_DAVID'S DECREPITUDE._
1 KINGS i. 1-4.
"Praise a fair day at night."
The old age of good men is often a beautiful spectacle. They show
us the example of a mellower wisdom, a larger tolerance, a sweeter
temper, a more unselfish sympathy, a clearer faith. The setting sun
of their bright day tinges even the clouds which gather round it with
softer and more lovely hues.
We cannot say this of David's age. After the oppressive splendour of
his heroic youth and manhood there was no dewy twilight of honoured
peace. We see him in a somewhat pitiable decrepitude. He was not
really old; the expression of our Authorised Version, "stricken in
years," is literally "entered into days," but the Book of Chronicles
calls him "old and full of days."[56] Josephus says that when he died
he was only seventy years old. He had reigned seven years and a half
in Hebron and thirty-three years in Jerusalem.[57] At the age of
seventy many men are still in full vigour of strength and intellect,
but the conditions of that day were not favourable to longevity.
Solomon does not seem to have survived his sixtieth year; and it is
doubtful whether any one of the kings of Israel or Judah--excepting,
strange to say, the wicked Manasseh--attained even that moderate age.
Threescore years and ten have always been the allotted space of human
life, and few who long survive that age find that their strength then
is anything but labour and sorrow.
But the decrepitude of David was exceptional. He was drained of all
his vital force. He took to his bed, but though they heaped clothes
upon him he could get no warmth. "He remained cold amid the torrid
heat of Jerusalem." Then his physicians recommended the only remedy
they knew, to give heat to his chilled and withered frame. It was the
primitive and not ineffectual remedy--which was suggested twenty-two
centuries later to the great Frederic Barbarossa--of contact with
the warmth of a youthful frame.[58] So they sought out the fairest
virgin in all the coasts of Israel to act as the king's nurse, and
their choice fell on Abishag, a maiden of Shunem in Issachar.[59]
There was no question of his taking another wife. He had already
many wives and concubines, and what the bed-ridden invalid required
was a strong and youthful nurse to cherish him. We are surprised at
such total failure of life's forces. But David had lived through a
youth of toil and exposure, of fight and hardship, in the days when
his only home had been the dark and dripping limestone caves, and
he had been hunted like a partridge on the mountains by the furious
jealousy of Saul. The sun had smitten him by day and the moon by
night, and the chill dews had fallen on him in the midnight bivouacs
among the crags of Engedi. Then had followed the burdens and cares of
royalty with guilty anxieties and deeds which shook his pulses with
wrath and fear. Coincident with these were the demoralising luxuries
and domestic sensualism of a polygamous palace. Worst of all, he
had sinned against God, and against light, and against his own
conscience. For a time his moral sense had slumbered, and retribution
had been delayed. But when he awoke from his sensual dream, the
belated punishment burst over him in thunder and his conscience with
outstretched finger and tones of menace must often have repeated to
the murderous adulterer the doom of Nathan and the stern sentence,
"Thou art the man!" Many a vulgar Eastern tyrant would hardly have
regarded David's sin as a sin at all; but when such a man as David
sins, the fact that he has been admitted into a holier sanctuary adds
deadliness to the guilt of his sacrilege. True he was forgiven, but
he must have found it terribly hard to forgive himself. God gave back
to him the clean heart, and renewed a right spirit within him; but
the sense of forgiveness differs from the sweetness of innocence,
and the remission of his sins did not bring with it the remission of
their consequences. From that disastrous day David was a changed man.
It might be said of him as of the Fallen Spirit:--
"His face
Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek."
The Nemesis of sin's normal consequences pursued him to the end. Dark
spirits walked in his house. Joab knew his guilty secrets, and Joab
became the tyrannous master of his destiny. Those guilty secrets
leaked out, and he lost his charm, his influence, his popularity among
his subjects. He was haunted by an ever-present sense of shame and
humiliation. Joab was a murderer, and went unpunished; but was not he
too an unpunished murderer? If his enemies cursed him, he sometimes
felt with a sense of despair, "Let them curse. God hath said unto them,
Curse David." His past carried with it the inevitable deterioration of
his present. In the overwhelming shame and horror which rent his heart
during the rebellion of Absalom, he must often have felt tempted to the
fatalism of desperation, like that guilty king of Greek tragedy who,
burdened with the curse of his race, was forced to exclaim,--
"Ἔπει τὸ πρᾶγμα καρτ' ἐπισπέρχει θεός
Ἴτω κατ' οὖρον, κῦμα Κωκυτοῦ λαχόν,
Θεῷ στυγηθὲν πᾶν το Λαΐου γένος."[60]
Curses in his family, a curse upon his daughter, a curse upon
his sons, a curse upon himself, a curse upon his people,--there
was scarcely one ingredient in the cup of human woe which, in
consequence of his own crimes, this unhappy king had not been forced
to taste. Scourges of war, famine, and pestilence--of a three years'
famine, of a three years' flight before his enemies, of a three
days' pestilence--he had known them all. He had suffered with the
sufferings of his subjects, whose trials had been aggravated by his
own transgressions. He had seen his sons following his own fatal
example, and he had felt the worst of all sufferings in the serpent's
tooth of filial ingratitude agonising a troubled heart and a weakened
will. It is no wonder that David became decrepit before his time.
