Justified True Belief

(●) Israel’s shepherd king, whose songs became the church’s prayer book and whose name the Gospels hang on Jesus. + Somewhere this morning a nurse coming off a night shift read the twenty-third psalm at a bedside, a monk sang the sixty-third before dawn, and a teenager who is not sure she believes any of it read the fifty-first because she had nowhere else to put what she was feeling. Outside the words of Jesus, no human being’s words have been prayed by more people, and most of them could not tell you a single thing about his reign. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is a promise. Around the year 1000 BC a prophet named Nathan told him that God would give his family a throne that would not end (2 Samuel 7:16), and from that sentence grew the whole shape of Jewish messianic hope: the coming deliverer would be a son of David. Matthew opens his Gospel with the phrase and Revelation closes with it. The second reason is more uncomfortable and just as useful. The same Scriptures that make David the standard for Israel’s kings also record, in unsparing detail, that he slept with another man’s wife and had the man killed to cover it. A book inventing a national hero does not do that. One thing to hold from the start: every date attached to him is a convention rather than a record. Nobody wrote down the year he was born. The chronology is built backward, and the place it starts from is the division of the kingdom after Solomon’s death, an event usually placed at 931 BC. That starting point holds because Assyrian records pin a few later Israelite kings to fixed years, Ahab at the battle of Qarqar in 853 BC and Jehu’s tribute in 841 BC, and the reign lengths given in Kings can be counted back from those. Subtract Solomon’s forty years and you reach about 970 BC for David’s death. Then 2 Samuel 5:4 says he was thirty when he became king and reigned forty years, which puts his birth near 1040 BC. Everything in between is estimated from the order of events rather than from dated documents. What is not conventional is the dynasty. In 1993 an excavation at Tel Dan in northern Israel turned up a fragment of a ninth-century BC victory monument, written in Aramaic by an enemy king, boasting of killing a king of Israel and a king of the "House of David." It is the oldest mention of his line outside the Bible, and it came out of the ground written by someone with no interest in flattering him.

(●) c. 1040 BC: Born the youngest of Jesse’s sons in Bethlehem, and singled out as king while he was still with the sheep. + Bethlehem was a village of a few hundred people in the hill country south of Jerusalem, close enough to the desert that the pasture ran out quickly and far enough from anywhere important that nothing was expected of it. David was the youngest son of a farmer named Jesse: the eighth of eight by the count in 1 Samuel 16, though the genealogy in 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 lists only seven and makes him the seventh. Commentators usually explain the difference by supposing that one son died without heirs and dropped out of the family register. The job that fell to the youngest was the one nobody wanted: taking the flock out for days at a time to whatever grazing could be found, sleeping in the open, and dealing with whatever came for the animals in the dark. The story of his anointing turns on that. Samuel, the old prophet who had made Saul king and then watched him fail, is sent to Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse’s sons in his place. Jesse lines up seven of them. Samuel looks at the eldest, Eliab, a tall and impressive young man, and is told no, in a sentence the rest of the Bible keeps circling back to: God does not see the way people see, because people look at the outward appearance and God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). Only when all seven have been refused does anyone think to send for the boy with the sheep. Then, remarkably, nothing happens. Oil is poured on his head in front of his family, and he goes back to the flock. Whatever the anointing meant, it did not come with a date, a throne, or an explanation, and the next fifteen years of his life were spent as a servant in another man’s court and a fugitive in another man’s wilderness. The first thing the narrative tells us he was hired for was music: Saul was tormented by what the text calls an evil spirit, and David was brought in to play the lyre for him until it lifted (1 Samuel 16:14-23).

