DIN-102

[Admzad]

Zzzz============DIN-102===================

This is from a very interesting book by Jonathan Kirsch:
king David, real life of the man who ruled Israel.

P2---
The single most surprising fact about David is the rawness with which he is
depicted in the bible. He is shown to be a lier, a trickster, an outlaw &
extortionist, a voyeur, a seducer, & a murderer. He is an exhibitionist, as
when he performs a ritual dance in such spiritual frenzy that his tunic flies
up & reveals his genitalia to the crowd. David, whose very name means “beloved”,
attracts both men & women, inspiring sometimes a pristine love but more often a
frankly carnal one. Some biblical critics insist that David's famous declaration
of love for his friend Jonathan - a love 'passing the love of women' - ought to
be understood as an expression of his bisexuality.

--<
After reading this part, I froze & didn't know what to think!
I mean we are talking about one of the most famous Prophets of all times, even one
of the biggest Messiah/Prophet in the 3 religions (J/Ch/I), was supposed to have
come from his line, yet this holy guy was not only “a lier, a trickster, an outlaw
& extortionist, a voyeur, a seducer, & a murderer”, but he showed his genitalia to
people while dancing?!

Surely there is something wrong here. Either the author(JK) is bullshitting, or this
guy wasn't holy at all & was full of shit, which means the all-knowing & all-powerful
God had nothing to do with this guy.
>--


P9---
“Yahweh is the God who fell in love with David” - Harold Bloom.

Why is God shown to be more enamored of David then Moses or any other towering
figure of the Hebrew bible?

The authorship of the bible remains a Gordian knot. One theory proposes that
the core of the Hebrew bible originated as a formal biography of King David &
the rest of the text came to be attached to his life story in bits & pieces
over the centuries.

David is not mentioned in the bible until the book of Samuel, but we can begin
to hear the strains of the 'undersong' that bible scholar G von Rad detects in
the earliest passages of the Yahwist's primal history. In fact, the first 5
books of Moses are seeded with clues that anticipate the coming of King David
long before we actually encounter him. And these clues suggest that the bible
was first & always intended by its original authors to be a celebration of
king David & the line of Davidic kings who sat on the throne of Israel & Judah
for some 500 years ...

the bible opens with a famous scene of seduction, Adam lured by Eve ... Was
the tale Adam & Eve, as some scholars propose, meant by the biblical author
to prepare us for the fateful sexual encounter between David & Bathsheba?

The rape of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, by prince Shechem anticipates the rape
of Tamar, daughter of king David, by her half brother, prince Amnon.

When bible depicts the matriarch Rebekah conspiring with her son Jacob to
steal the birthright of her firstborn son, Esau, by persuading the patriarch
Isaac to give the blessing of the firstborn to the younger son, perhaps we
are intended to see Bathsheba in conspiring with Solomon to persuade the aging
David to designate his younger son as king of Israel in place of Solomon's
older brother.

P19---

Bible, according to the consensus of modern scholarship, is a patchwork of
ancient texts that were composed & compiled by countless authors & editors,
men & women alike, over a period of a 1000 years or so.

Samuel was born in the land of Canaan a couple of hundred years after the
conquest by the coalition of 12 tribes known as b'nai Yisrael, the children
of Israel, at a time when things had gone terribly wrong for the Chosen People.
The bible characterizes Canaan as the Promised Land, 'a land flowing with milk
& honey'. But as it turned out, Canaan was not a virgin paradise. Rather, the
land promised to the Israelites teemed with tribes & people - '7 nations greater
& mightier than thou', as God had warned the Israelites - who regarded Canaan
as their homeland. Here begins the first & longest-lasting of the problems
created by the disparity between what God promises & what God does in the
Hebrew bible.

At first God had vowed to cleanse the Promised Land of its native dwellers.
“I will send my terror before thee”, God promised Moses. “I will deliver the
inhabitants of the land into your hand; & thou shalt drive them out before”.
But he was so angry & disappointed with the 'stiff-necked' Israelites, who
were always so faithless & so defiant, that he changed his mind. “I will not
drive them out from before you”, God later told Joshua, successor of Moses &
conqueror of Canaan, “but they shall be unto you as snares, & their gods shall
be a trap unto you”.

--<
God is not an old angry forgetful lunatic man.

God would not 'choose' one old man & tell him to move into another land, which
I'll give to you & your kids, then have all the innocent inhabitant of that land,
His own 'creation', killed & destroyed, so that He would give the land to another group.
But even fail in this, so end up telling the new group to fight & kill the other
inhabitants for thousands of years. Then His chosen-group being forced to live in
exile for centuries, without a true homeland or any from of promised-land.

God obviously didn't favor the people in old man's (Abraham) tribe, or in the
neighboring tribes. So why not get rid of them & give the land to the new group,
rather than send the old man to a far away land, & still fail to give him his
promised-land?!
>--

Yahweh was a bachelor father, a loner who disdained a female consort, but the
Canaanite pantheon included an array of she-deities who were both erotic &
maternal, thus answering the human need for a feminine object of worship. Once
in Canaan, the Israelites turned to idolatry, sacred harlotry, & other ritual
practices that the pious biblical source regard as too vile to describe. ...
Even David kept a collection of idols in his own home.

Although all 12 tribes claimed descent from the patriarch Jacob, a man also
known as Israel, they bickered & battled with one another in as series of
ruinous blood feud that turned the Promised Land into a wasteland.

A man from the tribe of Levi & his concubine go on a journey & are forced
to spend the night in a town that belongs to the tribe of Benjamin. A crowd
gather around the house & demand that the guests be surrendered to them for
their sexual pleasure. To spare himself, the Levite pushes his concubine out
of the door & offers her to the mob in his place. All night long, the woman
is raped to death. Her body is left at the threshold.

--<
Wow, they even wanted to rape the man!
>--

Demanding retribution, the outraged Levite hacks the woman's battered body
into 12 pieces & sends the bloody chunks to the other tribes of Israel as a
call to arms against the Benjaminites. All of Israel unites in war against
the Benjaminites & the tribe is nearly exterminated. At the last moment,
they decide to spare the 600 Benjaminite men remaining. Since all the women
& children were slaughtered, the men are sent to Shiloh with instructions to
seize the young virgins of the town & use them to reproduce the tribe of Benjamin.
Thus the rape & murder of 1 woman prompt the rape & abduction of 600 more women.


At this point the author blames all the failings of the Chosen People on the
simple fact that they were not yet ruled by a king. Indeed, the book of Judges
can be regarded as a parade of horribles intended to persuade the original
readers of the bible that only a king would be capable of putting an end to
the chaos & imposing moral law & order on the unruly Israelites. “In those
days there was no king in Israel & every man did that which was right in his
own eyes”.

One faction preferred an old-fashioned theocracy - leadership of devout men
men & women who felt called upon by God to 'judge' the people. The other faction
favored the newfangled institution of monarchy, & its members agitated for a
king like the ones who reigned in the superpowers of the ancient world, Egypt
& Mesopotamia. ... Indeed, the rivalry between theocracy & monarchy in ancient
Israel was bitter enough to break God's heart.

--<
what bullshit!
Since when the 'chosen' people of God 'decide' what system they should have?!
All this while they claim God is all-knowing & all-powerful, while having
living prophets among them?!
>--

p26---

Theocracy prevailed among the Israelites in the early periods of the conquest.
Deborah, the fiery prophetess who led the armies of Israel into battle against
the Canaanites, was one of the first judges, & Samson, who was famously seduced
by a Philistine woman named Delilah & who then martyred himself by bringing
down the walls of a pagan temple, was among the last. Again & again, the
Israelites “hearkened not unto their judges, for they went astray after other
gods, & worshiped them”.

--<
Wow, female prophet!
>--

Even the Samuel, the very last of the judges, failed in his efforts to save
the Israelites from their own excesses. Under Samuel's leadership, the dreaded
Philistines were defeated on the field of battle & the corrupt priesthood of
Israel was brought down. But Samuel was an ineffective father whose sons
rejected his pious ways, “turned aside after lucre, & took bribes, & perverted
justice”. The elders of Israel fretted over what would happen when Samuel was
gone & only his corrupt sons remained, so they confronted Samuel & made a bold
demand. Behold, thou art old, & thy sons walk not in thy ways. Now make us a
king to judge us like all the nations”.

When they were still a mob of runaway slaves in the wilderness, Moses had
revealed to the Israelites that they had been chosen to be a “kingdom of
priests, & a holy nation”, & their one & only sovereign was to be the invisible
deity called Yahweh. ... The rule of kings, according to the fundamental
theology of the 5 books of Moses, was strictly for the goyim.

Samuel found this demand heartbreaking because it was so ordinary & thus so
unworthy of the Chosen People. He sought guidance in prayer & God spoke to him
in a very childlike manner. “Hearken unto the voice of the people, for they
have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king
over them”. God, like the frustrated father of a stubborn & greedy child was
always ready to punish the Chosen People by the simple expedient of giving
them exactly what they thought they wanted. ... God would give them one - but
they would live to regret it.

At God's direction, Samuel delivered an oration to the people of Israel that
fairly sizzled with contempt for the idea of monarchy. “He will take your sons
to be his horsemen & to plow his ground to reap his harvest, & to make his
instruments of war ... He will take a tenth of your flocks, & ye shall be
his servants.”

--<
pure bullshit!
What kind of prophet couldn't control his own sons?
Since when people demand from prophet to change “God's system” & God disagrees
but decides to do it anyway just to teach them a lesson.
But He does it with all sorts of warning why this is a bad idea!
This was all written to promote & justify David's monarchy.
>--

But bible also preserves the fingerprints of authors who disdained the rule of
kings. Most of the kings who came after David were regarded with even greater
horror in the prophetic circles & ancient Israel. Monarchy only led to a
succession of catastrophes that ended only with the destruction of Jerusalem
& exile to Babylon in 586 BCE. ... Long after David was dead & gone, a writer
took the liberty of slipping a manifesto against monarchy into the same pages
of the bible where David, the greatest king of all, is celebrated with such ardor.

God gave the people the king they demanded - but his name was not David. God
told Samuel, “I will send you a man out of the land of Benjamin & you will
anoint him to be prince over my people Israel, & he shall save my people from
out of the hand of the Philistines”. So Yahweh chose a handsome but hapless
fellow named Saul to be the first king. He was from the tribe of Benjamin,
the tribe that was punished for the rape & lost all their women, so 600
remaining men had to steal virgin girls to breed from.

Saul was sent by his father to find some stray asses from the family herd. He
wandered aimlessly in the countryside till he ran out of food. He then sought
out a local seer hoping the seer may know where to find the asses. The seer
was Samuel. God whispered to Samuel, “here is the man of whom I spoke to you.
This man shall rule my people”.

P30---

At dawn the next day, Samuel roused Saul from sleep & anointed the young
man who had come in search of his lost asses. From a small flask, Samuel
poured oil upon Saul's head - olive oil spiced with myrrh, cinnamon, cassia,
& aromatic cane, according to a recipe in the book of Exodus.

Messiah is the English rendering of mashiach, Hebrew word for 'the anointed one”.

Israelites found a great many reasons & opportunities to anoint people &
things. The altar of sacrifice was smeared with consecrated oil, & so were
the tabernacle & the sacred paraphernalia used in ceremonies of worship.
Aaron, the brother of Moses, was anointed as the first high priest of Israel,
& anointment was the rite of initiation for the generations of high priests
who came after him. Even lepers were anointed with a 'sevenfold' sprinkling
of oil in a ritual of purification. Starting with Saul, however, anointment
became the essential & enduring symbol of kingship, a faintly magical rite
in which the strength, wisdom, & power of Yahweh were symbolically conveyed
to the mortal monarch.

--<
How could a king be anointed, but not a prophet?!
>--

God's choice of Saul remained a secret until Samuel staged a convocation
with the apparent purpose for drumming up public enthusiasm for the man
whom he had privately anointed as king. ... the old man opened the proceedings
by reminding the crowd of their clamor for a king & pointing out rather
irritably why he still thought it was a terrible idea. “thus saith the Lord,
the God of Israel: “I brought up Israel out of Egypt, & I delivered you out
of the hands of all the kingdoms that oppressed you”. But you have this day
rejected your God, who himself saves you out of all your calamities & your
distresses, & you have said unto him:”Nay, but set a king over us!”

Then, curiously, Samuel conducted a drawing of lots among the 12 tribes of
Israel with apparent purpose of selecting the man who would be king. Since
God had already directed Samuel to anoint Saul as king, the lottery was
something of a sham. Still, the people watched as the first lot fell to the
tribe of Benjamin, ..., until the young man named Saul was finally selected.
But Saul was nowhere to be seen. Saul asked God if the man be coming back &
God replied “there he is, hiding among the baggage”.

--<
Sham election existed even in those days & was OK by God!

How strange that millions of people over the centuries have believed in this rubbish!

One should not accept all this as facts.
One should start from above, the all-knowing & all-powerful God, & use logic to
work his way down to details, always asking “would God do such a stupid thing?”.

Is it possible for God to choose a Prophet, then choose his cousin to succeed him,
make the cousin more holy than the Prophet, but not tell His Prophet, not mention a
word about it in His holy book, not let all His followers know, & cause civil war
after the sudden death of the Prophet over who should succeed the Prophet?!
>--

some ancient rabbis regarded Saul as a model of humility because he hid from
his own coronation, but some of the Israelites would've seen it as a sign of
timidity or perhaps even cowardice.

P35---

God is supposed to be all-powerful, but it turned out that his designation
of Saul to be king of Israel was not enough to make it so - Saul was obliged
to engage in politicking & public relations in order to put Saul on the throne
& keep him there. God is supposed to be all-knowing, but the Almighty
apparently didn't foresee that Saul would bungle the kingship that Samuel
procured him.

The kingdom of Saul was occupied territory. Even Gibeah, the town where Saul
lived & reigned, remained under the authority of a governor appointed by the
Philistines. And Saul was unable or unwilling to engage in a war of liberation
against the Philistines. Israelites were forbidden to have metal-smithing lest
they made swords & spears for themselves.

Now, Jonathan, Saul's son takes matters into his hands & assassinates the
governor. Saul is forced to fight but the Philistine army is much bigger so
Saul's army begin to slip away. Saul is left with 600 men, against 3000
charioteers & 6000 cavalry. Saul decides to make a blood offering to Yahweh.
Samuel instructs Saul to wait, but after 7 days of waiting, Saul ordered,
“bring the holocaust & the communion offering to me!” Just as the sacrifice
was going up in smoke on the altar of Yahweh, Samuel shows up most upset saying:
“what have you done? Though has done foolishly. Now your kingdom shall not
continue. The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, & the Lord hath
appointed him to be prince over his people.” This new kid “after God's own heart”
is to be David.

But, in spite of all this, not only Saul wins the battle, he even fought
successfully against the armies of Moab, Edom, & Ammon.