Yet what a picture does he present of the vanity of human wishes,
of the emptiness of all that men desire, of the truth which Solon
impressed on the Lydian king that we can call no man happy before
his death! David's youth had been a pastoral idyll; his manhood an
epic of war and chivalry; his premature age becomes the chronicle
of a nursery. What different pictures are presented to us by David
in his sweet youth and glowing bloom, and David in his unloved and
disgraced decline! We have seen him a beautiful ruddy boy, summoned
from his sheepfolds, with the wind of the desert on his cheek and
its sunlight in his hair, to kneel before the aged prophet and feel
the hands of consecration laid upon his head. Swift and strong, his
feet like hart's feet, his arms able to bend a bow of steel, he
fights like a good shepherd for his flock, and single-handed smites
the lion and the bear. His harp and song drive the evil spirit from
the tortured soul of the demoniac king. With a sling and a stone the
boy slays the giant champion, and the maidens of Israel praise their
deliverer with songs and dances. He becomes the armour-bearer of
the king, the beloved comrade of the king's son, the husband of the
king's daughter. Then indeed he is driven into imperilled outlawry by
the king's envy, and becomes the captain of a band of freebooters;
but his influence over them, as in our English legends of Robin Hood,
gives something of beneficence to his lawlessness, and even these
wandering years of brigandage are brightened by tales of his splendid
magnanimity. The young chieftain who had mingled a loyal tenderness
and genial humour with all his wild adventures--who had so generously
and almost playfully spared the life of Saul his enemy--who had
protected the flocks and fields of the churlish Nabal--who, with the
chivalry of a Sydney, had poured on the ground the bright drops of
water from the Well of Bethlehem for which he had thirsted, because
they had been won by imperilled lives--sprang naturally into the
idolised hero and poet of his people. Then God had taken him from
the sheepfolds, from following the ewes great with young ones,
that he might lead Jacob His people and Israel His inheritance.
Generous to the sad memories of Saul and Jonathan, generous to the
princely Abner, generous to the weak Ishbosheth, generous to poor
lame Mephibosheth, he had knit all hearts like the heart of one
man to himself, and in successful war had carried all before him,
north and south, and east and west. He enlarged the borders of his
kingdom, captured the City of Waters, and placed the Moloch-crown of
Rabbah on his head. Then in the mid-flush of his prosperity, in his
pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, "the tempting
opportunity met the susceptible disposition," and David forgat God
who had done so great things for him.
The people must have felt how deep was the debt of gratitude which
they owed to him. He had given them a consciousness of power
yet undeveloped; a sense of the unity of their national life
perpetuated by the possession of a capital which has been famous
to all succeeding ages. To David the nation owed the conquest of
the stronghold of Jebus, and they would feel that "as the hills
stand about Jerusalem so standeth the Lord round about them that
fear Him."[61] The king who associates his name with a national
capital--as Nebuchadnezzar built great Babylon, or Constantine chose
Byzantium--secures the strongest claim to immortality. But the
choice made by David for his capital showed an intuition as keen as
that which has immortalised the fame of the Macedonian conqueror
in the name of Alexandria. Jerusalem is a city which belongs to
all time, and even under the curse of Turkish rule it has not
lost its undying interest. But David had rendered a still higher
service in giving stability to the national religion. The prestige
of the Ark had been destroyed in the overwhelming defeat of Israel
by the Philistines at Aphek, when it fell into the hands of the
uncircumcised. After that it had been neglected and half forgotten
until David brought it with songs and dances to God's holy hill of
Zion. Since then every pious Israelite might rejoice that, as in the
Tabernacle of old, God was once more in the midst of His people.