(●) c. 1025 BC: He killed the Philistine champion, and the song the women sang afterward turned Saul, Israel’s first king, against him. + Two armies faced each other across the valley of Elah, and for forty days neither would come down, because the Philistines had put forward a champion and Israel had nobody to send. The offer was single combat: one man against one man, the losing side to serve the winning one. Goliath is described as a giant in armor, and the details the narrator lingers on are all metal, weight and bronze. What David brought instead was a sling, which was not a toy but the standard ranged weapon of a shepherd and, in trained hands, a serious one. The speech he makes before the fight is the reason the story sits in the Bible rather than in a book of heroic legends. He tells the Philistine that the sword and the spear are not what decides this, that the battle belongs to the LORD, and that the point of the whole business is that the earth would know there is a God in Israel (1 Samuel 17:45-47). Then he runs at him. What followed was a song, and the song was the problem. The women came out of the towns singing that Saul had struck down his thousands and David his ten thousands, and from that day, the text says, Saul watched him (1 Samuel 18:7-9). A king who has already been told his dynasty will not continue does not need much help hearing a threat in a chorus line. Within a short time Saul had thrown a spear at him twice, set a bride price for his daughter that was meant to get him killed by Philistines, and finally given the order outright. One honest complication belongs here, and it is better faced than hidden. 2 Samuel 21:19 credits the killing of Goliath the Gittite to a man named Elhanan, while 1 Chronicles 20:5 says that the man Elhanan killed was Goliath’s brother. Something has happened in the transmission of one of those two verses, meaning the long chain of hand copying by which the text came down to us, and translators and commentators have argued for centuries about which verse it happened to. It is a real difficulty. It is also visible at all only because the tradition kept both lines rather than quietly tidying one away.

(●) c. 1020 BC: Hunted through the wilderness for years, he twice had Saul at his mercy and let him go. + The fugitive years are the part of David’s life that produced the poetry, and they were not romantic. He hid in caves in the Judean wilderness, a country of chalk ridges and dry ravines where a man could disappear and could also die of thirst. Around him gathered what 1 Samuel 22:2 calls everyone in distress, everyone in debt, and everyone discontented: about four hundred men at first, six hundred later, the ancient equivalent of a militia raised from people with nothing left to lose. A priest at Nob who had fed him was slaughtered along with eighty-four other priests for it, and David took the blame for it on himself (1 Samuel 22:22). Twice the hunt reversed itself. In a cave at En-gedi, Saul came in alone to relieve himself, not knowing David’s men were in the dark at the back; David cut a corner off his robe and could not even do that with a clear conscience. Later, at the hill of Hachilah, he walked into Saul’s camp at night, stood over the sleeping king with a spear stuck in the ground beside his head, and stopped his companion from using it. His reason both times was the same, and it is the political conviction that runs through his whole life: the man was the LORD’s anointed, and it was not David’s to undo what God had done (1 Samuel 24:6; 26:9-11). He wanted the throne. He would not take it by killing for it. Not everything in these years is admirable, and the narrator does not pretend otherwise. Driven out of Judah altogether, David took service with Achish, the Philistine king of Gath, was given the town of Ziklag, and spent a year and four months raiding desert peoples while reporting to his employer that he had been raiding Judah, leaving no survivors who might correct the story (1 Samuel 27). He was spared the final absurdity of fighting on the Philistine side at Gilboa only because the other Philistine commanders did not trust him. Saul and Jonathan died in that battle, and David’s response was an elegy, a funeral song, for both of them, including the man who had spent years trying to kill him: "How the mighty have fallen" (2 Samuel 1:19-27).