The Hebrew word translated in the bible as 'holocaust' (olah) is usually
rendered in English bibles as 'burnt-offering' or 'whole-offering' & identifies
an offering that is burnt whole on the altar. Precisely because the word
'holocaust' refers to to a sacrificial offering to the God of Israel, some
historians & critics prefer the Hebrew word 'shoah' ('catastrophe') over
'holocaust' to describe the mass murder of Jews by Nazis.


God now instructs Samuel to tell Saul to go & destroy Amalekites & put their
property under ban. The 'ban' here is the Hebrew 'herem', which is the grimmest
of the rules of Israelite holy war, which today would be genocide. God says
“spare no one, put them all to death, men & women, children & babes in arms,
herds & flocks, camel & asses”.

--<
what kind of sick god would say such a thing?!
What kind of god would tell one group of humans to be kind & compassionate
one day, but tell them to kill women & children the next?
Why couldn't god do his own killings by plagues/storms/etc?

How come God would ask His people for burnt-offering (kabaab sukhteh) for centuries,
& then, all of a sudden, stop asking for it? Not only Christians & Muslims don't do
it, Jews haven't done it in their Temple for a long time.
>--


Saul raised a new army, so he goes from 600 men to 200K men! He first allowed
the Kenites, a tribe of nomadic coppersmith to flee, because Moses had married
a Kenite woman. He then killed all the Amalekites, except for one, their king.
Then he set aside he best of the flock & the herd & every good thing as a prize
of war fro himself & his army.

But God is enraged that Saul spared one man & told Saul, “I repent of having
made Saul king because he has turned his back on me & has not obeyed my commands”.
Samuel goes & tells Saul off for not having killed everyone & all the cattle,
some of which were being sacrificed & some were still kept in the pens.

The text is confusing so we can't tell how long Saul was the king. Some say
'Saul was a year old when he began to reign, & he reigned for 2 years over
Israel'; some say he was 30 when he was crowned & reigned for 22 years; others
say 'Saul was ... years old” taking the number out.

P40---

Long after god admitted his mistake in anointing Saul & vowed to remove him
from the throne, Saul continued to reign as king of Israel, wage war against
the Philistines, & keep his rivals for kingship, real or imagined, at bay.
Some scholars read the biblical text to suggest that Saul, who is depicted
by the royal chroniclers of the Davidic kings as a bungler & a madman, may
actually have been far more beloved by the people of Israel than his successor.

The open-eyed bible reader may wonder out loud why god waited so long to execute
his harsh judgment on Saul, & why he allowed the hated Philistines to do his
work for him.

The bible honors the Persian emperor Cyrus II, who conquered Babylon & thus
put an end to the exile of the Jewish people, with the exalted title of messiah:
if it took a pagan monarch from far-off Persia to restore the Jews to their
homeland, the prophet Isiah concluded, he must've acted with the blessing of the
God of Israel.

P43---

Saul was old & ready to die, but was called by God, “how long will you mourn
for Saul, seeing I've rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your
horn with oil, & go! I'm sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem, for I've chosen
myself a king among his sons”. Saul protests, “how can I go? If Saul hears it,
he'll kill me!”

--<
This is not a conversation a prophet would have with the all-powerful God!
This kind of talk happens between 2 old grumpy men.
>--

God cooks up a cover story, “take a heifer with you & say, 'I have come to
sacrifice to the Lord', then I'll tell you what you shall do. You'll anoint
the one I point out to you”.

Samuel goes & sends a message to Jesse to bring his sons along. Jesse shows
up wt his 7 sons. His eldest son is so tall & handsome that Samuel thinks he
must be the one, but God tells him that He has rejected the eldest son. Then
Jesse paraded the rest of his sons in front of the old prophet, but God rejected
each one.

--<
didn't the all-knowing God know His chosen one wasn't there to begin with?!
>--

Samuel tells Jesse that God hasn't chosen any of them & were these all his
sons. Jesse says his youngest son is tending the flock, so Samuel tells him
to fetch him. When the youngest son arrives, God says to Samuel, “Arise! Anoint
him, for he is the one!”. Then David was anointed, while his father & brothers
watched in amazement. One of authors of bible says, “the spirit of Yahweh
came mightily upon David from that day forward” & at the same time it departed
from Saul.

Bible is candid about physical flaws of even most exalted figures - matriarch
Leah had poor eyesight, Moses was a stutterer - but now & then a biblical
figure suddenly looms larger than life. David is such a figure, whose life
seems to be more like a folklore & fairy tale than history or theology.

The sense that we are being told a tall tale is heightened by the contradictions
in the text; according to book of Samuel David is the youngest of 8 sons of
Jesse, but Chronicles refers to him as a the 7th son. Also, bible formally
embraces the superior rights of the eldest son, but David was the youngest &
the worthiest son. Yet the bible can be understood as a saga about the surprising
success of youngest sons: Isaac prevails over his older half brother, Ishmael;
Jacob over his earlier-born twin, Esau; Joseph over all of his older brothers.
Each of these stories may have been intended to prepare the reader for the
success of David.

Not only Saul had been abandoned by the spirit of Yahweh, but “an evil spirit
from Yahweh” was sent to haunt & terrorize the doomed king.

--<
so it seems that Devil is not the only source of evil in the world!
Yet, in spite of of all this, Saul remains a king for many many years?!

This is not the story of the all-powerful God, it's a man-made fiction about a
useless angry old man, Yahweh.
>--

Josephus says that Saul was beset by strange disorders & evil spirits which
caused him suffocation & strangling. More recent critics understand Saul's
affliction as fits of melancholia & madness that we'd describe today as mental
illness.

The cure was the sound of music, & the courtiers urged that Saul submit to
the Bible-era equivalent of music therapy. They search for a harp player &
they bring David to play harp for Saul. The courtier introduces him as “a mighty
man of valor, a man of war, skilled in speech, & handsome - the Lord is with him”.

--<
David was a young kid, a Shepherd boy, so all this text was written afterwards
to raise his profile.
>--

Saul, like so many other men & women to follow, is suddenly & powerfully smitten
with love for David at the moment he lays upon him & decides to name young David
as his weapon bearer, a position of unique intimacy & importance in the royal
household. David alone was capable of easing the madness that came upon the king,
& soon the evil spirit departed from Saul.

Philistines gather their army & come to fight & send their champion Goliath to
fight someone from the Israelites, but nobody wants to fight this giant. Goliath
was nearly 10 feet tall, was in full bronze armor, the wooden shaft of his weapon
was as thick as a weaver's beam, & his spearhead alone weighed 7 kg. For 40 days,
morning & night, Goliath issued the same challenge, asking for a man to fight with,
but nobody volunteered. David was too young to be in the army, but Jesse sent him
to the front to take food for his brothers. David's brother says, “what are you
doing here? Who have you left to look after the sheep? You've only come to see
the fighting.”

David boldly approaches king Saul & offers to fight the giant, “let no man's heart
fail within him, your servant will go & fight with the Philistine”. King Saul,
giving no sign that he had ever seen David before, scoffed at the idea of a
shepherd boy in single combat with the mightiest warrior in the Philistine army,
“you are only a lad, & he has been a man of war from his youth”. David tells the
king that “your servant smote both the lion & the bear ... Yahweh, who delivered
me out of the paw of the lion will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine”.
Saul give David his armor, but it is too heavy & he staggers under the weight.
David slips off the armor, lays down the heavy sword, chooses a wooden staff
of a shepherd & the slingshot. The sight of David, ”this handsome lad .. with
ruddy cheeks & bright eyes” moved Goliath to scornful laughter. Goliath says,
“Am I a dog, that you've come to me with a stick? Come on, &'ll give your flesh
to the birds & the beasts”. David gives him a sermon about how he's come in the
name of Yahweh ... Goliath gets angry & lurched forward with an upraised spear.
David ran forward & took a stone from his bag & slung it, & smote Goliath in his
forehead. Goliath fell on his face, David ran to him, seized his sword & neatly
separated Goliath from his head.

--<
Saul's sword was too heavy, but he had no trouble to take Goliath's sword & cut
his head off 'neatly'?!
Pure nonsense.
He played harp for Saul & was his weapon-bearer, but now Saul doesn't even know him?!
>--


so the image of the shepherd takes on exalted meaning throughout the bible: the
good shepherd becomes a metaphor for a king & a redeemer. Indeed, the notion
of a god or a king as a shepherd & the people as his flock can be found not
only in the towering figures of Judeo-Christian tradition - Abraham, Moses,
David, & Jesus - but throughout the pagan faiths of the ancient Near East.

Philo, a Jewish chronicler wrote, “that man alone can be a perfect king who
is well skilled in the art of the shepherd, for the business of a shepherd is
a preparation for the office of a king to any one who is destined to preside
over that most manageable of all flocks, mankind”.

P56---

Although the Book of Samuel first introduces David as “a mighty man of valor,
a man of war” who has been summoned by Saul from the household of Jesse &
recruited for a lifetime of royal service as a weapon bearer & court musician,
David makes his second appearance as a country bumpkin & a total stranger to
king Saul. King Saul asks “who is this lad?” when he sees David on the battlefield
& his general says, “O king, I cannot tell”, so Saul recruits David a second
time for royal service!

Another example of confusion in the bible text involves what happens to the
severed head of Goliath. David is said to take the head to Jerusalem, but
Jerusalem at this point belongs to native-dwelling tribe of Jebusites, & David
conquers Jerusalem many years later. By then, the head seems to have disappeared;
only his sword is preserved in a shrine of Yahweh as a war trophy. But then, in
the second book of Samuel, a man called Elhanan is credited with the slaying
of Goliath in a campaign against the Philistines that took place when Saul was
long dead & David was king of Israel. The author assures us that he is in fact
referring to Goliath, “the staff of whose spear was like weaver's beam”.

Many have tried to solve this mystery; some say that Elhanan killed the brother
of the famous Goliath; some say David & Elhanan were one & the same man (David
was called Elhanan); some say that Elhanan did kill Goliath & the authors of
bible credited the deed to David; others say the author of bible have decorated
the life of David with fairy tales & folktales to fill in the blanks.

Moses's miraculous survival in a little boat of reed may have been borrowed
intact from a more ancient tale of an Akkadian king of 3000 BCE. So all these
old tales were preserved & embellished by the authors & editors who compiled the
law, legend, & lore of ancient Israel into the patchwork that we've learned to
call the Bible.

So, One of the traditional tales of ancient Israel suggests that Saul first
saw David in his court as a musician; but another one says that Saul first
saw David on the battlefield. And the authors chose to include both versions
in the sacred history.

Bible describes a series of passionate encounters between David & 2 of the
adult children of Saul - first Jonathan, the king's eldest son, & later Michal,
the king's daughter. Each one, like Saul himself, falls suddenly & deeply in
love with David. Indeed, the love of Michal for David is the only instance in
all bible in which we are explicitly told that a woman loves a man.

The name David has been interpreted by some scholars to mean “darling” or
“beloved” in biblical Hebrew, & love at first sight is exactly what David seems
to inspire in everyone who encounters him.

Something more heartfelt & more carnal may have characterized the love of David
& Jonathan, even if the bible dares not speak its name. Tom Horner, bible scholar
argues, “we have every reason to believe that a homosexual relationship existed”.
David sings of Jonathan from the pages of bible, “wonderful was thy love to me,
passing the love of women”. Some imaginative readers of the bible wonder whether
David captured the heart of Saul, too, & maybe even Goliath!

Now Saul's “love” for David suddenly turns into fear & loathing.

Women of Israel sang & praised young David above the king himself, & they credited
him with martial prowess that exceeded Saul's own by tenfold. So it was that
king Saul marked the handsome young war hero as a man to bury rather than to praise.

On the very day after Saul first heard the women of Israel sing David's praise,
David goes to court to play the lyre for Saul, but suddenly, Saul rose to his
feet, seized a spear & hurled it at David's head with one mighty thrust. David
sidesteps the spear & flees from the palace. Author of bible says, “an evil
spirit from God came mightily upon Saul, & he raved in midst of the house. Saul
was afraid of David, because the Lord was with him, & was departed from Saul”.

Saul first tried to remove David from the royal household by promoting him into
a high ranking captain & sending him to war so he'd be killed. But David won
the battle again & became a hero again. Then Saul promised his elder daughter
to David if he fought more wars, thinking David would fight harder & get himself
killed. But David rejected the offer saying 'who am I to be king's son-in-law'.
Then Saul found out that his youngest daughter, Michal, had fallen in love with
David. Saul told one his courtiers to tell David how king loves him & that he
should become king's son-in-law. But David refused saying he was too poor. Saul
sends message to David that pride-price would be a 100 foreskins of the Philistines,
calculating that this should get David killed. David did his killings & returned
with 200 foreskins, but bible doesn't explain why he changed his mind. Saul gave
David his daughter. But he didn't change his mind about killing David, if the
Philistines didn't do the job for him, he'd find a way to do it himself, even
if it meant defying the will of God.

Saul confided in Jonathan that he intended to kill David, he even told the
royal household about it. Jonathan who “delighted much in David” sought David
out & warned him that his father was going to kill him. David stayed away from
the court for a while. Jonathan tried to change his father's mind. Saul vowed,
“as the Lord lives, he shall not be put to death”. David went back to his wife
& fought in more wars.

Again, “an evil spirit from the lord” came upon Saul & king tried to kill David
with spear. David fled to his house & locked himself in with Michal. Saul sent
a few soldiers to David's house to kill him in the morning. Michal saw the royal
hit men & alerted David. She helped David to escape through the window, then
took one of household gods, teraphim, & placed it in David's bed, using goat
hair for his hair, then covered it with blanket. She sent message to the guards
that David was sick & in bed. The guards reported this to king, & Saul told them
to bring David to him, bed & all, so he could kill him. Guards returned to
David's house but it was too late, David had escaped. Saul asked Michal why
she had played a trick on him, she told him that David had told her, “help me
to escape, or I will kill you”.

P70---

The patriarch Jacob fled from his father-in-law, Laban, with 2 daughters whom
he had taken as his wives, Leah & Rachel. Laban's daughters carried off their
father's traphim, & Rachel contrived to hide the stolen idols from her pursuing
father by hiding them in the cushions & sitting on them, then telling her father
she couldn't rise because she was menstruating.

So even as late as 1000 BCE, at David's time, Israelites were still keeping
& using idols despite the loathing of Yahweh for idols. “Thou shalt not have
no other gods before me” is the first of the 10 commandments, & the second
one is “thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of
likeness, ...., for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God”.

Some of the priests & scribes who were the custodians of the Holy Writ in
ancient Israel were scandalized by such details (about using idols), & they
censored the older text - book of Chronicles has been cleaned up of such stories.

David flees & went to Samuel & told him how Saul has tried to kill him. They
both flee & go into hiding, but somebody betrayed them & informed the king.
Saul sent his soldiers to arrest David, but they all turned into whirling
dervishes when they got the David's hiding place. Then Saul himself goes to
he hiding place, but he too fell under the same spell, & he stripped off his
cloths & prophesied before Samuel, & lay down naked all that day & night”.