The merely superstitious might only regard the Ark as a fetish--the
fated Palladium of the national existence. But to all thoughtful men
the presence of the Ark had a deeper meaning, for it enshrined the
Tables of the Moral Law; and those broken Tables, and the bending
Cherubim which gazed down upon them, and the blood-sprinkled gold of
the Mercy-Seat were a vivid emblem that God's Will is the Rule of
Righteousness, and that if it be broken the soul must be reconciled
to Him by repentance and forgiveness. That meaning is beautifully
brought out in the Psalm which says, "Who shall ascend into the hill
of the Lord, or who shall rise up into the holy place? Even he that
hath clean hands and a pure heart: who hath not lifted up his mind
unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour."
To David more than to any man that conviction of the supremacy of
righteousness must have been keenly present, and for this reason his
sin was the less pardonable. It "tore down the altar of confidence"
in many hearts. It caused the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, and
was therefore worthy of a sorer punishment. And God in His mercy
smote, and did not spare.
He sinned: then came earthquake and eclipse. His earthly life was
shipwrecked in that place where two seas meet--where the sea of
calamity meets the sea of crime.[62] Then followed the death of his
infant child; the outrage of Amnon; the blood of the brutal ravisher
shed by his brother's hands; the flight of Absalom; his insolence,
his rebellion, his deadly insult to his father's household; the long
day of flight and shame and weeping and curses, as David ascended
the slope of Olivet and went down into the Valley of Jordan; the
sanguinary battle; the cruel murder of the beloved rebel; the
insolence of Joab; the heartrending cry, "O Absalom, my son, my son
Absalom; would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
Not even then had David's trials ended. He had to endure the fierce
quarrel between Israel and Judah; the rebellion of Sheba; the murder
of Amasa, which he dared not punish. He had to sink into the further
sin of pride in numbering the people, and to see the Angel of the
Plague standing with drawn sword over the threshing-floor of Araunah,
while his people--those sheep who had not offended--died around him
by thousands. After such a life he was made to feel that it was
not for blood-stained hands like his to rear the Temple, though he
had said, "I will not suffer mine eyes to sleep nor mine eyelids
to slumber, neither the temples of my head to take any rest till I
find a place for the tabernacle of the Lord, a habitation for the
mighty God of Jacob." And now we see him surrounded by intrigues;
alienated from the friends and advisers of his youth; shivering in
his sick-room; attended by his nurse; feeble, apathetic, the ghost
and wreck of all that he held been, with little left him of his life
but its "glimmerings and decays."
It is an oft-repeated story. Even so we see great Darius
"Deserted at his utmost need
By those his former bounty fed;
On the bare ground exposed he lies
Without a friend to close his eyes."
So we see glorious Alexander the Great, dying as a fool dieth,
remorseful, drunken, disappointed, at Babylon. So we see our great
Plantagenet:--
"Mighty victor, mighty lord,
Low on his funeral couch he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye afford
A tear to grace his obsequies."
So we see Louis XIV., _le grand monarque_, peevish, _ennuyé_,
fortunate no longer, an old man of seventy-seven left in his vast
lonely palace with his great-grandson, a frivolous child of five,
and saying to him, "_J'ai trop aime la guerre; ne m'imitez point_."
So we see the last great conqueror of modern times, embittering his
dishonoured island-exile by miserable disputes with Sir Hudson Lowe
about etiquette and champagne. But among all the "sad stories of
the deaths of kings" none ends a purer glory with a more pitiful
decline than the poet-king of Israel, whose songs have been to so
many thousands their delight in the house of their pilgrimage. Truly
David's experience no less than his own may have added bitterness to
the traditional epitaph of his son on all human glory: "Vanity of
vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
FOOTNOTES:
[56] 1 Chron. xxiii. 1.
[57] 2 Sam. v. 5.
[58] It is mentioned by Galen, vii.; Valesius, _De Sacr. Philos._,
xxix., p. 187; Bacon, _Hist. Vitæ et Mortis_, ix. 25; Reinhard,
_Bibel-Krankheiten_, p. 171. See Josephus, _Antt._, VII. xv. 3.
[59] Now Solam, near _Zerin_ (Jezreel), five miles south of Tabor
(Robinson, _Researches_, iii. 462), on the south-west of Jebel
el-Duhy (Little Hermon), Josh. xix. 18; 1 Sam. xxviii. 4.
[60] Æsch., _Sept. c. Theb._, 690.
[61] See Psalm cxxii. 3-5.
[62] See Kittel, ii. 147.