(●) c. 1010 BC: Crowned at Hebron and then over all Israel, he took Jerusalem and brought the ark up into it. + The throne did not arrive in one piece. The men of Judah anointed him at Hebron while Saul’s surviving son Ish-bosheth was made king over the northern tribes, and the two houses fought a long war that David’s side won slowly (2 Samuel 3:1). It ended in two murders he did not order and could not afford: his own general Joab killed Abner, the northern commander who had come to negotiate, and two of Ish-bosheth’s officers assassinated their master in his bed. David executed the assassins, walked behind Abner’s bier and wrote a short lament for him, and the northern elders came to Hebron and made him king over everything. He was about thirty-seven. His first act as king of a united country was a piece of political genius. Jerusalem was a hill fortress belonging to the Jebusites, the Canaanite people who had held the place since long before Israel came into the land. It sat on the seam between north and south, on the boundary between Judah and Benjamin and in the hands of neither, and it was still unconquered after centuries. Taking it gave him a capital that no tribe could claim as its own. The account of how it fell is short and obscure, involving a water shaft and a taunt from the defenders that the blind and the lame could hold the walls against him (2 Samuel 5:6-9). Then he did the thing that made the city more than a capital. The ark of the covenant, the gold-covered chest that had carried Israel’s law since Sinai and had sat neglected in a village since before Saul was king, was brought up to Jerusalem in procession. The first attempt ended in a death when a man named Uzzah took hold of the ark and was struck down, and David, the text says, was both angry and afraid and left it where it was for three months. The second attempt worked, and he danced the whole way in a linen ephod, a priest’s garment, in front of everybody. His wife Michal, Saul’s daughter, watched from a window and despised him for it, and the exchange between them is one of the coldest conversations in the Old Testament (2 Samuel 6).

(●) c. 1000 BC: He offered to build God a house, and was told instead that God would build him one. + Settled in a cedar palace with the wars mostly won, David told the prophet Nathan it was not right that he should live in a house of cedar while the ark sat under a tent. Nathan told him to go ahead. That night Nathan was sent back with the answer, and the answer was no, followed by a play on words that turns the whole proposal inside out. David wanted to build God a house, meaning a temple. God would build David a house, meaning a dynasty. The terms are worth reading slowly, because everything the New Testament does with the title "son of David" is built on them. A descendant would come after him and build the temple instead. That descendant’s kingdom would be established; God would be a father to him and he a son to God; when he did wrong he would be disciplined like any son, but the favor withdrawn from Saul would not be withdrawn from him. And then the sentence the prophets spent five centuries chewing on: your house and your kingdom will endure before me forever, your throne will be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16). There is an immediate referent for all this, and honesty requires naming it. The son who built the temple was Solomon, and the discipline clause fits a fallible human king exactly. But the word "forever" outran Solomon almost at once, and the prophets who watched the kingdom split, shrink and finally fall kept reaching back to this promise for a king who had not come yet (Isaiah 9:7; 11:1; Jeremiah 23:5; Ezekiel 34:23-24; Amos 9:11). Later Christian readers call this pattern typology: an earlier person or event that carries a real meaning of its own and also prefigures something larger, the way a rehearsal is a real performance and also not the performance. Solomon was the son of David. He was not the last one.

(●) c. 990 BC: He took another man’s wife, had the man killed, and a prophet told him a story about a lamb. + The chapter opens with a line the narrator clearly means as an indictment: in the spring, when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and stayed home. From the palace roof he saw a woman bathing, asked who she was, was told she was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his own elite soldiers, and sent for her anyway. The Hebrew narrative gives Bathsheba no reported speech until she is pregnant and sends two words. Readers have argued for a long time about how much choice a woman had when a king sent for her, and the argument is a fair one; the text lays the blame on David without qualification and never on her. What he did next is worse than what he did first. He recalled Uriah from the front hoping he would sleep with his wife and provide cover for the pregnancy. Uriah, a foreigner in Israel’s army, refused to go home while the ark and his comrades were in the field, and slept at the palace door. So David sent him back carrying his own death warrant: a letter instructing Joab to put him where the fighting was fiercest and then withdraw from him. Then he married the widow. About a year later Nathan came and told him a story about a rich man with many flocks who took a poor man’s one ewe lamb, the pet that ate from his plate and slept in his arms, and served it to a guest. David lost his temper and pronounced sentence on the man in the story. Nathan said: you are the man (2 Samuel 12:7). The confession that followed is two words in Hebrew, "I have sinned against the LORD," and Psalm 51 is what the tradition has always heard behind it. The forgiveness was immediate and the consequences were not lifted: the child died, and from that point the second half of David’s life is a slow-motion collapse inside his own family, one son raping a half-sister, another son murdering the first, and a father who could not bring himself to act in either case.