--<
This is very interesting: if God can do such things, then why not do it all
the times, to all the enemies of 'his prophets' & the enemies of 'His people',
for as long as it takes?!
Why ask this/that guy to 'kill them all', when he can easily do it himself?
>

p81---

according to bible, “the sons of God” - or more likely, “the sons of the gods”
(b'nai Elohim) - descended from heaven soon after the creation of the world
& bedded the women who struck their fancy, thus siring a race of giants known
as the Nephilim. Their descendants still lived in the land of Canaan when,
centuries later, Moses sent spies ahead of the army of Israel. They reported
that “we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, & so we were in their sight”.
All the giants were exterminated, but a few who remained in Gaza & Gath.

Bible says that Goliath was the distant offspring of the sexual union between
gods & mortals.

Now David presents himself to the Philistine overlord who ruled Gath, a king
named Achish, & pleads for refuge against Saul. But David discovers that even
among the philistines he is regarded as a dangerous young man. Achish counselors
warn him, saying “isn't his David the king of the land?” & that didn't the
Israelites sing how he killed more than Saul?” David now feigns lunacy to save
his life, he scrabbled on the doors of the gate & let his spittle fall down upon
his beard. Achish complained, “the man is mad! Am I short of madmen that you
bring this one to plague me?” David then seeks refuge in a cave, more like a
runaway slave than a man who would be king.

--<
But David 'was' the king, he was 'anointed'!
How could the all-powerful God elect him, but fail to put him on the throne?!
So it all must've been nonsense!

What kind of God can't make his chosen one the king?

All he had to do was to turn Saul into a whirling dervish, which he had done before.
>--

The word of David's hiding place reached Judah & his brothers & the rest of
his family & hundreds of men went to David. Soon, every one who was in distress,
or in debt, or discontent, gathered themselves unto David, & David became the
captain of 400 men.

So David became like a “bandit chief of ruffians & desperadoes”!

p84---

About the best case that can be made for David during his fugitive years is
that he was a soldier of fortune who relied on guerrilla tactics to survive
& prevail against the reigning king of Israel.

David's little army of outcasts & malcontents increased. They raided farms
& towns & carried off food & wine & livestock, extorted protection money from
the wealthier landowners, & now & then earned a few shekels as mercenaries for
the Philistines. David was skilled in the brutal craft of banditry.

Men & women throughout the land of Israel - & even his fellow tribesmen in the
land of Judah - regarded David with suspicion & sometimes even hatred.

Bible says that “David abode in the wilderness ... & Saul sought him every day,
but God delivered him not into Saul's hand”.

--<
God supposedly makes Saul a king, then he makes David a king, which means Saul
is no longer a king, but Saul remains a king for many years trying to kill
God's chosen king, while God chosen king lives in the wild as a killer thief,
because God 'didn't deliver him into Saul's hand”?!

The story must've been written for kids or retarded people, who couldn't use any
form of 'logic'.
>--

David goes to the estate of a rich Calebite named Nabal. He instructs his men
to ask Nabal to show gratitude for what David did not do to his sheep & shepherds.
But Nabal rejects their demand, saying “who is David?” David now orders his
men to strap on their swords & go for the kill. Bible tries to show that David
is a righteous man who tries to be good, & that he is forced to do steal &
kill because God had anointed him to be king but had done nothing to put a
crown on his head. David is depicted as a sympathetic figure who didn't ask
to be anointed, but now he's been left to his own devices. Still, the
bloodcurdling threat that fell from David's lips seems more appropriate to a
bandit or terrorist than a man on a mission from God. David vows as his army
approach the estate of Nabal, :God do the same thing to me & more, if I leave
until morning a single one who pisses against the wall!”

--<
wow! Such holy language?!
This is supposed to be the king chosen by the all-compassionate God?!
>--

but now Nabal's wife, Abigail, a woman “of good understanding, & of a beautiful
form”, without telling her husband, orders a gift-offering to be prepared for
the raiders: 200 loaves, 2 skins of wine, 5 sheep slaughtered & dressed, 100
clusters of raisins, 200 cakes of figs.

Bible even has one of Nabal's shepherds saying how David & his men were good
to them & the real evildoer was Nabal who “flew upon” David's men when they
tried to “salute our master” & solicit some humble gifts in return for their
protection; & that Nabal is such a good-for-nothing that there is no point
even talking to him.

At first sight of David, Abigail hastens towards him, alights from her ass,
& bows her forehead to the ground in greeting. “Let thine handmaid, I pray
thee, speak in thine ears”, pleads Abigail in phrases that are both formal &
yet flirtatious, “& hear thou the words of thy handmaid”. She then blames her
husband & offers the gift to David & his men. She then delivers a sermon that
must've surely been scripted & inserted into the text to prefigure David's
rise to kingship & to soften some of his rough edges, saying how David should
refrain from slaughter & instead use his sword for “the battle of the Lord”,
so he would be rewarded with a “sure house” & raised to be “prince over Israel”.

David says, “blessed be Yahweh, God of Israel, who sent you to meet me this
day. If you had not come so quickly to meet me, not a single one of Nabal's
household who pisses against a wall would've been left alive by morning”.
David accepts the gift & return to his camp to feast.

Nabal, not knowing what happened, gets drunk that night to celebrate. Abigail
waits till morning, then tells Nabal the story. Nabal's heart “died within him
& he became as a stone”, & 10 days later he is dead. Was it a heartbreak over
his wife's infatuation with a bandit-chieftain? Bible reports that “the Lord
smote Nabal”. David thanks God for his good fortune, & then sends a hasty
but confident proposal of marriage to Abigail, & she accept. She mounts her
ass & rides away from her dead husband's estate with 5 maidservants. Promptly
on arrival at David's camp, the widow Abigail & the handsome outlaw who had
come so close to killing her first husband are wed. David was still married to
Michal, whom he had left behind.

--<
It is very clear that the author is trying to make David look good.
God can't get rid of the old king who is trying to kill His new king, yet he
“smote” Nabal so David can have sex with his wife?!

Husband dies & the wife immediately marries (has sex with) the guy who was going
to kill her husband?!

All this when David is supposed to be the God's Chosen-One?!
>--

now David & his band & their camp followers sought refuge in Ziph in the land
Judah. But the locals were no more enamored of David than Nabal had been, &
they sent a delegation to petition the king to rid of them of him. They informed
Saul exactly where David was hiding out & begged the king to march against him.

--<
yet this was supposed to be David's own tribe!
>--

Later, Saul goes to search for David & kill him in En-gedi. The king, during
the search-&-destroy mission, sought out a cave among the rocks in order to
defecate. By chance, David & his men were hiding in the deeper reaches of the
same cave, & they watched in amazement as the king of Israel squatted on the
cave floor & relieved himself in supposed privacy. How easy it would be for
David to slip up behind the king at this vulnerable moment & strike him down
once & for all! “The day has come!” whispered David's henchmen in excitement.
“Yahweh has put your enemy into your hands, as he promised he would, & you may
do what you please with him!” But David, in a sudden display of piety & integrity,
declared himself to be shocked - shocked! - at the suggestion. “God forbid that
I should harm my master,” he scolded. “He is the Lord's anointed!” David sneaks
behind Saul, while he was defecating, & sliced off the hem of Saul's robe with
his dagger.

Moments later, Saul rearranges his garments & leaves the cave, but David follows
him & calls out to him, saying “My lord the king! Why do you harken to the ones
who say: 'David seeks out to hurt you'?” David then tells Saul how “Yahweh
delivered you into my hand in the cave” & some told him to kill Saul, but he
had refused. He then shows Saul the strip of his cloth as proof, saying “my
father, see the skirt of thy robe in my hand!” Then Saul weeps & says “Is this
thy voice, my son David! Thou art more righteous than I; for thou hast rendered
unto me good, whereas I have rendered unto thee evil”.

This interlude, which reads like a fairy tale from first to last, ends abruptly
& implausibly as Saul concedes his crown to David: “& now, behold, I know that
you will surely be king, & that the kingdom of Israel will be established in
your hand”. Then the reigning king is reduced to begging the future king for
mercy: “swear now to me by the Lord that you will not cut off my seed after
me”. So the 2 bitter enemies part as friends. But the narrative resumes a
moment later: David is again on the run with Saul in pursuit, as if what just
happened never did happen at all.

--<
what rubbish!

The guy is a killer, yet he doesn't kill his enemy who wants to kill him?!
David is supposed to be the real one “anointed”, yet he calls the previous
king “anointed”?

David even tells Saul that “Yahweh delivered you into my hand”, but decides to
go against God's wish, because he's such a nice guy?!

This is all written in exaggeration, to make David look good & Saul look bad.
>--

Now David is tired of running & decides that “one of these days I shall be
killed by Saul ... the best thing for me to do will be to escape into Philistine
territory”, so that Saul would lose hope of finding him so he'd escape his clutches.

--<
this is surely not a man who believes in being chosen by God to be king!
>--

so once again, David sought refuge with the hated enemies of his people,
offering himself & his skills as a soldier of fortune to the king of Gath,
returning to the court of king Achish. David now had 600 men under his command,
so Achish gave David the town of Ziklag to set up his base in. soon the wives
joined the men, followed by the Benjaminite defectors who had lost faith in Saul.

P100---

Now David under the patronage of the king of Gath, start raiding the nomadic
desert tribes. Bible suggests that David confined his attacks to only
non-Israelites, but confirms that David was merciless towards his victims: “David
smote the land, & left neither man nor woman alive, & took away the sheep, & the
oxen, & the asses, & the camels, & the apparel”.

Bible leaves no doubt at all that David committed the kind of atrocities that
we call war crimes. David even adopted a brutal policy of leaving no eyewitnesses
to his deeds: “& David left neither man nor woman alive to bring back to Gath,
saying “lest they should tell on us”.

Achish's cynicism was deep: “surely he has become loathsome to his own people,
Israel! I shall have him for a servant always!”

Achish wants to attack Israel, he summons David to his court to test his loyalty
& tells him that he & his men must take part in the battle. David says, “good,
you'll learn what your servant will do”. Achish says, “then I will make you my
bodyguard for life!”

A doublet is a tale that is preserved in the bible in 2 or more versions. David's
exploits in his fugitive years are described with shocking candor in the bible,
but there are many doublets. So it seems another pen, of a spin doctor, is at
work too, to smooth things out.

A few chapters after En-gedi, where David doesn't kill Saul while he was defecating,
we are told that David & his men slip into Saul's camp at night. God has sent Saul
& his men into a trancelike sleep called 'tardema Yahweh' (slumber of Yahweh), the
same comalike state that Adam experienced when God extracted a rib in order to
create the first woman.
David's commander whispers that God has delivered his enemy into his hand & asks
to kill him. But David tels him “destroy him not, for who can put forth his hand
against the Lord's anointed, & be guiltless? The Lord shall smite him, or he shall
go down into battle & be swept away”. David leaves the sleeping kind undisturbed,
& takes Saul's spear & water flask. Later, David hails at Saul's camp from a distance,
shows the spear & scolds the generals for not having kept watch over their lord the
king. Saul says, “behold, I've played the fool. blessed be thou, my son David, thou
shalt both do mightily, & shalt surely prevail”.

At the end of each of the doublets, the conflict between Saul & David is resolved,
the 2 men are reconciled, & each goes his separate way. But the happy ending is
paper-thin & the peace doesn't last long.

P107---

Now Samuel dies. This is a blow to the newborn kingdom of Israel, because he
once ruled the 12 tribes as the last of the judges, & he answered the people's
call for a king, & he even anointed the first 2 kings of Israel.

The Bible shows that no one - not Samuel, not Saul, not even David - is privileged
to converse directly with God. Yahweh was not always aloof. The bible tells us
that he had once walked & talked with the men & women he had created. In Genesis,
God strolls through the garden of Eden “towards the cool of the day”, hoping
for a chat with Adam & Eve but failing to find them. He shows up at the tent
of Abraham “in the heat of the day” & sits down to an impromptu meal of chops
& curds. He engages in a wrestling match with Jacob - & loses! He routinely
chats with Moses “face to face” & even “mouth to mouth, as a friend speaketh
to a friend”. But Moses is the last human being to enjoy the privilege of direct
conversation with God.

God declared to Aaron & Miriam, Moses' brother & sister, “Hear now my words,
of there be a prophet among you, I the Lord do make myself known unto him in
a vision, I do speak to him in a dream”.

The death of Moses may be regarded as the great divide in the sacred history of
Israel, the point in time when myth & legend come to an end & real history begins.
The biblical authors who composed David's life story didn't entertain the notion
that their contemporaries might hear the voice of God or see him. A prophet like
Samuel might hear from God, but only in dreams & visions & trance states. The
rest of humankind - even David - was restricted to the crude machinery of divination.

Divination by casting of lots is an ancient universal practice. Lot casting
survives in the form of tossing coins or plucking the petals of daisy for
decision making. According to the bible, the ancient Israelites consulted
Yahweh in exactly the same manner, using the Ark or the ephod or the mysterious
ritual objects called the Urim & Thummim. The Ark - “sacred divining box” - &
the ephod - “oracle instruments” - were more elaborate & ornate than a coin
toss but no different in function.

Divination is often mentioned but the paraphernalia are never described with
clarity in the bible. The lots were probably pebbles, sticks, arrows, or other
objects marked with words & images & cast like dice or drawn at random from a
container by the person who performed the ritual. The Urim & Thummim may have
been lots fashioned out of precious stones instead of river pebbles. The Ark &
the ephod were probably used as containers for the lots, & so was the priestly
mantle called “the breastplate of judgment”, where the Urim & Thummim were stored.

In one example, Saul asks, “if this guilt lie in me or in my son Jonathan,
O Lord God of Israel, let the lot be Urim, if it lies in thy people Israel,
let it be Thummim”.

Urim originally meant “condemned” & thummim meant “acquitted”, according to
one scholar.


--<

*******************

This is a very important point!

So anybody could dream about God & think he was a prophet.

Hell, not even Shiit mullahs would dare to do this.

Also they had to toss a coin to find out what God wanted them to do, which
means they had to ask questions with yes/no answers, which is not practical at all.
This doesn't make sense to me at all.

If God can talk to prophets face-to-face, why not continue to do so?

People must have become more sophisticated in time, so the authors couldn't
fool them any more & not just any dick could claim to be a prophet.

Yet, one often 'accepts' that God gave complicated instructions to the prophets,
without paying too much attention to the details, was it in a dream or was by
tossing a coin?

So most of the stories about God saying/doing this & that must be just a man-made
fiction, or at best, discovered by tossing coins!

******************

>--


Saul had dutifully enforced the divine law against the practitioners of magic,
& he banished from the land all who trafficked with ghosts & spirits. But now,
with Samuel dead, Saul was desperate to get in touch with God, so ordered “seek
me a woman that divines by a ghost that I may go to her, & inquire of her”. A
woman is found & Saul tells her to “bring me up Samuel”. ... Woman whispers “I
see a god, coming up out of the earth”. Saul asks “what is his appearance?” She
says as if in a trance, “an old man cometh up, & he is wrapped in a robe”. Saul
is terror-stricken, & he fells to the floor. The resentful ghost of Samuel says
“why hast thou disturbed me by bringing me up?” Saul complains that he is distressed,
the Philistines make war but God doesn't answers him no more, so he has done this
to ask what he should do. Samuel says “why ask me, of the Lord has departed from
you & has become your enemy?”. Samuel then explains how it was all Saul's fault
to turn God against himself. Samuel then issues one more prophecy, “the Lord
will deliver Israel into the hand of the Philistines, & tomorrow shalt thou &
thy sons be with me”.

