We have now to turn and see the sudden change of fortune which lifted
the exile to a throne. The heavy cloud which had brooded so long over
the doomed king broke in lightning crash on the disastrous field of
Gilboa. Where is there a sadder and more solemn story of the fate of a
soul which makes shipwreck "of faith and of a good conscience," than
that awful page which tells how, godless, wretched, mad with despair and
measureless pride, he flung himself on his bloody sword, and died a
suicide's death, with sons and armour-bearer and all his men, a ghastly
court of corpses, laid round him? He had once been brave, modest, and
kind, full of noble purposes and generous affections--and he ended so.
Into what doleful regions of hate and darkness may self-will drag a
soul, when once the reins fall loose from a slackened hand! And what a
pathetic beam of struggling light gleams through heavy clouds, in the
grateful exploit of the men of Jabesh, who remembered how he had once
saved them, while yet he could care and dare for his kingdom, and
perilled their lives to bear the poor headless corpse to its rude
resting-place!
The news is received by the fugitive at Ziklag in striking and
characteristic fashion. He first flames out in fierce wrath upon the
lying Amalekite, who had hurried with the tidings and sought favour by
falsely representing that he had killed the king on the field. A short
shrift and a bloody end were his. And then the wrath melts into
mourning. Forgetting the mad hatred and wild struggles of that poor
soul, and his own wrongs, remembering only the friendship and nobleness
of his earlier days, he casts over the mangled corpses of Saul and
Jonathan the mantle of his sweet elegy, and bathes them with the healing
waters of his unstinted praise and undying love. Not till these two
offices of justice and affection had been performed, does he remember
himself and the change in his own position which had been effected. He
had never thought of Saul as standing between him and the kingdom; the
first feeling on his death was not, as it would have been with a less
devout and less generous heart, a flush of gladness at the thought of
the empty throne, but a sharp pang of pain from the sense of an empty
heart. And even when he begins to look forward to his own new course,
there is that same remarkable passiveness which we have observed
already. His first step is to "inquire of the Lord, saying, Shall I go
up to any of the cities of Judah?" (2 Sam. ii. 1). He will do nothing in
this crisis of his fortunes, when all which had been so long a hope
seemed to be rapidly becoming a fact, until his Shepherd shall lead him.
Rapid and impetuous as he was by nature, schooled to swift decisions,
followed by still swifter action, knowing that a blow struck at once,
while all was chaos and despair at home, might set him on the throne, he
holds nature and policy and the impatience of his people in check to
hear what God will say. So fully did he fulfil the vow of his early
psalm, "My strength! upon thee will I wait" (lix. 9).
We can fancy the glad march to the ancient Hebron, where the great
fathers of the nation lay in their rock-hewn tombs. Even before the
death of Saul, David's strength had been rapidly increasing, by a
constant stream of fugitives from the confusion and misery into which
the kingdom had fallen. Even Benjamin, Saul's own tribe, sent him some
of its famous archers--a sinister omen of the king's waning fortunes;
the hardy half-independent men of Manasseh and Gad, from the pastoral
uplands on the east of Jordan, "whose faces," according to the vivid
description of the chronicler (1 Chron. xii. 8), "were like the faces of
lions, and were as swift as roes upon the mountains," sought his
standard; and from his own kinsmen of Judah recruits "day by day came to
David to help him, until it was a great host like the host of God." With
such forces, it would have been child's play to have subdued any
scattered troops of the former dynasty which might still have been in a
condition to keep the field. But he made no attempt of the sort; and
even when he came to Hebron he took no measures to advance any claims to
the crown. The language of the history seems rather to imply a
disbanding of his army, or at least their settling down to domestic life
in the villages round Hebron, without a thought of winning the kingdom
by arms. And his elevation to the partial monarchy which he at first
possessed was the spontaneous act of "the men of Judah," who come to him
and anoint him king over Judah.