(●) c. 979 – 970 BC: His son Absalom drove him out of Jerusalem, and he died with the succession settled and a temple paid for. + Absalom, the handsome son, spent four years standing at the city gate telling everyone with a grievance that if only he were judge they would get justice, and then had himself proclaimed king at Hebron. David left Jerusalem rather than fight for it, walking up the Mount of Olives barefoot with his head covered, weeping, while a man from Saul’s clan walked along the ridge throwing stones and curses at him and David would not let anyone silence him (2 Samuel 15-16). The revolt ended in a forest, where Absalom’s head caught in the branches of an oak and Joab killed him against explicit orders. The victory report reached a father who had asked only that they deal gently with the young man, and what he said is one of the most quoted sentences of grief in any language: he would rather have died himself (2 Samuel 18:33). The years given here are estimated from the order of events, since Samuel itself supplies no dates. The last stretch was a scramble. Another revolt, this one under a man named Sheba, nearly split the kingdom again, and the closing chapters of Samuel also record a famine and further war with the Philistines. Then David ordered a census of his fighting men, which the narrator treats as an act of pride, and it ended in a plague. To stop it he bought a threshing floor, the flat swept rock where a farmer beat the grain loose from the stalks, from a Jebusite named Araunah, and when Araunah offered to hand it over for nothing he refused to offer God something that had cost him nothing (2 Samuel 24:24). That threshing floor is where the temple would stand. He was old and cold and confined to bed when his son Adonijah tried to take the throne, and Nathan and Bathsheba between them moved fast enough to have Solomon anointed first. What David spent his final energy on is telling. He had been forbidden to build the temple, and so he assembled it instead: the site, the plans, the workmen, and enormous stockpiles of gold, silver, bronze, iron and cut stone, handed to Solomon with the charge to build (1 Chronicles 22; 28-29). He died in Jerusalem at about seventy, after forty years as king, and was buried in the city he had taken. The last instructions he gave his son were not all noble.

What He Taught

(T1) God keeps his people the way a shepherd keeps sheep, which is to say personally and at close range. + A shepherd in the Judean hills was not managing a herd of thousands. He had a few dozen animals, he knew them individually, and the work was mostly walking: to grass, to water, and home before dark. Sheep will not drink from fast water, so somebody has to find the still pools or dam a trickle into one. That is the ordinary fact behind the second line of the most famous poem ever written about God, and the man who wrote it had done the job. Two details in the psalm are usually softened in the reading. The rod and the staff are not decorative. The rod is a club for predators, and the staff is the crook for hauling an animal out of a hole it has fallen into; comfort here means somebody is armed and paying attention. And the valley of the shadow of death is a real place before it is a metaphor: the ravines east of Bethlehem run deep and dark between cliffs, and a flock has to go through them to reach pasture. The psalm does not say the sheep avoid the valley. It says they are not alone in it. There is one more thing worth noticing about the image, because David did not invent it. Kings all over the ancient Near East called themselves the shepherds of their people; Hammurabi of Babylon uses the title of himself in the prologue to his laws. David was a king with every right to it, and he handed it to God and put himself in the flock. Centuries later Jesus took up the same image, added something no shepherd would say, and said that the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11).

(Q) "The LORD is my shepherd, I will not be in need. He lets me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness For the sake of His name." + Source: Psalm 23:1-3 (English Standard Version). The Hebrew heading is simply "A Psalm of David." The reason given at the end for the whole business is not the sheep’s merit but God’s own name, which is to say his reputation and his character (T1).