This is very strange because bible regards the occults as sinful & utterly
false & useless, yet it is shown here to be real & working.

--<
This is all nonsense!
Ghost of a 'prophet' being disturbed & brought up, you must be kidding?!
>--

To the credit of the crazy old king, Saul didn't allow Samuel's prediction
of his imminent death to dissuade him from going forth once more to do battle
with the Philistines.

--<
But this also shows that the King, chosen by the prophet, didn't believe in
the prophet!

Which means many more must have not believed in everything the prophets said,
which explains why the Israelites kept on doing sinful things for centuries,
including keeping idols of other gods.
>--

So now there is a big War coming. The lords of the Philistines see thousands
of their soldiers pass by with David & his guerrillas at the end of the column.
The princes ask king Achish, “what are these Hebrews doing here?” Achish replies,
“is this not David, servant of Saul, king of Israel, who has been with me these
days & years? I have found no fault in him from the day he defected to me unto
this day”. The philistine generals didn't agree & said that David shall not
fight side by side with them, because he may turn traitor in the battle. Bible
shows how the philistines feared the military prowess & sheer ruthlessness of
the young mercenary. So Achish told David to go back to his fiefdom of Ziklag,
“as Yahweh lives, you have been upright - I have not found evil in you since
the day of your coming. Nevertheless, the philistine lords favor you not”.

--<
A philistine king would never invoke Yahweh, God of his enemies!
>--

strangely enough, David didn't take advantage of this offer not to kill his
own people, & tries to reassert his loyalty to the philistine cause, insisting
that any enemy of the king of Gath was his enemy too.

The bible generally refers to the 12 tribes who descended from the patriarch
Jacob as “Israelites” or, more precisely, the children of Israel (b'nai Yisrael).
But the Philistines use a different term for the same people - “Hebrew” (ivrim),
a word that may have been used to identify David & his men as renegades. Nowadays
“Hebrew” is the word used to describe the language of the bible, but the bible
uses the term to identify a people, not a language. In the bible, “Hebrews” is
used for the Israelites only where non-Israelites are speaking about the Israelites.
But archaeologists have found tablets in Egypt that refer to people called the
Habiru (or “Apiru”), dating back to 15 century BCE, who were waging a war of
conquest throughout Canaan. But the word habiru is also found in writings from
other sources, including the ancient Mesopotamian archives found in Syria.
Apparently, habiru referred to any people who lived outside a settled community
rather than to a specific tribe or nation. Today, habiru is probably best
understood as a term for “fugitives” or “refugees” who might show up as bandits
or brigands in one place, soldiers of fortune in another, or what we today would
call illegal aliens almost anywhere in the ancient New East around during the
second millennium BCE. Most of the habiru were marauders who descended upon
towns & farms that offered the prospect of easy plunder. Thus, the word habiru
certainly applies to David & his little army of malcontents.

P118---

Three days after leaving the Philistine army, David reaches Ziklag, but finds
it empty, because Amalekites had raided it, setting the town afire & carrying
off the women & children. Even David's wives were gone. Then David & the
people that were with him wept, until they had no more power to weep.

--<
it must be another 'author' at work here, because 'weeping' somehow doesn't fit
the image we have so far of David the sex-machine killer hero!
>--

His men began to blame David for leaving Ziklag undefended. People, embittered
by the loss of their sons & daughters, threatened to stone him. The people
of Judah had been willing to betray him to Saul, & now his own men were ready
to rise up & put him to death.

--<
wow, so much for a “most beloved king”!

It seems 'loyalty' was not part of Jews, they commit to Yahweh, then go on
worshiping other gods; they side with David one day, but want to kill him the next.

How 'Miranian'!
>--

As if to divert attention, David announces that he would seek an oracle
from Yahweh (by tossing coins), & calls for the priest Abiathar. The casting
of lots only gives answers to yes-no questions, but the author wants us to
imagine an intimate conversation. David inquires, “shall I pursue? Shall
I overtake them?” Yahweh replies “pursue”, but God also elaborated: “for
thou shalt surely overtake them, & shalt without fail recover all”.

--<
how God said all this with tossing coin, to get yes/no, is beyond me!

This is all a man-made fiction.
>--

So they pursue & find an Egyptian slave who led them to the Amalelikes,
who were celebrating. David attacks them at twilight & fought them unto
the evening of the next day. 400 Amalekites escaped, but the rest were slain
without mercy, & their animals were taken as spoils of war.

Now David uses this plunder to give gifts to raise his profile in the eyes
of his countrymen & make up with them. From now on, David is presented in
the bible as a savvy politician than a renegade guerrilla.

Jonathan was first to fall into the hands of the Philistines, & then 2 more
sons of Saul were taken. Saul is cornered with an arrow in his belly, so he
tells his armor-bearer to kill him with his sword, so the uncircumcised brutes
may not take him to make sport of him. But he refused, so Saul fell upon his
own sword. So Saul, his 3 sons, & all his men dies on that day. The Israelite
in towns around Mount Gilboa fled in panic & the Philistines came & dwelt in them.

--<
one could say that God gave the area to the Philistines!
>--

p125---

On the 3rd day after David return to Ziklag from his fight with an Amalekite
group, an stranger goes to David, fells to the ground & prostrates, saying
that he comes out of the camp of Israel, & that Saul & his sons were killed.
He is stupid enough to identify himself as an Amalekite, & then tells a new
story about how Saul died, different to what the bible has just said. The man
just happened to end up near Saul, who was mortally wounded & was leaning on
his sword, who cried to him “stand beside me, & slay me”. The stranger then
complied & killed Saul & took his crown, & brought it to David.

Bible gives 2 different stories about how Saul's died & offers no other
explanation of how Saul's crown ended up in David's hands, so we are left
to wonder which version of Saul's death is true. Did he fall on his sword,
or was he killed by an Amalekite?

David gets angry & asks the Amalekite, “how is it that you were not afraid
to put forth your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?” He tells him to leave,
but orders his men to kill the stranger.

--<
Very strange!

Why should an enemy/Amalekite take the crown to David?
For rewards? If so he didn't have to say he was an Amalekite!

David talks to him as if the Amalekite believed in Saul being chosen by the
god of Israelites!

Why should there be 2 version of Saul's death?
>--

did the king of Gath, David's protector, carry the crown back to David with
the intent of putting his trusted vassal on the throne of Israel? Or is it
possible that David went to war with the Philistines after all & plundered
the dead body of Saul? The Amalekite's story, conveniently enough, acquits
David of any such treachery & was meant to put an end to such scandalous
speculation.

David betrays no pleasure or relief at the news of Saul's death. Rather,
the man who had begged the philistines for the opportunity to go into battle
against Saul & the army of Israel now rent his garments in a public display
of grief, & his men follow his example.

--<
this all makes sense if the book was written to make David look good & innocent
& 'holy'.
>--

p130---

[Admzad]

p130---

anthropologist Raphael Patai insists “male homosexuality was rampant in biblical
times. The love story between Jonathan & David (the beautiful hero) must have
been duplicated many times in royal courts in all parts of the Middle East in
all period”. That's why we find intimacies between men in the Epic of Gilgamesh,
the creation myth of ancient Sumeria, & that's why some open-minded commentators
are willing to entertain the notion that the Israelites were not shocked to hear
of one man's love for another man.

Tom Horner argues, “homosexuality was both dignified & manly - in fact, often
associated with heroes - in the cultures that surrounded Israel. ... there can
be little doubt, except on the part of those who absolutely refuse to believe
it, that there existed a homosexual relationship between David & Jonathan. They
were simply well-rounded men who acted fully within the standards of a society
that had been dominated for 200 years by an Aegean culture - a culture that
accepted homosexuality”.

David reigns as king of Judah for 7.5 years, but only rules a tribe & not the
nation of Israel. Although Saul was dead, his dynasty survived in the person
of his eldest son, a 40 yo nebbish whom the bible sometimes calls Ishbaal &
sometimes Ish-bosheth.

--<
This only proves how hopeless & useless this god was who chose David to be
the king, but couldn't make it happen!
>--

p141---

Abner contrives to put Saul's son, Ishbaal, on the throne. Then Ishbaal accuses
Abner of having sex with one of Saul's concubines, but Abner gets angry &
threatens to make David king, & Ishbaal backs off. But Abner sends message
to David to “make league with me ... to bring all Israel unto you”. David
accepts on the condition that Abner brought him his first wife, Michal.

Saul had annulled d's first marriage & had given Michal to a man named Paltiel.
David had collected a half-dozen more wives, Abigail, Ahinoam, Maacah, Haggith,
Abital, & Eglah.

David demands Ishbaal to give Michal back to him & Ishbaal, unsure of his
grip on the crown, took his sister from her second husband & sent her to David.
... The whole incident raises the unsettling notion that Michal was forcibly
separated from her second husband, Paltiel, & sent back to David'd harem against
her will. As Michal was escorted back to the court of David, Paltiel followed
her in abject misery, “weeping as he went”, ... Abner turn the heartbroken man
around & sent him back home.

P144---

David made a deal with Abner, but Joab, his own general, is upset & tells
David that Abner is an spy & only after secrets. Joab sends a message to Abner
asking him back to Hebron. Joab called Abner aside for a moment & stabbed him
in cold blood without any warning. David claims he had nothing to do with it.

Tow of Ishbaal's generals kill Ishbaal in his sleep, without any guards being
around, & take his head to David, saying “behold the head of Ishbaal, ...,
Yahweh has avenged my lord the king this day of Saul & his seed”. But David
orders his men to kill the 2 generals.

--<
anybody did anything they wanted & claimed that Yahweh was behind it all!
>--

at the age of 37, after 7.5 years on the tribe throne in Hebron, David was
raised to the kingship of both Judah & Israel.

P150---

David wanted his new capital to be in a place that belonged to none of the
12 tribes. So he chose a fortified hill-town in the heart of the ancient Israel,
a place that had always belonged to Jebusites, one of the native dwelling tribes
of Canaan, a place called Jerusalem. Jerusalem has long been regarded in pious
tradition as a place of surprising holiness. According to the Talmud, Jerusalem
was the place where Adam offered the first sacrifice to God, where Noah erected
an altar after the flood, where Abraham was called to slaughter Isaac.

So sacred was Jerusalem that in one rabbinical dairy tale David refused to mount
a military assault on its defenses. Instead, he orders Joab to climb to the top
of a cypress tree near the city wall; the tree is pulled back with ropes & Joab
is catapulted over the high wall & into the city. The surprised Jebusites surrender
to Joab without a fight.

--<
If the bible was written to make David look good, then of course there would
be many stories about how holy his kingdom & capital was, no matter where he
chose his capital.

One has to be very stupid to think that all Jebusites surrendered to the army
of killer David just because one man jumped over their walls!
>--

The truth, as recorded in the book of Joshua, is rather more brutal. Unlike the
other cities of Canaan, Jerusalem had beaten back the Israelite armies under the
command of Joshua. The Jebusites taunted David & his men, “you will never get
in here! Even the blind & the lame will turn you back”. David sent a squad of
commandos to infiltrate the fortifications, issuing an order of shocking
brutality: “whoever smites a Jebusite, let him strike at the windpipe, for David
hates the lame & the blind!”

--<
Now this fits David far better.

This is another proof that the old stories are 'cooked' to make David &
Israelites look good, so they cannot be trusted as 'facts'.
>--

what are we to make of the fact that God's chosen king declares his hatred
for “the lame & the blind” with such cruelty?

--<
very simple, God never chose nobody to be a king or a prophet.

Some people dreamed that God told them this/that, put words into God's mouth,
& called themselves prophets.
>--

But the 12 tribes of Israel were not a unified people, & David would have to
overcome their tendency toward blood feuds & civil war.

Once construction of the palace was under way, David began filling the royal
palace with fresh young women & the royal nursery with more children.

--<
I bet most said that 'Yahweh' wanted all this to happen ...
>--

perhaps to ingratiate himself with the Jebusites - Jerusalem was after all a
conquered & occupied city - David “took him more concubines & wives out of
Jerusalem”, & his new wives turned out to be blessedly fertile.

--<
since you have to have a Jewish mother to be a Jew, then does this mean that
many of David's kids were not Jews?!

So God in those days thought having many concubines was OK, but changed his
mind later?!
>--

There was a fight with the Philistines, who ran away & left their idols behind.
David ordered his men to burn them all. The Philistines regroup & go to Jerusalem.
David resorts to use the tools of divination (tossing coin for yes/no) to ask
Yahweh what to do. But Yahweh seems to give far more elaborate advice that could
be possible extracted with yes-no questions: “circle around them ... then when
you hear the sound of the ind in the asherahs, look sharp, for Yahweh will have
marched out ahead of you to attack the Philistine camp!”

--<
pure nonsense!
>--

The Ark of Covenant, a gilded wooden chest, was fabricated by a master carpenter
named Bezaleel during the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai desert. It was 2.5
cubits in length & 1.5 cubit in height, made from acacia-wood, covered with pure
gold, & fitted with rings & staves that allowed it to be carried. Within the Ark
were stored the 2 stone tablets on which Moses was believed to have inscribed
the sacred law of Yahweh on Mount Sinai. Atop the Ark were 2 gold-wrought figures
of Cherubim - fierce sphinxlike beasts rather than fat angels of contemporary
Christmas cards - & God himself was imagined to have ridden on their outstretched
wings as he led the Israelites through the wilderness. Indeed, the Ark was
carried into battle precisely because it was imagined to be the throne & footstool
of Yahweh Sabaoth, that is, Yahweh in his fearsome role of the 'God of Armies'.

Twenty years earlier, when David was a lad tending his father's sheep in
Bethlehem, the Philistines had succeeded in capturing the Ark in battle, but
later they insisted on restoring it to the defeated Israelites when they found
themselves afflicted with an infestation of mice & a plague of tumors.

--<
why should God allow his 'throne' be taken by the enemies of His own people?

When everybody burnt the idols of their enemies, like David did, why should the
Philistine not burn the Ark, & insist on giving it back?!
>--

Now the authors try to explain! To make amends to Yahweh (god of their enemies
in whom they did not believe!) over the hijacking of the Ark, & to persuade
him to life the plague, the Philistines made 5 mice & 5 tumors out of pure
gold, loaded the Ark & golden offerings on cart drawn by milk cows & sent the
driverless cart to the Israelite border. The surprised local Israelites greet
the Ark with burnt-offerings, but a few dared to peek inside the Ark. God
promptly not only struck them dead, lest anyone miss the point, he smote 50000
others too! ... The Ark then finally came to rest in the private house of the
local priest in Kitiath-jearim, where it remained for the next 20 years.

