composed as an apology. This is why David gets to sit on the throne. If composed later, we could have a similar situation after the fall of Northern Israel in 722. A lot of the people who are up north would have migrated south, especially like an upper class of the intellectual class of scribes and priests. They migrate south. They congregate around Jerusalem. They have their own traditions about David, and they're probably contesting the traditions in the South, which derives its identity in large part from David. And so that would be another opportunity for people to be like, "Hey, we need some new stories. We need to tell a story about how no, David really is... We are really legitimate down here in the South. You are fortunate to be able to be a part of this. Our legitimacy goes back a long ways." And then there would be even more reason in exile with having seen how this all turns out, knowing that the fate of this monarchal project is to fail eventually. There could be reasons to memorialize what had gone before, and perhaps also some reasons to take a more pessimistic perspective on it and to tell more stories about David as a flawed figure, which is what we get sort of moving into 2 Samuel. You get a lot more of David's flaws closer to the surface of the story. And an audience later on might be more willing to say, "Look, this was sort of doomed to begin with. Even our best is not that great." So that's one of the reasons why biblical scholars date it to so many different times, because the texts can serve so many different rhetorical agendas.

Dan McClellan And when it comes to, you mentioned the distinction between the north and the south. Yeah. You mentioned earlier what little archeological data that we have relevant to the historicity of David, the Tel Dan inscription being probably the most important one, where we have the Aramaic Hazael talking about killing some of these Israelite kings, and they are referred to as a kingdom in the north. And then we get a king who is of the House of David. It doesn't seem to be talking about a kingdom. It seems to be talking about a dynastic house. Yeah. What do you think the relevance is of this inscription to how we reconstruct our understanding of the southern kingdom and how it came to be and David's role in that?

Aaron Higashi I definitely think it attests to a general trend in biblical scholarship of seeing the north as the much more powerful political entity and the south as either a marginal group that is affiliated in some way or dependent on them. But this text seems to treat northern Israel as the main polity worth talking about and then talks about the House of David only secondarily. And so that seems to confirm a lot of the rest of the archeology that we have. Generally speaking, when other nations around this people are talking about what's happening in Israel and Judah, they're talking about Israel, right? We have Assyrians talking about stuff that's happening in northern Israel, talking about their kings, talking about trade relations, talking about assassinations, talking about lots of stuff that's going on up there. And they, in general, don't talk about stuff that's happening in the south. It's as though it's a non-issue. And so the mention of the House of David is sort of similar. Yes, we took the north, we destroyed many sites there. Yeah, we also beat up the House of David that's down there as well. But that's not to give it the same level of prestige. And so it seems to agree with the broader consensus that Israel is the main polity. Which is interesting because, of course, the voice that we then get preserved in the texts is sort of the voice of the one that survived in Judah, and the South is the one that ended up surviving longer, and so they got to write the stories, right? So these histories are heavily biased in favor of the South, even though history itself as it played out, the actual power, it seems, was in the north.

Dan McClellan I think it's interesting that what we have largely represents the perspectives of the South, and they talk about longing for the golden days of David's kingdom when Israel was at its largest and had conquered all its enemies and everything like that. And it certainly seems based on the data that the Omrides actually are the ones who had the largest kingdom that that part of the world had ever seen- Yeah ... outside of the empires around them. And it seems like the South is wanting to appropriate the achievements of the North in a lot of ways, going so far as to even adopting their identity, identifying as Israel- Mm-hmm ... in many parts of the text, which I find fascinating. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Even in the later part of David's reign, we get some of that tension because David's son, Absalom, leads a civil war against David, manages to oust him from the city of Jerusalem, his capital, for a short period of time. And many of Absalom's supporters seem to be, and the text will sometimes just say Israel is supporting him or the men of Israel. And it's sort of ambiguous whether or not, is this referring to everybody in the land, or is this referring to people in the northern territories specifically? And so already early in these stories, there's a recognition of the ambiguity and the tension there between how this word Israel can be used to refer to a particular northern section or all of it entirely. And the Bible is going to play on that, and different biblical authors are going to play on that in different ways. And so Israel becomes a very flexible term to have social connotations, kinship connotations, political connotations, theological connotations. And in the hands of different biblical authors, it means different things. Mm-hmm. So it's sort of always been a flexible term from the beginning. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And when Absalom finally gets what's coming to him, there's the famous reply of David, "Oh Absalom, oh Absalom." He seems to mourn the deaths of his enemies in a very kind of poetic way, in a way that is kind of holding him up as like he really wasn't trying to kill them. You can tell because he's so upset that they're dead. Yeah.