(T2) The sky argues for God without saying a word, and the Scriptures say what the sky cannot. + Get far enough from a town on a clear night and the reaction is involuntary. Nobody has to be taught to feel small under that, and nobody who feels it has thereby learned anyone’s name. Psalm 19 is built on exactly that gap, and C. S. Lewis judged it the finest poem in the Psalter, which is the old name for the book of Psalms. It falls into two halves that look at first like two different poems. The first half is the sky: the heavens telling, the expanse declaring, day pouring speech into day and night into night, and then the strange line that there is no speech and there are no words and their voice is not heard. The testimony is real and it is silent. Theologians have a name for this, general revelation, meaning the knowledge of God available to anyone through creation and conscience without a Bible in the house; Paul appeals to it in Romans 1:19-20 and quotes this very psalm at Romans 10:18. The second half turns to the law of the LORD, which is perfect and restores the soul, and is sweeter than honey. That is special revelation: God saying particular things in particular words. Put the halves together and you have the argument. The sky can tell you that someone enormous is there. It cannot tell you his name, whether he can be approached, or what he wants, and the psalm ends with David asking to be cleared of the faults he cannot even see in himself (Psalm 19:12-14), which is not a request the stars were ever going to answer. The order matters too. The man who wrote this had the sky first and the words second, and he did not treat the second as a demotion.

(Q) "The heavens tell of the glory of God; And their expanse declares the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge." + Source: Psalm 19:1-2 (English Standard Version). The opening of a psalm headed "For the music director. A Psalm of David." Paul quotes the fourth verse of it in Romans 10:18 to argue that the message has gone out to everyone (T2).

(T3) Every sin is first of all against God, and what he wants brought to him is a broken heart. + There is a way of apologizing that is really an accounting exercise. You list the damage, you offer to cover it, and you go home square. Psalm 51 refuses that, and the refusal is the first thing a reader trips over: "Against You, You only, I have sinned." You might well think, hold on, what about Uriah? He is the one who is dead. The complaint is fair and the answer is not a dodge. Hebrew regularly says "not this but that" where we would say "not so much this as that," and the psalm is not denying that Uriah was wronged. It is saying what makes the wrong a wrong. A king in the ancient world could argue that he had broken no law he did not himself make, and in a sense David had not; there was no court in Israel that could summon him. What he could not argue with was that he had done it in God’s sight, against God’s own character, and that is the reckoning that survives when the human one is unavailable. Then comes the part that ought to be astonishing in the mouth of the man who had brought the ark to Jerusalem. He says God does not delight in sacrifice, or he would give it. He had the herds, the altar and the priesthood; the one thing the system could not supply is the thing asked for here, a broken spirit and a contrite heart. Contrite is an old word worth keeping: it means crushed, ground down small, the opposite of self-defense. Israel’s prophets said the same thing to a nation busy with offerings (Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:6-8), and Jesus twice told professional religious men to go and learn what Hosea meant (Matthew 9:13; 12:7).

(Q) "For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You do not take pleasure in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, God, You will not despise." + Source: Psalm 51:16-17 (English Standard Version). The heading of this psalm ties it to a particular week of his life: "A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba" (T3).

(T4) God knows him completely and cannot be escaped, and this is the best news in the psalm rather than the worst. + Being fully known is a mixed experience. Most people have one friend who can tell what is wrong from three words on the phone, and the same quality that makes that friendship worth having is what makes it impossible to hide anything, which is occasionally unbearable. Psalm 139 takes that ordinary double feeling and turns it up as far as it will go. Theologians use two words for what the psalm describes, and both are easier than they look. Omniscience means God knows everything, and the psalm gets there by small domestic examples: he knows when you sit down and when you get up, and the word is known before it is on your tongue. Omnipresence means there is nowhere God is not, and here the poetry gets adventurous. Climb to heaven, he is there; make your bed in Sheol, the Hebrew word for the shadowy place of the dead, and he is there too; take the wings of the dawn, meaning travel as fast as sunrise crosses the sky, and his hand arrives first. Darkness, which is where anyone hiding would naturally head, is simply not dark to him. What David does with all this is the surprising part. A man who had spent years being hunted, and who once had very good reasons to want a private life, does not treat inescapability as surveillance. He treats it as company, and he ends the psalm by inviting the search: look at me and tell me what is wrong with me, because I cannot see it from here. That is a different posture from a man with nothing to hide. It is the posture of a man who has already been found out once and lived.