--<
pure nonsense!
Surely, the Philistines MUST have looked inside the Ark & taken stuff out of
it & tried to do dirty things to it, yet Yahweh did nothing to stop it?!

But now, Yahweh kills anyone who looks inside it & then kills 50000 more?

Where were these 50K, surely not at the border. Did God just kill 50000 in
other cities, away from the Ark, without them even knowing why?! Even if
they were in a nearby city, they didn't know what was going on.

Why should such a holy shrine end up & remain in a local priest's house for
20 years?
>--

the district around Kiriath-jearim remained under Philistine control, so the
Ark was inaccessible. David pushed the Philistines out of the area & brought
the Ark to Jerusalem.

On the way to Jerusalem, the oxen stumbled & one the attendants, a man named
Uzzah, reached out to steady the Ark. He only tried to save the Ark, but Yahweh
was offended, because “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, & God
smote him there for his error ...”

--<
how amazing that many have believed in this rubbish for so many years!
>--

P164---

To demonstrate his piety, David shed all his royal clothes & wore only the
brief linen ephod that was the customary garb of a consecrated priest. “And
David danced before Yahweh with all his might”

David pitched a tent & placed the Ark inside - Israelites celebrated being
tent-dwelling nomads & tent was their God's preferred meeting place with his
greatest prophet.

Everybody was happy, but one woman in the palace, Michal David's first wife
was angry & “despised David in her heart”. She was angry because she had seen
that David had danced with such abandon that his brief linen garment repeatedly
flew up & exposed his genitals to the crowd. She told David later, “didn't
the king of Israel do himself honor today, exposing himself in the sight of
his subjects' slave-girls like some dancer!” David says “blessed by Yahweh,
who chose me instead of your father & all his family, & appointed me ruler
over Yahweh's people Israel. ... I will dance before Yahweh & dishonor myself
even more ... ”. .... “And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the
day of her death” (meaning David didn't have sex with Michal no more) ...

--<
doesn't look like the same man who used to call Saul his father & didn't
allow anybody to say anything bad about Saul, does it?

The author of this part of bible must have forgotten the past ...
>--

p166---

To counsel him on his duties to Yahweh, David has summoned not a priest but
a prophet named Nathan. David tells him the ironic facts that David himself,
a mere mortal, enjoys the comforts of a palace while the Ark of the Covenant,
the throne & footstool of the King of the Universe, is sheltered only in a rude
tent. That night, Nathan is granted a vision in which Yahweh explains it all,
saying “shalt thou build me a house for me to dwell in?”, & that He has not
dwelt in a house since the day He brought the children of Israel out of Egypt,
& that He has never complained, & that David should not feel guilty, & that He
has chosen him to be prince over His people, & that He has cut off all David's
enemies, & that He will make David a great name on earth.

Next, God promises that David, unlike the judges & kings who had ruled over
Israel before him, would be the founder of a dynasty - a 'house'. “when thy
days are fulfilled, & thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy
seed after thee, that shall proceed out of thy body, & I will establish his
kingship.

Finally God pronounced a blessing on the house of David that is unprecedented
in all of the bible, an unconditional promise of divine protection that no
other mortal - not Adam, not Noah, not Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, not even
Moses - was ever granted. A blank check of unlimited validity made out to the
house of David! God says of David's successor, “he shall build a house for my
name, & I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be for him
a father, & he shall be to me for a son; if he commit iniquity, I will chasten
him, with the rod of men, & with the stripes of the children of men, but my
mercy shall not depart from him”.

--<
this is the biggest proof that 'Yahweh' is nonsense & not a true God, because
we know perfectly well how this never happened.

People could say, well it didn't happen because man did sin to anger god, but the
all-knowing God should know better & should not make phony promises & if this
was the case, He should've made it 'conditional', ”I will do .... IFF ....”

Abraham, Moses, & the other prophet never had their own dynasty, why should a
killer sex-machine have it?

“kingdom forever”?! Not even this world is supposed to last forever!
This is definitely not God talking!

This was all written by men to raise David's profile, all propaganda!

Hell, God couldn't even keep his promise to Abraham, so even that part of bible
must've been written by men, who put words into God's mouth.
>--

God had entered into covenants with Noah & Abraham & Moses, but never before
had he given such a sweeping promise of divine favor. Indeed, the deal that
Moses is shown to broker between God & Israel was strictly an “if-then”
proposition. Moses announced, “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing &
a curse. The blessing, if ye shall hearken unto the commandments of the Lord
your God, which I command you this day, & the curse, if ye shall not hearken ...”.
but God's vow to the house of David was perpetual & unconditional, “and thy house
& thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever before thee; thy throne shall be
established forever”.

The biblical source that contributed Nathan's prophecy to the Book of Samuel
is generally understood to be one of the priests who served the Davidic monarchy
in Jerusalem several centuries after David's reign. The royal theologian's motive
was to put the divine seal of approval on the house of David, which continued
to provide kings to rule over the southern kingdom of Judah for nearly 500 years.

One sure sign that a later author or editor reworked the text of Samuel can be
found in the schizoid quality of Nathan's prophecy. First God says that He doesn't
a “house of cedar” & that He prefers to dwell in a tent; but then, abruptly, God
changes his mind & demands a temple to be built for Him by David's son. David
didn't build a temple, so the authors have to justify that by saying God didn't
want any, that He like his chosen people, was a restless wanderer, a nomad, a
tent-dweller. But Solomon built a temple, so the authors had to say that God
wanted it, so they had to insert it into the text. To make things look good, the
author of the book of Chronicles came up with his own reason: David knew that it
would be necessary to build a temple (house of God) in Jerusalem, so assembled a
supply of building materials, but told Solomon that God didn't want David to build
the temple, because David's hands were so bloodstained: “... thou has shed blood
abundantly, & hast made great wars ...”.

--<
How strange, God even got angry at his own chosen king, Saul, for not killing
every man & woman & child & animal, but now says killing is bad?!

A God who not only has no regards for non-Jews & tells Jews to kill them,
man/woman/child; but a God who smote 50000 Jews only because one Jews peeked
inside the Ark?!
>--

David goes to the tent where Yahweh was understood to dwell & delivered a prayer
of thanksgiving, “thou has promised a good thing unto thy servant. Thou, O Lord
God, has spoken it, & through thy blessing let the house of thy servant be
blessed forever”. But his sense of well-being would not last long. War & rebellion,
conspiracy & deception, murder & mayhem, sexual adventure & sexual assault - all
depicted with brutal candor by the biblical authors - would soon put his life &
throne at risk even in the face of God's unconditional promise of divine favor.

--<
God couldn't even have his own chosen man to become the real king for many many
years, & God couldn't let his biggest King have a blessed-life, because God never
made any such promises. Men dreamt, called themselves prophets, & put words into
God's mouth.
>--

p172---

Under king David. Eretz Yisrael reached from the “river of Egypt unto the
great river, the river Euphrates”, just as God had once promised the patriarch
Abraham so long ago”. The bible devoutly notes, “And Yahweh gave victory to
David wherever he went”.

--<
This could be another proof that bible was written to make David look good,
the authors wrote it so that the boundary promised to Abraham was exactly
what David had managed to grab.

God “gave victory”, meaning, God let him kill by the thousands, men, women &
children, but God didn't want David to build the temple, because David had blood
on his hands?!
>--

David subdued all of the traditional enemies who had long threatened the very
existence of the land of Israel - the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites,
the Amalekites - & the smaller tribes & peoples submitted without a fight.
After each victory, David left behind garrisons to occupy the defeated nation,
& he carried tributes & plunder back to Jerusalem.

--<
So God allowed wandering nomads to move into other people's lands, kill the
locals & take their lands, because God had promised the land to His chosen
people, who couldn't stop worshiping idols & other gods?!
>--

David is praised for his administration of “justice & righteousness”, but we
are never shown or told exactly what he did to earn such praise.

After defeating the Moabites in battle, David lined up the survivors in 3
groups, & he ordered the men in each line to lie on the ground, 2 lines to
put to death & 1 full line to keep alive. When David withdrew from the land
of Edom, he left behind a series of garrisons, & all the Edomites became servants
to David.

--<
& this is supposed to be “justice & righteousness?!
>--

One day, abruptly, David tries to find out if anybody is left from Saul's
family so that he could show some kindness for Jonathan's sake! Saul, Jonathan
& 2 sons died in the battle. Later, bible tells us that David ordered 7 sons
& grandsons of Saul be killed. But now we are told that David wants to be kind
to Saul's children!

Book of Samuel says that the land of Israel suffered a famine that lasted 3
years, & David sought a divine oracle to explain why. It comes out that “blood
guilt rests on Saul & his family because he put the Gibeonites to death”. This
crime is never described in the bible, but David wants to make up for it. David
offers silver & gold to the Gibeonites, but they refuse & ask for blood-vengeance,
they ask for 7 of Saul's sons so they could hang them up unto Yahweh. David turns
5 sons & 2 grandson of Saul to the Gibeonites.

With is actually going on here, some scholars speculate, is the offering of royal
blood to propitiate an angry god who has punished the Israelites with famine, a
ritual of human sacrifice that may have been borrowed from the practice of the
pagan Canaanites & one that plainly violates the official theology of the bible.
The very notion that David surrendered the sons of Saul for “hanging” is shocking.

--<
yet we are supposed to believe that David never even allowed anybody to say
anything bad about Saul?!
>--

Only one male descendant of Saul now survived, & he was an unfortunate cripple
named Mephibosheth, son of Jonathan, who was only 5 when Jonathan died, & was
taken by his nurse into hiding. David promises him that “I will restore to you
all the land of Saul, & you shall eat bread at my table”.

--<
Based on what we know of David, it makes sense to think that David did this to
keep a watchful eye on the last survivor of the house of Saul.
>--

p185---

bible suggests that David rose from an afternoon nap & idled on the rooftop of
his palace in order to catch a cool evening breeze. But we might also imagine
that David woke from his slumber in a state of agitation & perhaps even sexual
arousal. And perhaps he wondered whether he might be able to spot some willing
woman from his observation point atop the palace. He spots a naked woman taking
a bath on a nearby rooftop. David sent & inquired after the woman. Her name was
Bathsheba, the wife of man called Uriah the Hittite, a member of David's military
elite, one of the many men of foreign ancestry who served in the army of Israel.
Bathsheba, too, may have been a non-Israelite. The Chronicler gives her name
as “Bathshua”, which was also the name of the Canaanite wife of Judah, a distant
ancestor of David & founder of the tribe of Judah. So this woman was doubly
forbidden to him - she was married to another man, & she may have been one of
those seductive strangers whom the bible routinely accuses of luring Israelite
men into “harlotry & other abominations”. But David “sent messengers, & took
her; & she came in unto him, & he lay with her”.

At the moment of their adultery, Bathsheba “was purified from her uncleanness”,
meaning she was not in her menstrual period, so David did not - God forbid! - have
sex with a ritually impure woman! This also means that she was likely to be ovulating.

--<
Masters of propaganda & brainwashing at their best!

They ignore the crime, but talk about all sorts of rubbish details, trying to
shift focus, all to make David look good.
>--

She goes back to her own home & later sends a message to David that “I am with
child”. David, so skilled in the arts of deception, decided to make it appear
that the bastard child had been fathered by her husband, Uriah. David sent word
to his general, Joab: “send me Uriah the Hittite”. David has a short chitchat
with Uriah & then tells him, “go down to thy house & wash thy feet”. The Hebrew
word for 'feet' or 'legs” (raglayim) was sometimes used in biblical Hebrew as a
euphemism for genitalia.

But Uriah didn't go to his house & spent the night at the door of the palace.
David then insisted that Uriah join him for a feast & tries to get him drunk,
so he'd go & have sex with his wife. But Uriah still didn't have sex with
Bathsheba. David then sent Uriah back to his unit with a letter for his general,
commanding, “put Uriah in the front of the hottest battle, & then fall back &
leave him to meet his death”.
This was done & Joab sent message to David that “they servant Uriah is dead”.
David sent message back, “do not let this distress you - the sword devours one
way or another ...” Bathsheba shows neither relief nor satisfaction at the death
of her husband, but observed the customary period of ritual mourning. “David sent
for her & brought her into his house. She became his wife & bore him a son”.

--<
So David tries to get Uriah to have sex with his wife, so David could deny to
be the father of the bastard child.

He then gets the innocent guy killed.

Only idiots would believe that this sex-machine killer was chosen by God, not
just any God, but a God who has repeatedly warned against sin & adultery, &
that the all-knowing God would protect David & his dynasty “forever”, regardless
of what they do!
>--

Now Nathan, the new 'prophet', talks to David & tells hims a story to teach
him he did wrong having taken somebody else's wife, & delivers a message to
David from God, “I anointed thee king over Israel & delivered thee out the
hand of Saul, & I gave thee thy master's daughter, & I made his wives lie
down in thine embrace, I gave thee the daughters of Israel & Judah, & if
that were too little, I would give thee that many again, why then hast thou
despised the word of the Lord, to do that which is evil in my sight? Uriah
the Hittite thou has smitten with the sword, & his wife thou hast taken to
be thy wife. Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from thy house”.

Nowhere does the bible confirm Nathan's remarkable suggestion that Saul's
wives ended up in David's harem.

God's disappointment with the failings of humankind is perhaps the single
most persistent theme of the bible. The same punishing despair is found in
the story of the flood, where God resolves to exterminate the whole of his
human creation save Noah & his family; & in the tale of Sodom & Gomorrah,
where God destroys 5 cities filled evildoers for the want of 10 righteous
men; & in the saga of Exodus, where he threatens to slaughter the Chosen
People & start all over again with Moses.

--<
But He seems to be too thick to get the message & learn once & for all!

This is not a real god, it's a man-made god, it's all a fiction.

Does this mean that mankind were created by incest twice, first from Adam's
children having sex with each other, then by Noah's children?!

There were nobody else to take as wives/husbands, but their own sisters/brothers.
>--

God tells David, through Nathan's dream, that “thou shall not die. Behold,
I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, & I will take thy
wives before thine eyes, & give them unto thy neighbors, & he shall lie with
thy wives within the sight of this sun”.

Finally, God announced his intention to deliver a 'coup de grace' for the
crime of David & Bathsheba - a death sentence, not on the star-crossed lovers,
but rather on the wholly innocent victim of their fornication. Nathan warned,
“the child that is born unto thee shall surely die”.

--<
what pure rubbish!

A true God, who preaches 'morality', would never ever do such things!

Either this is all lies/fiction; or if such events happened, then it has to
be 'explained', later, how & why 'god' let it happen, so the text has to be
edited that 'god' said all this was going to happen as a form of punishment.

We are told that people didn't want prophets & talked God into choosing Kings
instead. God chose 2 kings & promised to protect the dynasty of David
forever. So why all of a sudden have a 'prophet' again?! If having prophets
was working, why not continue with it. If it wasn't, then why continue with kings?
Seems to me, this 'god' doesn't know what he is doing. He can't even put his
chosen king on the throne.