Aaron Higashi And it's interesting to read it both ways. You can read it when David mourns the death of Saul, for example, at the beginning of 2 Samuel. Is he really sad that he's... This opens up the power vacuum that allows David to become king, and then to eliminate the rest of Saul's household and to dominate these territories. Is he really sad that he's gone? And so you can read that. That's hard to read in a more straightforward, sympathetic way. But some other characters, it's difficult. When he mourns Jonathan's death, is that sincere? Jonathan would've been the successor to Saul, so he has political reason to celebrate that death and personal reason, perhaps, to mourn that death. So which is it? Same thing with Absalom. Absalom has ousted him from the kingdom. He's taken over. He's defeated his army, at least temporarily. He's taken a lot of his base of power. He's caused a rupture in the kingdom that David will spend the rest of his life trying to put down. At the same time, he's his, at that point, oldest son, and he's lost others before this in infighting and violence and terrible stories. So is this genuine mourning or is it not? And it's always interesting to sort of see what the story looks like both ways. It's difficult to tell. That's another element of both of the ambiguity and of the fatherhood, right? A father would mourn the death of his son. Mm-hmm. But David's not a great father. The whole reason he was in that situation to begin with is because he wasn't a good father to Absalom, such that Absalom would betray him.

Dan Beecher When you talk about the ambiguity in these stories, when you talk about how many possible or potential interpretations there could be of these things, do you have some favorite moments that have... Because some of these stories have prominent traditional interpretations.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher The understanding that you get in church or the understanding that you get if you read a children's version of the story of David or whatever. There are these moments that are given very traditional interpretations and reasons why they're there and what the meaning is and what the message is and what the moral of the story is or whatever. Do you have some favorite moments where you would quibble with the traditional reading or the traditional understanding?

Aaron Higashi Yeah, there are a lot. This could go a lot of different ways. I read Jonathan and David's relationship as being sincere and intimate. And so I think that usually gets preached, if it's preached at all or taught as a sort of a brother-in-arms camaraderie. I think there is something much more intimate happening there. Jonathan and David's relationship is utterly unprecedented in the Hebrew Bible for the amount of affection and vivid descriptions of the mutual feelings of the characters on multiple occasions, on literally every scene that they are together. Yeah. I think it's probably beyond the scope of the text to be able to say that this is romantic or erotic necessarily. Regardless, it is utterly unprecedented. The only relationship that gets close to the relationship between Jonathan and David anywhere in the Hebrew Bible is in the Song of Songs, and that is an explicitly erotic relationship. You can think back, I think I do this thought experiment in the book, and if not, maybe I should add it in before it goes to print. Think about couples in the Hebrew Bible who are described as loving each other. Can you think of any? There are very few. Hmm. Do you know how Moses feels for Zipporah? Do you know how Jacob feels for his wives? We have one line about how Jacob loves Rachel, and then this drove him to work for all this long time. But that's about it, right? Do we know what many of these characters felt for one another? And the answer 99 times out of 100 is no. We just assume. But the relationship between David and Jonathan, every time they are together, it's just he loved him like he loved himself. His soul clung to him. My love for you surpasses the love of women. You have other characters. Saul condemns Jonathan, that, "Your fidelity to David shames the nakedness of your mother," which has this sexual connotation to it. Every scene they appear in together, they are in love. But that's also overshadowed by the fact that David is the kind of person who might manipulate somebody's feelings, and so it's difficult to know if he's in this as much as Jonathan is. Hmm. And so even there, there's some ambiguity, but I tend to read it as a pretty straightforward, intimate relationship. I don't know if you get much morally edifying out of that, except that love is good wherever you can find it.