(Q) "Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there." + Source: Psalm 139:7-8 (English Standard Version). The same psalm closes by asking God to search him and know his heart, and to lead him in the everlasting way (Psalm 139:23-24). It also contains four verses of raw hatred toward the wicked, which the parting-ways row takes up honestly (T4).

(T5) The king wrote of a king greater than himself, and called him "my Lord." + Fathers do not call their sons "sir." That small social fact is the whole hinge of an argument Jesus once ran on a crowd in the temple courts, and Psalm 110 is the text he ran it on. The psalm opens with two different words that English flattens into one. The first is the divine name, God’s own personal name, printed as LORD in small capitals in most English Bibles. The second is adoni, "my lord," the everyday word a subject uses of a superior, the word a servant would have used of the king himself. So the line reports one speaker telling another to sit at his right hand until his enemies are underfoot, and the poet, a king with nobody above him in Israel, is calling that second figure his lord. The psalm goes on to make him a priest as well, "according to the order of Melchizedek." Melchizedek is the mysterious priest-king of Salem who blesses Abraham in Genesis 14 and then vanishes from the story. He matters here because Israel kept priesthood and kingship strictly apart, priests from Levi and kings from Judah, so a priest-king cannot be slotted into the ordinary system at all; the letter to the Hebrews spends three chapters on that point (Hebrews 5-7). Jesus asked the scribes how the Messiah could be David’s son when David calls him Lord (Mark 12:35-37), and nobody had an answer, because within the assumptions of the room there was none. Two things should be said plainly about the argument. It depends on the psalm being David’s, which the Hebrew heading says and many modern scholars doubt, some reading it as a court poem written for a king rather than by one. And it does not by itself prove the Christian conclusion; what it does is open a gap between "son of David" and "David’s Lord" that the Gospels then propose to fill. Psalm 110 is quoted or alluded to more often in the New Testament than any other passage of the Old.

(Q) "The LORD says to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.’" + Source: Psalm 110:1 (English Standard Version). The heading reads "A Psalm of David." Jesus quotes this verse against the scribes in Mark 12:36, Peter quotes it at Pentecost in Acts 2:34-35, and it stands behind every New Testament sentence about Christ seated at God’s right hand (T5).

(Q) "The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me, And His word was on my tongue." + Source: 2 Samuel 23:2 (English Standard Version). From the short oracle the narrator introduces as the last words of David. The claim in it, that he spoke by the Spirit rather than merely about his own affairs, is exactly the claim the New Testament takes up when Peter calls him a prophet (Acts 2:30) and when Jesus says he spoke in the Holy Spirit (Mark 12:36). Whatever else the church did with David, it started here.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The New Testament turned his name into a title and gave it to Jesus. + Matthew’s Gospel begins with a line that is really a claim: the record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Both genealogies in the Gospels run through David, by different routes. Blind Bartimaeus shouts "Son of David" at him on the Jericho road; the crowds shout it on the way into Jerusalem; Paul opens Romans by saying Jesus was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh (Romans 1:3); Revelation closes with Jesus calling himself the root and the descendant of David (Revelation 22:16). No other human ancestor is used this way. The bridge from the promise to the title was built by the prophets, who kept returning to 2 Samuel 7 as the monarchy decayed. Isaiah promised a government with no end on the throne of David (Isaiah 9:7) and a shoot from the stump of Jesse, a striking image once the tree has been cut down (Isaiah 11:1). Jeremiah promised a righteous branch (Jeremiah 23:5), Ezekiel a single shepherd called by David’s name (Ezekiel 34:23-24), Amos a fallen shelter rebuilt (Amos 9:11). By the first century, "son of David" was simply what many Jews called the deliverer they were waiting for. Then the apostles did something more specific with David’s own words. Preaching at Pentecost, the harvest festival that fell seven weeks after the Passover of the crucifixion and filled Jerusalem with pilgrims, Peter quoted Psalm 16, which says God will not abandon his holy one to decay, and made a straightforward historical argument out of it: David died, was buried, and his tomb was a landmark anyone in the audience could walk to, so the sentence cannot have been about him (Acts 2:25-31). Paul made the same move at Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:34-37). Whatever a reader makes of the conclusion, notice the form of the reasoning. It appeals to a fact the hearers could go and check.