The limits of his territory are substantially those of the kingdom over
which his descendants ruled after Jeroboam's revolt, thus indicating the
existence of a natural "line of cleavage" between north and south. The
geographical position of Benjamin finally attached it to the latter
monarchy; but for the present, the wish to retain the supremacy which it
had had while the king was one of the tribe, made it the nucleus of a
feeble and lingering opposition to David, headed by Saul's cousin Abner,
and rallying round his incompetent son Ishbosheth.[Q] The chronology of
this period is obscure. David reigned in Hebron seven years and a half,
and as Ishbosheth's phantom sovereignty only occupied two of these
years, and those evidently the last, it would appear almost as if the
Philistines had held the country, with the exception of Judah, in such
force that no rival cared to claim the dangerous dignity, and that five
years passed before the invaders were so far cleared out as to leave
leisure for civil war.
[Q] The Canaanitish worship of Baal seems to have lingered in Saul's
family. One of his grand-uncles was named Baal (1 Chron. ix. 36); his
son was really called Eshbaal (Fire of Baal), which was contemptuously
converted into Ishbosheth (Man of Shame). So also Mephibosheth was
properly Meribbaal (Fighter for Baal).
The summary narrative of these seven years presents the still youthful
king in a very lovable light. The same temper which had marked his first
acts after Saul's death is strikingly brought out (2 Sam. ii.-iv.) He
seems to have left the conduct of the war altogether to Joab, as if he
shrank from striking a single blow for his own advancement. When he does
interfere, it is on the side of peace, to curb and chastise ferocious
vengeance and dastardly assassination. The incidents recorded all go to
make up a picture of rare generosity, of patient waiting for God to
fulfil His purposes, of longing that the miserable strife between the
tribes of God's inheritance should end. He sends grateful messages to
Jabesh-Gilead; he will not begin the conflict with the insurgents. The
only actual fight recorded is provoked by Abner, and managed with
unwonted mildness by Joab. The list of his children born in Hebron is
inserted in the very heart of the story of the insurrection, a token of
the quiet domestic life of peaceful joys and cares which he lived while
the storm was raging without. Eagerly, and without suspicion, he
welcomes Abner's advances towards reconciliation. He falls for a moment
to the level of his times, and yields to a strong temptation, in making
the restoration of his long-lost wife Michal the condition of further
negotiations--a demand which was strictly just, no doubt, but for which
little more can be said. The generosity of his nature and the ideal
purity of his love, which that incident shadows, shine out again in his
indignation at Joab's murder of Abner, though he was too meek to avenge
it. There is no more beautiful picture in his life than that of his
following the bier where lay the bloody corpse of the man who had been
his enemy ever since he had known him, and sealing the reconciliation
which Death ever makes in noble souls, by the pathetic dirge he chanted
over Abner's grave. We have a glimpse of his people's unbounded
confidence in him, given incidentally when we are told that his sorrow
pleased them, "as whatsoever the king did pleased all the people." We
have a glimpse of the feebleness of his new monarchy as against the
fierce soldier who had done so much to make it, in his acknowledgment
that he was yet weak, being but recently anointed king, and that these
vehement sons of Zeruiah were too strong for him; and we have a
remarkable trace of connection with the psalms, in the closing words
with which he invokes on Joab the vengeance which he as yet felt himself
unable to execute: "The Lord shall reward the doer of evil according to
his wickedness."
The only other incident recorded of his reign in Hebron is his execution
of summary justice upon the murderers of the poor puppet-king
Ishbosheth, upon whose death, following so closely that of Abner, the
whole resistance to David's power collapses. There had never been any
real popular opposition. His enemies are emphatically named as "the
house of Saul," and we find Abner himself admitting that "the elders of
Israel" wanted David as king (2 Sam. iii. 17), so that when he was gone,
it is two Benjamites who give the _coup-de-grâce_ to Ishbosheth, and end
the whole shadowy rival power. Immediately the rulers of all the tribes
come up to Hebron, with the tender of the crown. They offer it on the
triple grounds of kinship, of his military service even in Saul's reign,
and of the Divine promise of the throne. A solemn pact was made, and
David was anointed in Hebron, a king by Divine right, but also a
constitutional monarch chosen by popular election, and limited in his
powers.