Who is supposed to be running the show anyway, people or 'God'?
God doesn't seem to like kings, argues against it, but then goes & chooses
one that he doesn't like anyway, & then another one but can't put him on the
throne, but still doesn't work & he has to choose another 'prophet'?!

Is it because only prophets can get long message from god in dreams, & not
just by tossing coins? Otherwise, people would question how the king got the
message by tossing coins!

What's the point of having a 'king' when the prophet seems to be really the
'boss' & in-charge?!
>--

the biblical prophets who found themselves filled with “the spirit of Yahweh”
have been likened to the ecstatics & diviners of other times & places, not
only he mystics & wonder-workers who were active in pagan cults throughout
the ancient world but also the Hasidim, dervishes, & Pentecostals of today.
As with the shamans & seers of indigenous cultures who carry messages from
the spirit world, no ordination was required to be a prophet - men & women
received the word of god through the medium of “visions & oracles delivered
in a state of trance”. Ecstatic practices of an orgiastic type - singing,
dancing, speaking in tongues, perhaps even self-flagellation & self-mutilation
- are some of the expressions which, taken collectively, are called 'prophesying'.

Samuel, the first of the 'classical' prophets, was literally called by God
as a young child - called by name & called by night - to the task of making &
breaking both kings & high priests.

David refused to accept the decree & sought to bend God's will to his own.
“David besought God for the child keeping a prayer vigil night & day, fasting,
& sleeping on bare earth in a display of remorse & repentance”. But the boy died.
Abruptly, David rose, washed himself, & dressed in fresh clothes. Then he anointed
himself, walked to the tent-shrine of Yahweh, prostrated himself, & prayed one
more time. David then sat down to his first meal in 7 days. His servants dared
to ask, “what is this? While the child was alive, you fasted & wept & kept a
vigil for him, but now that the child is dead, you rise up & eat”. David said
that he was hoping to save the boy, but now that he was dead, there was no point
in fasting, because he couldn't bring him back, “I shall go to him, but he will
not return to me”.

Bible doesn't tell us about Bathsheba's grief, but David “went in unto her, &
lay with her”, according to the literal translation of the euphemistic biblical
Hebrew in the King James Version, or “had intercourse with her”, according to
the plain-spoken New English Bible.

--<
This is non-sense.

He is the man who had sex with another man's wife, tried to deny he was the
father, had the husband killed, but now he is portrayed as a “caring father”?!

He eats & has sex with his wive after he hears about his own son's death. What
a caring father!
>--

David is a worldly-wise man who refuses to blame God when his own prayers
are unavailing, a man who lives wholly in the here & now & neither beseeches
nor blames God for his lot in life.

Bathsheba gives birth to another son. The child is named twice. The prophet
Nathan, acting on instructions from God, dubs him Jedidiah, “beloved of the
Lord”; but Bathsheba insists on calling him Solomon, which is traditionally
understood to derive from the Hebrew word for peace, shalom. God announces
to David in the book of Chronicles, “a son shall be born on thee. his name
shall be Solomon, & I will give peace & quietness unto Israel in his day. ...
I will be to him for a father”.

--<
But why did god tell Nathan to call him Jedidiah?!

It seems the editors can't keep track of all the 'fiction' & stories & changes.
>--

so troubled were the rabbis & sages by the story of David & Bathsheba that
they concocted a whole array of improbable excuses & far-fetched exculpatory
tales to soften the impact of the frank biblical report. Bathsheba was to
blame for provoking David's lust, by taking off her dress where she knew he
would see her; David was not technically guilty of adultery; Uriah gave his
wife a bill of divorcement before going off to fight; Uriah was to blame for
his own death; the whole nasty affair was God's doing in the first place: God
decreed that David should summon Bathsheba to his bed so that he could later
serve as a shining example pf moral redemption. Satan was to blame, Bathsheba
was bathing behind a screen, Satan became a bird & knocked down the screen,
the sight of her naked body was too much for David; David spent 22 years as
a penitent, eating his bread mixed with ashes & weeping fro a full hour each day.

--<
very close to stories made by mullahs in Shiit-Islam !
>--

bible allows us to imagine that Bathsheba yearned for David with the same
passion, but “d sent messenger, & took her”. Cheryl Exum argues, “this is
no love story. The scene is biblical equivalent of 'wham bam, thank you,
m'am': he sent, he took, she came, he lay, she returned. ... raped by the pen”

p205---

Two women named Tamar figured crucially in the life of king David. The first
Tamar was a Canaanite who disguised herself as a harlot in order to seduce
her father-in-law, Judah, so that she might conceive a child. Despite her
sins of incest & fornication & prostitution, the bible pronounces her a
righteous woman. David was a distant but direct descendant of Tamar & Judah,
founder of the tribe of which he was king, & her passionate blood ran in his
veins. Is it not ironic that David - God's anointed, king of all Israel, &
progenitor of the Messiah - traced his ancestry back to the bastard son of a
foreign woman who played the harlot with her own father-in-law? By now, we
know enough about David to realize that his bloodline are perfectly appropriate.

Te second Tamar was the daughter of king David, the only one actually named
in the bible. Among the admirers of the fair Tamar was her half-brother, Amnon,
who was firstborn son of David & was destined to replace David. Bible reports,
“Amnon the son of David lover her, & was so distressed that he fell sick because
of his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin, & it seemed hard for Amnon to do
anything unto her”.

--<
Is the author implying that if Amnon's sister wasn't a virgin, he would've had
sex with her & it would've been OK?!

Amnon lusted after his sister & lost appetite & weight. He told his cousin
Jonadab, “I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister”. Jonadab was “a very
subtle man”, as the bible tells us, & he gave David a plan: go to bed pretending
to be sick, when your father comes to see you, tell him: 'let my sister come
& give me food. Let her prepare the food in front of me, so that I watch her
& then take it from her own hands'. David agreed & told Tamar, “go now to thy
brother Amnon's house & prepare a meal fro him”.

Surely this is a very strange request & a sex-machine like David must've
know what was going on.

Tamar made cakes & baked it, but Amnon refused to eat & ordered his household
to leave. Amnon told Tamar to bring the cake to his bed so he could eat it
from her hands, & told Tamar to “come lie with me, my sister”. Tamar gets the
message & said, “no, my brother, do not force me, for no such thing ought to
be done in Israel. Do not behave like a beast!” Amnon tries to rape her, & she
tries to talk him out of it: “where could I go & hide my disgrace? ... why not
speak to the king? He will not refuse you leave to marry me”. Bible reports,
“being stronger than she, he forced her, & lay with her”.

I suppose we should be surprised that the bible doesn't tell us how sexy David's
son was & how Tamar couldn't resist her, but this is not needed, because Amnon
ends up dying, so there is no need to justify his actions. But still, it is
shocking that the holy book doesn't picture Amnon as 'evil'.

After the rape, Amnon's 'love' turns into disgust & suddenly orders Tamar,
“Arise, Be gone.” Tamar protests, “No! It is wicked to send me away. This is
harder to bear than all you've done to me”. Amnon orders his servant to “put
out this 'thing' from me, & bolt the door after her”. So Tamar, no longer a
virgin, & unacceptable as a wife to anybody, is thrown out into the street,
with messy hair & clothes.

To explain this change of heart, which makes the ugly scene even uglier,
Talmudic sages speculated that “Amnon hated Tamar because, when he raped
her, he became entangled in her pubic hair & injured himself”. Wow! Isn't
this similar kind of things Muslim Mullahs would come up with about their Imams?

>--

Incest between a brother & his half sister - “daughter of thy father” - is
specifically ruled out by the set of laws known as the Holiness Code.

Contrary to what we've been taught by Freud, the taboo against incest was
not primal & universal, & the biblical world regarded incest with far less
horror that we might suppose by reading the parade of sexual atrocities in
the book of Leviticus. Throughout the ancient Near East, & down through
history, sex & marriage among close relations have been not merely tolerated
but actually celebrated. And, it has been argued, the cosmopolitan court of
king David was both familiar & comfortable with such practices.

The ancient Egyptians embraced the notion of incestuous marriage both in
religious myth & common practice. Because property passed from a mother to
her eldest daughter, rather than from father to son, an Egyptian father might
marry his own daughter, or a son might marry his sister, in order to prevent
the family wealth from falling under the control of a son-in-law or a
brother-in-law. The reigning pharaohs customarily married their own sisters
in pious imitation of the myth of Isis & Osiris, the sibling-lovers with whom
the kings of Egypt identified. Although a prohibition against sexual intercourse
between a father & his daughter is literally chiseled in stone in the Code of
Hammurabi, the sacred myth of ancient Mesopotamia depicted gods & goddesses
in sexual coupling with their own offspring & siblings. And the people of the
land of Canaan, among whom the Israelites lived throughout their long history,
told a tale in which the god called Baal engaged in sexual union with his sister,
Anat.

At certain vivid moments, the bible betrays an easygoing attitude towards
incest in general & the marriage of brother & sister in particular. For example,
the daughters of Lot, a nephew of the patriarch Abraham, ply their father with
wine & then sleep with him in order to conceive, all without condemnation or
punishment of any kind. Indeed, since Lot's daughters apparently believed that
the rest of humankind had been destroyed along with Sodom & Gomorrah, they are
praised in biblical tradition for acting courageously to preserve human life
on earth by the expedient of sleeping with their father.

Elsewhere in the bible, the patriarchs pass off their wives as their sisters -
not once but 3 times! Abraham did it twice with his wife Sarah, Isaac did it
with his wife Rebekah. Abraham even said, “she is the daughter of my father,
but not the daughter of my mother”. Was Abraham saying that Sarah was his wife
& his half-sister, or was he lying?

Even the oldest codes of law probably didn't find their way into the bible
until the priests & scribes of ancient Israel fixed the text of the 5 books
of Moses in their final form as late as the 4 century BCE.

P216---

According to tradition in ancient Israel, as in so many other times & places,
no man would marry a woman who had been deflowered by another man, whether
with or without her consent. The penalty for rape under biblical law was the
marriage of the rapist to the woman he had raped, at least if the victim so
desired. Since the rapist had rendered his victim unmarriageable, the only
way to repair the damage was to marry her.

Tamar didn't tell her father David & didn't try to seek shelter in her father's
house, instead, she went to her brother's house.

--<
David the sex-machine & expert in deception should've known what Amnon wanted.
In fact, David may have been tipped off to this by the word Amnon used. The
Hebrew word that Amonon used, lebibot, is usually translated into English as
'bread' or 'cakes' or 'dumplings'. But 'lebibot' is also an 'erotic pun'
derived from the Hebrew word for 'heart' & suggests arousal & pleasure. Some
have read this as “libido cakes”.
>--

One scholar suggests that David was not only tacitly approving Amnon's sexual
claim on his sister but actually delivering her into the hands of her rapist.

Absalom, Tamar's brother, seems to understand the treacherous family politics
behind the rape & tells her “keep this to yourself, he is your brother - do
not take it to heart”. Absalom didn't say a word to Amnon or David & waited
to see what David would do. Bible reports that when David heard the story,
he was very angry, “but he would not hurt Amnon because he was his eldest son
& he loved him”.

P222---

--<
after 2 years, Absalom invites David & all the royal household to his house
for a party. David ends up not going, but his sons went. Absalom gets everyone
drunk & then orders his servants to kill Amnon. Everyone got up & ran away.
News got to David that Absalom had killed all of his sons. David goes crazy,
but Jonadab, the 'subtle' cousin, told David that only Amnon was dead, but
there is no explanation on how he knew this. The author wanted Jonadab to tell
David that Absalom's anger was caused by the rape of Tamar, & not say that he'd
planned the event. David accepts Absalom's death & shifts his attention to
Absalom, who is the next in line for the throne. But Absalom runs away & seeks
refuge in the country of his mother, the kingdom of Geshur, for 3 years.

Joab, David'd nephew who was commander of the army & David's henchman, too it
upon himself to bring Absalom back. He recruits a woman to play act & talk David
into allowing Absalom to return. Absalom returned to Jerusalem but David didn't
see him for 2 more years (2+3+2= 7 years after the rape). David finally agrees
to see Absalom, but the tenderness is short-lived. Absalom regards his father
as a man in decline, ruled by his heart than his head. He sees no reason why
he should not be the king now, starts acting like a king, & tries to take over.
Bible says that “there was no blemish in him” & that “Absalom stole the hearts
of the men of Israel”. When Absalom turns 40, he gets serious about taking
over, moves to Hebron, capital of Judah, & wears the crown of Judah. David
hears about Absalom's plan to take over, & runs away from Jerusalem, “lest
he overtake us & bring down evil upon us ...”, but he leaves 10 concubines
behind. People of Israel fall behind Absalom, which shows that David may have
been beloved of God, but he was despised of men. A man shout insults at David
when he is on the run, “begone, begone, you scoundrel! You man of blood! The
Lord has returned upon you all the blood of the house of Saul, whose throne
you have stolen!” Joab's brother asks David “why should this dead dog curse
my lord the king?” & wants to kill the man, but David stops him, saying “if
someone curses in that way, it's because Yahweh has said to him: 'curse David!'”
This is not 'like' the sex-machine killer we've seen so far.

P239---

Absalom & his army move into Jerusalem & take over. Ahitophel advises Absalom
to make a public display of authority: “have intercourse with your father's
concubines & all Israel will come to hear that you've given great cause of
offence to your father ...”. a pavilion is erected on the roof of the royal
palace, & each one of the 10 concubines is escorted there to have sex with
Absalom, “in sight of all Israel”.

This is typical biblical exaggeration, “in sight of alllll Israel”.
How could allllll Israel see the top of the palace from miles away? Surely
'Israel' was not just a few blocks around the palace in Jerusalem! This was
all written to keep the audience in shock-&-awe.

God is nowhere to be seen or heard in these ugly affairs, the same God who
promised to protect David's dynasty forever! But one of the authors seems
to want us think that God had a hand in this, by inserting in the text that
Gad had previously threatened David “I will take thy wives before thine eyes,
& give them unto thy neighbor, & he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of
this sun”. Why should all-merciful God punish innocent wives of his chosen
king for the crimes of their husband? If God wanted to punish David for his
sin with Bathsheba, why should 10 innocent woman pay for it, but Bathsheba's
son end up being the King?! Saying “god moves in mysterious ways” is not a
proof for God's existence or God's involvement.

248---

Bible reports that Absalom's greatest glory was his hair, weighing 1.5 kg.
Now war beaks out between father & son, but Absalom delays which gives time
to David to make better preparations. We are told that David tells his killer
generals “deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom”, but I find this
hard to believe, it just doesn't fit the killer sex-machine we've seen so far.
He must have known that his killer generals were not into dealing 'gently'.

Absalom is riding on his mule in a forest, his hair gets caught in the branches,
& he is “taken up between the heaven & the earth & the mule that was under him
went on”. One of David's man reports this to Joab, who protest “why did you not
strike him to the ground?” Soldier says that he wouldn't kill king's son for
even 1000 pieces of silver because they all heard the king demanding that no
one should touch his son. So Joab went in search of Absalom who was dangling
“between the heaven & the earth”, found him & struck him “ through the heart”
with darts. But Absalom didn't die (!), so 10 men who were with Joab “smote
Absalom & slew him”.