(†) The church learned to pray in his words, and has never stopped. + Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth-century bishop who spent his life contesting Arianism, the teaching that the Son of God was the highest of creatures rather than God himself, wrote a letter to a friend named Marcellinus about why the Psalms are different from the rest of Scripture. Most of the Bible speaks to you, he said; the Psalms are spoken by you. Read a prophet and you hear about someone else’s grief. Read a psalm and you find your own words already written down, including the ones you would be ashamed to say out loud. That conviction shaped Christian practice more than any theological treatise did. Benedict’s sixth-century Rule required his monks to pray the entire Psalter every week, which meant a monk knew all hundred and fifty by heart within a few years. Augustine worked through every one of them, preaching some and dictating others, and the collection, the Enarrationes in Psalmos, is the longest work he ever produced. Luther called the Psalter a little Bible, in which everything in the whole Bible is set out in short form. Calvin, in the preface to his commentary, called it an anatomy of all the parts of the soul, because there is no feeling anyone has ever had that is not mirrored somewhere in it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in 1940 with his country at war and his own arrest three years away, published a small book on the Psalms as the prayer book of the Bible. The New Testament writers had already set the pattern. The Psalms are the Old Testament book they quote most, and two of the sentences Jesus is recorded as speaking from the cross come from them: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" from Psalm 22:1, and "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," which takes up Psalm 31:5. A man dying in agony reached for words he had learned as a boy, and they were David’s.

(†) Where Christians have had to part company with him: the curses, the wives, the blood, and the deathbed. + An account that only quotes the shepherd psalm is not telling the truth about the man, and the Bible itself does not do that. There are four places in particular where the church has had to say plainly that David is not the model. - The curses. Some psalms in his name ask God to do appalling things to enemies: Psalm 109 asks that a man’s children be fatherless and his wife a widow, and Psalm 139, a few verses after the loveliest lines in the Psalter, says he hates them with the utmost hatred. Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43-44). Christians have handled the gap in various ways, and the most honest of them keeps two things at once: these are prayers, which means the rage is being handed over to God rather than acted on, and they are still not what a follower of Christ is told to want. The Psalter teaches people to bring God everything they actually feel. It does not certify all of it. - The wives. David accumulated wives and concubines, the secondary wives of lower legal standing that a court was expected to keep, exactly as ancient kings did (2 Samuel 3:2-5; 5:13), and the law he lived under had specifically told Israel’s kings not to (Deuteronomy 17:17). Scripture reports this without approving it, and the wreckage in his household is traceable straight to it. Jesus settled the question by going behind the whole practice to the beginning, to one man and one woman (Matthew 19:4-6, quoting Genesis 2:24). - The blood. The reason God gives for refusing him the temple is not squeamishness on the narrator’s part; it is stated in David’s own mouth: he had shed much blood and waged great wars, and therefore would not build the house (1 Chronicles 22:8). Israel’s greatest warrior king is told that the sanctuary is not his to build. Any Christian use of David to bless a war has to get past that verse first. - The deathbed. His final instructions to Solomon include settling old scores: deal with Joab, and do not let Shimei, whom David had personally sworn not to kill, go down to the grave in peace (1 Kings 2:5-9). It reads exactly like what it is, and the text offers no gloss. Which leaves the phrase everyone knows. Samuel tells Saul that the LORD has sought out for himself a man after his own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), and Paul repeats it (Acts 13:22). It is worth being careful about what that means, because it is not a character reference; it is said about a successor before David has done anything at all, and it sits in a sentence about God’s choosing. What actually separates David from Saul in the narrative is not that he sinned less. It is what he did when he was caught. Saul, confronted, explained. David, confronted, said two words and wrote a psalm.