The first result of his new strength is the capture of the old
hill-fortress of the Jebusites, the city of Melchizedek, which had
frowned down upon Israel unsubdued till now, and whose inhabitants
trusted so absolutely in its natural strength that their answer to the
demand for surrender was the jeer, "Thou wilt not come hither, but the
blind and lame will drive thee away." This time David does not leave the
war to others. For the first time for seven years we read, "_The king_
and his men went to Jerusalem." Established there as his capital, he
reigns for some ten years with unbroken prosperity over a loyal and
loving people, with this for the summary of the whole period, "David
went on and grew great, and the Lord God of Hosts was with him" (2 Sam.
v. 10). These years are marked by three principal events--the bringing
up of the ark to the city of David, the promise by Nathan of the
perpetual dominion of his house, and the unbroken flow of victories over
the surrounding nations. These are the salient points of the narrative
in the Book of Samuel (2 Sam. v.-viii.), and are all abundantly
illustrated by the psalms. We shall have next then to consider "The
Songs of the King."
How did the fugitive bear his sudden change of fortune? What were his
thoughts when at last the dignity which he had ever expected and never
sought was his? The answer is ready to our hand in that grand psalm (Ps.
xviii.) which he "spake in the day that the Lord delivered him from all
his enemies, and from the hand of Saul." The language of this
superscription seems to connect the psalm with the period of internal
and external repose which preceded and prompted David's "purpose to
build an house for the Lord" (2 Sam. vii.) The same thankfulness which
glows so brightly in the psalm stimulated that desire, and the emphatic
reference to the mercy promised by God to "his seed for evermore," which
closes the hymn, points perhaps to the definite promise of the
perpetuity of the kingdom to his descendants, which was God's answer to
the same desire. But whether the psalm belongs to the years of the
partial sovereignty at Hebron, or to those of the complete dominion at
Jerusalem, it cannot be later than the second of these two dates; and
whatever may have been the time of its composition, the feelings which
it expresses are those of the first freshness of thankful praise when he
was firmly settled in the kingdom. Some critics would throw it onwards
to the very close of his life. But this has little in its favour beyond
the fact that the author of the Book of Samuel has placed his version of
the psalm among the records of David's last days. There is, however,
nothing to show that that position is due to chronological
considerations. The victories over heathen nations which are supposed to
be referred to in the psalm, and are relied on by the advocates of later
date, really point to the earlier, which was the time of his most
brilliant conquests. And the marked assertions of his own purity, as
well as the triumphant tone of the whole, neither of which
characteristics corresponds to the sad and shaded years after his great
fall, point in the same direction. On the whole, then, we may fairly
take this psalm as belonging to the bright beginning of the monarchy,
and as showing us how well the king remembered the vows which the exile
had mingled with his tears.
It is one long outpouring of rapturous thankfulness and triumphant
adoration, which streams from a full heart in buoyant waves of song.
Nowhere else, even in the psalms--and if not there, certainly nowhere
else--is there such a continuous tide of unmingled praise, such
magnificence of imagery, such passion of love to the delivering God,
such joyous energy of conquering trust. It throbs throughout with the
life blood of devotion. The strong flame, white with its very ardour,
quivers with its own intensity as it steadily rises heavenward. All the
terrors, and pains, and dangers of the weary years--the black fuel for
the ruddy glow--melt into warmth too great for smoke, too equable to
blaze. The plaintive notes that had so often wailed from his harp, sad
as if the night wind had been wandering among its chords, have all led
up to this rushing burst of full-toned gladness. The very blessedness of
heaven is anticipated, when sorrows gone by are understood and seen in
their connection with the joy to which they have led, and are felt to
be the theme for deepest thankfulness. Thank God that, for the
consolation of the whole world, we have this hymn of praise from the
same lips which said, "My life is spent with grief, and my years with
sighing." "We have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very
pitiful and of tender mercy." The tremulous minors of trustful sorrow
shall swell into rapturous praise; and he who, compassed with foes,
cries upon God, will, here or yonder, sing this song "unto the Lord, in
the day that the Lord delivers him from the hand of all his enemies."