P256---

David returned to Jerusalem & his first decree was to shut his 10 concubine,
who were raped bu his own son, away where he would never see them again, “so
they were shut up unto the day of their death in widowhood, with their husband
alive”.

P264---

David's final act of kingship was taking a census to determine the population
of Israel. One author says that God got angry at Israel & told David to “go,
number Israel & Judah”, another says that Satan made David do it. But David
feels guilty after the census, even though God ordered him to do it,”I have
sinned greatly in what I've done”! So prophet Gad, yet another man who dreams,
shows up to tell David that God intended to punish Israel with one of the 3
afflictions: 7 years of famine, 3 days of pestilence/plague, 3 months of David
fleeing while being pursued by his foes. David refused to choose but let god
know that he didn't want to “fall into the hand of man”. So god chose 3 days
of plague & 70000 men died, from Dan to Beersheba, but when it reached Jerusalem,
god relented & told angel of death “It is enough. Now stay thy hand”. But angel
of death shows itself to David as a ghostly specter hovering above the
threshing-floor of a Jebusite named Araunah. David is moved to beg God for
mercy, “Lo. I have sinned, but these sheep, what have they done? Let thy hand
be against me ...”.


1- It's beyond me to think that God would decide to punish but let the humans
choose from the 3 forms of punishments!

2- a true caring 'king', who was old already, would've chosen the option
less harmful to his people, so he'd chosen the 3rd choice. So David was not
a 'caring' king! What kind of 'God' would choose such a selfish sex-machine
killer to be king over His own Chosen people?!

3- is the author telling us that woman & children didn't die?!

4- since most of the sins seems to have been done in Jerusalem, shouldn't
the plague have started from there?!

5- But if God was angry because of the census, why punish 70000 innocent
people & spare those who did the actual census?! Not only David admits that
he has sinned, & angel of death hovers over him, yet he gets away with it,
but God kills 70000 innocent men instead?!

6- David told God he didn't want opt-3, so God would've chosen opt-1 or opt-2,
both would've resulted in a lot of death. But David said nothing, till 'death'
reached Jerusalem?! If he had cared about the 'sheep', he would've chosen opt-3.

Prophet Gad told David that this all meant that Yahweh wanted him to “rear an
altar unto the Lord in the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite”. This is
strange, if God already was using Gad to send message to David, then why use
angel of death as well & scare the shit out of his chosen King, whom he didn't
want to punish?!
>--

p266---

When Araunah learned of the king's plan, he insisted on providing David with
all of the necessaries for a ritual sacrifice: “Behold the oxen for the
burnt-offering, & the threshing-instruments & the furniture of the oxen
for wood”. David was apparently untroubled by the fact that a threshing-floor
belonging to a Jebusite might have been used as the site of idol-worship &
other pagan rituals. After all, he was accustomed to handling the teraphim &
other idols, & some of his best friends were Gittites & Philistines, Pelethites
& Cherethites, all of them idol-worshippers. But David insisted on paying for
what Araunah had offered as gift, saying “I will verily buy it at a price,
neither will I offer burnt-offering unto the Lord my God which cost me nothing”.
The 2 men settled on 50 shekels of silver as a fair price. David proceeded to
build an altar & offer up the cattle to Yahweh, “so the Lord was entreated for
the land, & the plague was stayed from Israel”.

--<
This is very strange.

Why should a killer, who for years lived off what he stole or took by force
from innocent people, refuse a free 'gift'?!

Why should God, who was so fussy about purification & rituals, out of alllllll
the unused sites in the area, choose a site that used to be used for idol-worship?!

Knowing that this site ends being the holiest Temple, it is only logical for
us to think that it wouldn't have looked good for it to have 'belonged' to
non-jews, so somebody must have 'cooked' the book to say that David 'paid'
for it, so it 'belongs' to the Jews. Some authors even claim that a much
higher price was paid for it, which proves that not all authors believed in
what was in the bible!

So God killed 70000 of innocent people, from his own people, for nothing?!

Why didn't he tell David to build the altar in the first place?
Oh, I know David had “too much blood on his hands”; but Yahweh, who smote 50000
here & 70000 there, & told his king to kill them all man/woman/children/ass, didn't?!
>--

The link between David & the Temple, that Solomon builds, is only suggested
in the book of Samuel, but it is spoken out loud in the book of Chronicles,
where the take of the threshing-floor is retold with a few significant
variation. The Jebusite who owned the sacred site is called Ornan rather
than Araunah, & the price paid by David is given as 600 shekels of gold
rather than 5 shekels of silver. According to the book of Samuel, the
threshing-floor was the site of a crude altar of sacrifice to Yahweh, but
the book of chronicles makes it clear that the Temple will rise on the same
site during the reign of David's son & successor, king Solomon. David is made
to declare, “this is the house of the Lord God, & this is the altar of
burnt-offering for Israel”. So eager was David, according to the Chronicler,
that he began to assemble a corps of masons & a supply of gold & silver, ...,
all of it to be used for “the house that is to be builded for the Lord”. But
David is not permitted to actually build the Temple. David tells his Solomon,
“my son, as for me, it was in my heart to built a house unto the name of the
Lord my God, but the word of the Lord came to me, saying: 'thou hast shed
blood abundantly, & hast made great wars; thou shalt not build a house unto
my name ....”. but Solomon was no less of an intriguer than his father, no
less ruthless in his lust for power, no less willing to shed blood of even
his closest kin.

At the age of 70, the king of Israel, once so fresh & full of promise, once
so strong & virile, lay alone in the bed that had accommodated so many warm
bodies. “now king David was old & stricken in years; & they covered him with
clothes, but he could get no heat”.

P270---

One of the courtiers suggested a way to cheer his king: “let there be sought
for my lord the king a young virgin, & let her stand before the king, & be a
companion unto him, & let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat”.

So a kind of bible-era beauty contest was conducted throughout the land of
Israel until a suitable woman was found - a “fair damsel” called Abishag, a
woman from the town of Shunam in the hill-country outside Jerusalem.

Would the next king of Israel be Adonijah, David's eldest son, or Solomon,
the late-born son of David & Bathsheba? These 2 contested each other for the
throne. The very idea of dynastic succession was something wholly new in ancient
Israel, & no law or custom was available to resolve the conflicting claims of
Adonijah & Solomon.

Solomon was more subtle in his politicking but no less effective.

David's ruthless general sides with Adonijah, but Nathan sided with Solomon.

“Have you not heard that Adonijah has become king, all unknown to our lord
David?” Nathan said to Bathsheba. “Now come, let me advise you what to do for
your own safety & for the safety of your son, Solomon”.

Nathan urged Bathsheba to present herself to king David & remind him that he
had once vowed to her that he would make Solomon his successor as king of Israel.
Until now, the bible has reported no such promise by David, & some scholars
think that Nathan may simply have invented it.

--<
I bet the blind-fanatics would say Yahweh told Nathan to do this.

Also, if the dynasty had changed in future, some author would've said that
'Satan' made Nathan do it.

This is what happens when man puts words in God's mouth, when anybody could
say that God told him so in a dream.
>--

Bathsheba talked to David & named names, listing each of the courtiers who
were siding with Adonijah, & said, “and now, my lord the king, all Israel is
looking to you to announce who is to succeed you on the throne. Otherwise,
when you sleep with your forefather, my son Solomon & I shall be treated as
criminals”.

--<
So no matter who became the king, he'd treat others as criminals & kill all opposition.

This is another reason why this 'king-system' was not decided or planned by
the all-knowing all-powerful God! Such a God would know humans & would plan a
'system' to prevent any dog from taking over His Kingdom & mess it up.

At very least, God should've chosen the next king, well in advance, & not sit
back & watch dog-eat-dog.

If Nathan were a true prophet, he'd go directly to David & tell him that Yahweh
wanted Solomon to be king, & not scheme with a 'foreign' woman who committed adultery.
>--

Nathan, who had slipped into the king's bedchamber during Bathsheba's address,
confirmed that everything Bathsheba had told him was true & then added a few
incriminating details of his own. The sons of David & Joab, his general, ate &
drank with Adonijah, boldly toasting him as if he already wore David's crown:
“Long live king Adonijah!”

David promised Bathsheba, “... that Solomon your son should succeed me, & that
he should sit on my throne, & so will I do this day”. David promptly set in
motion the plan that would make Solomon the next king of Israel.

At the very moment of Solomon's anointment, as the bible reveals, Adonijah &
his own band of intimates - Joab & high priest & all the other sons of David -
were celebrating what turned out to be Adonijah's premature claim on the kingship.

--<
This is so stupid.

They must've had good reason for thinking so & David should've known it to.
There should've been no doubt who was to be the next king.

David created hostility by his own stupidity & such a stupid sex-machine killer
can be no man of God & no God-chosen King.


When Adonijah's supporters found out that Solomon was now the king, they all
began to scatter in panic & abandoned him.
Adonijah went to the altar of Yahweh, a squat column of stone with a hornlike
protuberance on each corner, & he caught hold on the horns of the altar, thus
invoking an ancient tradition by which a man could claim the protection of
Yahweh against his pursuer.
It is reported to Solomon that Adonijah has laid hold on the horns of the altar,
saying: 'let king Solomon swear to me first of all that he will not slay his
servant with the sword”.
Solomon replied, “if he shall show himself a worthy man, there shall not a hair
of him fall to the earth, but if wickedness be found in him, he shall die”.
Adonijah went to Solomon & prostrated himself before his brother in abject surrender.
>--

David charged Solomon to be resolute & ruthless in claiming & keeping the crown
of Israel. Just as Moses & God once charged Joshua, conqueror of Canaan, to
“be strong & of good courage”, David urged Solomon: “be thou strong, & show
thyself a man”.

Next, David gave orders for what would be his final act of revenge. Indeed,
he gave Solomon a hit list - “a last will & testament worthy of a dying Mafia
capo”, & the scene was copied in the movie The Godfather.
David said, “You know how Joab treated me & what he did to 2 commanders-in-chief
in Israel. He killed them both, breaking the peace by bloody acts of war, & with
that blood he stained the belt about my waist & the sandals on my feet. Do as
your wisdom prompts you, & let not his gray hairs go down to the grave in peace”.

David told Solomon that he was still nursing a grudge against old Shimei, the
man who once cursed him as a “bloodstained fiend of hell”, & instructed him to
punish Shimei for the old insult. He even admitting that by doing so he was
carefully sidestepping his own vow to God, “true, I swore by the Lord that I
would not put him to death with the sword, but you don't need to let him go
unpunished now ... ,bring his gray hairs in blood to the grave”. .. to the
very end, then David was a “man of war” & a “man of blood”.

--<
I find it incredible that Jews believed that their Messiah was going to be
from blood-line of David. What is there to admire in him?!

How could anybody think that somebody like Jesus could've been from David's
bloodline! But then, one could say that Jews didn't accept Jesus as their Messiah.
Which also proves that Jesus was not God & was not chosen by the all-knowing
all-powerful God, because such a God would not fail to 'move' His followers in
His direction & have them follow His chosen Prophet or Messiah.
>--

some late biblical editor, who probably came along a few hundred years after
these lines were first written down, found himself appalled at the brutality,
cynicism, ruthlessness, & sheer impiety of David's final charge to Solomon.
So he decided to give the dying king a few theologically correct lines to speak,
& he boldly wrote these new lines into the old text “keep the charge of the
Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, ..., according to that which is written in
the law of Moses, ...”

--<
Therefore, the whole book can't be trusted at all.

It is not 'facts' but fiction & lies, edited by too many editors, each with
his own hidden agenda.
>--

according to Deuteronomy, the fate of ancient Israel was not predetermined by
God; rather, the Israelites enjoyed the gift of free will, & their fate depended
on how they used it. So the promise of God to house of David came with a big “if”:
“if” thy children take heed to walk before me in truth with all their heart & with
all their soul, there shall not fail thee ...” But the biblical spin doctor at
work here chose to ignore the promise that God had once made to David through
the prophet Nathan, “When thou shalt sleep with thy father, I will set up thy
seed after thee, & I will establish the throne of his king forever”, promised God.

At the moment of his birth, according to a tale preserved in the Midrash, David
was destined to survive only 3 hours, “He would've dies immediately had not
Adam made him a present of 70 years”. Indeed, even though more biblical text
is devoted to David than to any other figure in the Hebrew bible, relatively
few tales are told about him in the vast accumulation of legends & lore that
we find in the Talmud & the Midrash. The flesh-&-blood is rendered in the bible
with such brilliance that mere mythmaking seems hardly worth the effort.

“And the days that David reigned over Israel were 40 years: 7 years reigned
he in Hebron, & 33 years reigned he in Jerusalem. And Solomon sat upon the
throne of David his father; & his kingdom was firmly established”

p282---

[Admzad]

p282---

--<
Solomon's first victim was his brother, Adonijah, the man he'd forgiven. The
biblical author says that Adonijah approached Bathsheba with a strange &
shocking request: “you know the kingdom was mine but I was passed over ....
And now I make one small request of you, don't refuse me. Speak to king Solomon,
for he will not refuse you! Ask that he give me Abishag the Shunamite in marriage”.

This is too shocking & stupid to believe. The bible has made it clear by few
examples that one should not go anywhere near a king's wife/concubine, yet we
are supposed to believe that king's son, who was scared of his own life &
prostrated to Solomon, would now say such a stupid thing, when he could've
had almost any virgin girl in the country.

In fact, Adonijah's demand was so plainly suicidal that scholars cannot take
it seriously, so they suggest that perhaps Bathsheba falsely made this accusation
to persuade her son to kill this potential rival, or maybe some later biblical
author made up the whole story in order to provide a excuse for Solomon's
assassination of his own brother.

As everyone in the royal household except Adonijah seemed to recognize, the
request was a plain act of treason, & Solomon recognized it as such.

******************

It seems that the authors are deliberately trying to shock their readers with
extreme exaggeration just to wake them up or scare them into submission,
like:
God smote not just 10, but 50000;
David's son raped not just 1 of his wives/concubines in private, but 10 of them
on the roof where allllll Israel watched; etc.

The authors never say David had a silent fart, because it would be boring; so
they say David had a giant exploding fart that smote 5000 Philistines
& created a sand storm, which killed 50,000 Philistines & then the rest of the
Philistine army of 500,000 ran away in terror.

They give Yahweh the same treatment: Yahweh didn't just kill 1 or 2 people, He
smote 50,000 because 1 man made him angry; or Yahweh didn't command that 10 of the
Philistine leaders be killed, he commanded that every man, woman, child, & animal be
killed, & He got very angry when even 1 man was spared.

Perhaps they did this exaggeration to raise their own profile - by raising
Yahweh's profile - & to make the defeated & abused Israelite, who were living
as slaves in exile, feel good & make them proud so they follow Judaism & not
convert to the religion of their masters.

*****************

Solomon's chose Benaiah, who was a sinister thug who out-Joabs his predecessor,
to be his executioner. Benaiah killed Adonijah & then went after others who were
on David's death-list. Joab ran away to the tent-shrine of Yahweh & clung to the
horned altar. Benaiah not wanting to violate the sanctuary of Yahweh, reported
this to Solomon, who told him to kill Joab in the shrine!
>--

King Solomon's extraordinary ruthlessness in ridding himself of enemies &
rivals has convinced some scholars that David is wrongly blamed in the bible
for the crimes of his son. Perhaps, they speculate, the life story of David -
or at least the so-called Succession Document that describes how Solomon came
to be his successor - was first composed in the court of Solomon to explain
(& excuse) his willingness to kill for the crown. If, as the bible records,
Solomon was the 4th son of David & the offspring of a marriage that began in
adultery, the royal chroniclers in Solomon's court might have felt it necessary
to explain how & why he ended up on the throne ahead of his 3 older brothers.
And, significantly , they may have decided that a frank account of David's
life as a “man of blood” would make Solomon look somewhat less bloodthirsty,
if only by comparison to his father.

The united monarchy over which David had reigned, however, didn't survive
Solomon's death. Indeed, the kingdom shattered along the same stress lines
of tribal politics that can readily be seen in the life story of David. Only
the tribe of Judah recognized Solomon's son as his successor. Ten of the other
tribes now seceded from the tribal union & established their own monarchy.

The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in 772 BCE, & its people
were dispersed & destroyed - a catastrophe so complete that they have come to
be known as the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. Judah, too, eventually fell to a
foreign power when the Babylonians invaded & conquered the southern kingdom
in 597 BCE, & began to send the aristocracy, intelligentsia, & the priesthood
into exile. Babylonians destroyed the Temple of Solomon, razed the city of
Jerusalem, & put the last Davidic king to death in 586 BCE.

God may have promised eternal kingship to David & his descendants - “And thy
house & they kingdom shall be made sure forever” - but history proved God
to be wrong.

--<
God can never fail & can never be wrong, so it must be that God never made the
promise, & that man created this fiction to make Israelites feel good.
>--

289---

Slowly & subtly, the notion of eternal kingship began to be reworked &
reinterpreted, & a new theological spin was put on God's vow to king David ....
the next king from the house of David would be a spiritual emissary from God,
both a king & a messiah, & he would reign not in the here & now but in the end
of times. And yet, even then, the Messiah-King would be a direct descendant of
David. Indeed, he might be David himself, raised from the dead & elevated to
the right hand of God. Thus was David transformed from an earthly king into a
celestial one.

Here is exactly the pint in history where “messiah” began to take on the
profoundly mystical & history-changing meaning that is now attached to the
word in both Jewish & Christian tradition. The phrase 'anointed one' (mashiach
in biblical Hebrew, “messiah” in English translation) refers to anyone who was
anointed with oil in a ritual of coronation. Later, the term was used to identify
anyone who merited the special favor of God; for example, the Persian emperor
Cyrus II, who defeated the Babylonians, is identified as an “anointed one” by
the prophet Isaiah.
But now the Messiah became the spiritual focus for the yearning of an oppressed,
heartbroken people. “Messiah”, as the term came to be understood, now identified
the redeemer whom God would send one day to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.

The yearning for the Messiah only grew sharper as the subsequent generations
in the land of Judah tasted fro themselves the bitter experience of foreign
occupation & oppression, first under the Persians, then the Greeks, & finally
the Romans.

The last man to bear the title “king of the Jews” was Herod the Great, a Roman
puppet-king from the neighboring Arab land of Idumea, a man whose family had
only recently converted to Judaism as a matter of opportunism & who was generally
loathed by the Jewish people.

--<
Herod was technically not a Jew, his mother was Arab.
>--

by 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple & razed Jerusalem to the
ground, the messianic idea was the focus of both Judaism & Christianity, although
Jews & Christians had reached very different conclusions about the identity of
Messiah. Christians believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah, &
Jews were (& are) still awaiting him. On one thing, however, Christians & Jews
agree: the Messiah would be a direct descendant of king David, “a shoot out of
the stock of Jesse”.

According to Talmudic sages, “if the Messiah-King comes from among the living,
David will be his name; if he comes from among the dead, it will be David himself”.
The genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels trace his human lineage all the way back
to king David, even though, strictly speaking, Christian theology doesn't regard
Jesus as the son of a mortal father.

On one article of faith, then, Christians & Jews were in agreement: the ancient
promise of eternal kingship that God conveyed to David through the prophecy of
Nathan would be fulfilled one day, & on that day, the blood of David would flow
in the veins of a savior, a redeemer, a liberator - the Messiah.

The sacralization of David reaches its most exalted expression in a passage of
the Christian bible where the royal bloodlines of king David are invoked to
authenticate Jesus of Nazareth as the long-promised & long-delayed Messiah.

P292---

During the first century CE, the Tenth Legion in Palestine remained under
standing orders from four successive Roman emperors “to hunt out & execute
any Jew who claimed to be a descendant of king David”. The order was given
precisely because “political revolutionaries inevitably traced their right
of government back to king David”.

After the victory of 1967, a minister in Israeli government asserted that
the modern state of Israel enjoyed the legal right to clear the Temple Mount,
as the site is known in Jewish tradition, because king David had purchased
it form Araunah the Jebusite for 50 pieces of silver.

More recently, Yael Dayan, member of parliament & daughter of Moshe Dayan,
cited the intimate relationship between David & Jonathan in support of a
proposed law to extend civil rights to gay men & lesbians.

In 1997, a celebration of the 3000th anniversary of Jerusalem was conducted
in the modern state of Israel & in Jewish communities throughout the world.
What actually happened 3000 years ago in Jerusalem? According to the bible,
it was the conquest of the Jebusite hill-town by the newly crowned king of
Israel & his private army of foreign mercenaries, perhaps by means of a commando
attack on the water works & the slaughter of “the blind & the lame”.

Robert Alter is convinced of David's history & writes that it is “possible”
that the soap opera of David's intimate family life “may have been reported
on good authority”, he is intellectually honest enough to admit to concede
that the biblical stories “are not, strictly speaking, historiography, but
rather the imaginative reenactment of history by a gifted writer”.

P296---

Perhaps the biblical king David is best compared to the medieval king Arthur ...
Like Arthur, David may have been a rude aboriginal chieftain whose obscure life
was glorified beyond recognition by later mythmakers.

Even the so-called Start of David, the symbol that has come to signify Judaism
in general & the modern state of Israel in particular, has no real connection
with king David. The distinctive six-pointed start first came to be associated
with David among alchemists & magic-users in medieval Christian & Islamic
circles, & early Jewish sources linked the start sometimes to David, sometimes
to Solomon, & sometimes to neither of them. The earliest written reference to
the “Shield of David“ (magen David), as six-pointed star is known in Jewish
usage, dates only to the 14 century. And it was not until the 19 century that
the Star of David came to be adopted by the Jewish community as “a striking &
simple sign which would 'symbolize' Judaism in the same way as the cross
symbolizes Christianity”, according to Gershom Scholem, a leading scholar of
Jewish mysticism.

Still, as mighty as David & his little empire may have been, they wholly
escaped the attention of the scribes & chroniclers of every other nation of
the ancient world, & the story of his conquests is told only in the pages of
the bible.

There is not a single contemporary reference to David or Solomon in the many
neighboring countries which certainly were keeping written records during the
10 century BCE. As far as archaeology is concerned it was a paper empire only
(existing only in the bible).

--<
In 1993, a team of archaeologists was at work at a place in northern Israel
called Tel Dan, which had been under work since 1966. they found a stone which
was a portion of a stela, with some inscription on it. But the stela had been
broken up & put to use as building material not long after it was made. The
language was early Aramaic, a sister language of biblical Hebrew. It referred
to the 'house of David' (bet David), recording the 'defeat' of a king from the
house of David, dating back to early 8 century BCE.

“I [killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab] king of Israel,
& [I] killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin-]g of the house of David.
And I set [their towns into ruin & turned] their land into [desolation]”

the missing words & letters make it impossible to prove that the stela makes
a direct reference to king David. Indeed, he (Thomas Thompson) points out,
the word that has been interpreted as “David” also appears on an important
archaeological find from Jordan, the Mesha Stele of the 8 century BCE, where
it is used as the divine title for an ancient god called Yahweh, who may or
may not be the same deity who is identified as the God of Israel in the bible.

Exactly what are we meant to learn from king David as he is depicted in the
bible? Once we have read his biblical life story with open eyes - & once we
have witnessed the shocking excesses of which he was capable - some of us may
be left with the idea that he doesn't really belong in a book that holds itself
out as a source of moral instruction for humankind!

David seemed to embrace only the thoroughly modern notion that nothing succeeds
like success - or, when it came to satisfying his sexual appetite, the equally
modern notion that nothing succeeds like excess.

David does what he has to do to preserve his power at all costs: just ask his 7
brothers whom he jumped in the quest for the family's patrimony; king Saul whom
he undercut as a monarch; Ahimelech, the priest whom he gulled out of Goliath's
sword; Uriah, whom David arranged to have killed so that he could sleep with
Uriah's wife (for much longer that he already had done), Bathsheba; & the
tens of thousands of dead he left strewn about Palestine as he conquered his
various neighbors, aggressive & pacific alike.

P304---

The Talmudic rabbis were so troubled by the plain facts of David's life that
they simply dreamed up a new & improved David. “Whatever leisure time his royal
duties afforded him, he spent in study & prayer”, they imagined.

Other bible readers may prefer the vision of David that we encounter in the
prophetic writings of the bible - a wholly celestial messiah-king .... Prophet
Isaiah exults, “A son is given unto us , & of peace there be no end, upon the
throne of David”. Here he becomes the child=king who reigns in a utopia that
resembles nothing in the life experience of the fleshly David: “& the wolf
shall dwell with the lamb, ..., & a little child shall lead them”.

Such images still exerts a powerful tug on the hearts & minds of men & women
who are aghast at the world in which we find ourselves nowadays, a world that
tolerates & even encourages “ethnic cleansing”, child pornography, biological
warfare, “squash” videos, & the miscellaneous horrors of modernity. Indeed,
some corners of the bible still offer a comfortable refuge for those who find
themselves battered & bruised by what confronts us in newspapers & motion
pictures, & on TV & the Internet.

But more often the bible is not a comforting book. It is often provocative &
challenging, unsettling & off-putting, sometimes even shocking & scandalous.
The deepest of all the mysteries that confront us in the Hebrew bible is the
mystery of how a man as flawed as David can be a man after God's own heart.

When the prophet Micah wonders out loud what God demands of us, his answer
is a simple moral credo that can be understood & acted upon in here & now:
“only to do justly & to love mercy, & to walk humbly with thy God”. Even
prophet Isiah says that God wants us: “... to share your bread with the hungry,
& to take the wretched poor into your home, ...”

David, of course, cannot readily be credited with the profound compassion or
the fierce sense of social justice that inspired the prophets. His last charge
to his beloved son was: “be thou strong, & show thyself a man”!


--<
The more I read this book, the more shocked I became: brother (next in line to
succeed God's king) raping sister, son raping step-mothers, etc etc.

But, the author(JK) is not bullshitting.
This can only mean that David wasn't holy at all & was full of shit, which means
the all-knowing & all-powerful God had nothing to do with this guy.

Hell, even Yahweh didn't want David to build the Temple!

We've seen how Yahweh, the god of Judaism, who is also supposed to be the god of
Christianity & Islam, operated for centuries, choosing so many prophets, one after
the other, letting them make decisions by tossing coins, & say 'God told me so'.
Why should such a god, all of a sudden decide to change His religion by choosing a
circumcised Jew to preach a new religion, then before he gets anywhere, have him
crucified, then resurrect him into an almost god-like figure?

Even more dramatic, as many believe, why should such a god, the all-knowing
all-powerful God, decide to give up on prophets & come to earth, in the form of a
Jewish child, created from virgin birth, then get circumcised & live among normal
Jews for 30 years, then get crucified, without converting most Jews to His new
religion? If all he wanted was to suffer for 'our sins', then why come in the
form of a child from virgin birth, why not appear in the form of an adult, preach,
then get crucified? How come this child's own mother didn't consider him a prophet
or God?

When you read early banned 'bibles', you see very clearly that Christianity as we
know it today did not exists in 100 CE, it has gradually changed over the centuries
to what it is now. It too had extremely corrupt clergies & caused too much pain &
prosecution & killings, all in the name of Jesus who said “turn the other cheek”
& “love thy enemy”. But the true religion of the all-knowing & all-powerful God would
be very clear from the start, & wouldn't allow men to re-invent it or shape it into
what they like. At the very least, such a religion would at least say that earth is
not flat. How could a 'holy' book talk about brothers raping their sisters, but not
mention that earth moves around the sun? Simple, its 'authors' didn't know this
simple fact, so they were not 'connected' to God at all.

Doesn't the fact that most Jews didn't accept Jesus as their prophet or messiah
prove that God failed? How would it look like if Mohammad had failed to convert
Arabs to Islam, then moved to France & converted all France to Islam, praying in
the French language & reading Quran in French? Would it not be strange? Isn't a
'prophet' supposed to be accepted by his own people? Then how come Jesus was not
accepted by most Jews?


Yahweh has clearly failed in many of his actions & promises, as described in
this book.

God, by definition, simply doesn't work this way at all.
The all-knowing all-powerful God is never wrong, can never fail, & doesn't do
stupid things or things that make no sense.


I've often criticized Shiit Muslims for following a rubbish religion, but this
stuff about David is simply beyond belief. If anybody says such things about any
of the 12 Imams, he won't live long, yet these things are not mere accusations,
they are all in the Old Testament, in black & white, for all to see! Which goes
to show how stupid people used to be in the BC days, or centuries after it, to
have believed in this rubbish, as 'facts' about God.


This also proves that most people follow the religion of their parents, no matter
what it is. Because as children they accept everything they are told as facts &
can't use much 'logic' to question things. Once they grow up, it's too late for
change for most, & it is much easier to follow the 'tradition' & the crowd. In fact,
often, those who dare to question their religion, are simply killed by the crowd
or the power-hungry & corrupt clergy.

But can we expect much from them when, even now, millions follow all sorts of
rubbish religions.

Just take the uneducated Shiit Muslims of Miran, who still believe what the
filthy killer KIR mullahs tell them.


Billions of people believe in all sorts of rubbish & gods & religions all over the
world, so it must 'work' for them at some level, it must pay off & give them some
comfort at least. So it seems to me that no matter what religion you follow, you'd
benefit from it. So, if any religion would do the job, then why not follow the one
that would make more sense & would cause the least damage. But to find such a religion,
we need to use our rational thinking & logic, & not just give in to peer pressure &
follow the stampeding-cattle-crowd.

At very least we must try to be open, not be fanatic about what our parents have
told us about their religion, & we must not accept it all as God-given facts.

What if there is a God & we are following the wrong religion?!

God-NO-Ahmaq,
mardom-Ahmaq!

>--

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