The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks

I had seen myself as a man in the hand of the Name--serving the king chosen to lead his people in this Land. But what kind of god could will this baseness, this treachery? What kind of nation could rise under such a leader? If David was a man after this god's own heart, as my inner voice had told me often and again, what kind of black-hearted deity held me in his grip?

King David is one of the Biblical era's most interesting characters. As Geraldine Brooks notes in her afterword to The Secret Chord, her novel of David's life, he's the first person in history for whom we have a recorded life from birth to death. Speaking from my own Christian perspective, David is remembered as the Psalmist--the composer of the beautiful songs that make up the book of Psalms. The other side of David--the warrior king, the rebel against Saul, the rebelled-against by his own son Absalom, the seducer of Bathsheba and killer of her husband Uriah--I remember mostly from Sunday School stories that never seemed as important or worth remembering as an adult.

But Brooks, whose reputation is one of the premier modern fiction writers of Jewish themes, brings back that complicated picture of David. Her David is not only complex, most of the time he just seems like a big piece of shit. The novel is told by the prophet Natan (an un-Anglicized version, as most of the names here are, of "Nathan"), one of David's closest advisors and the mouthpiece of the Jewish God, or "the Name," who has put David on the throne, and whom David has tasked with writing his autobiography. As Nathan tells it, David begins as a Jewish hero (the slayer of the Plishtim Goliath) beloved, then suspected, by King Shaul, who chases him into the desert and forces bloody conflict. David becomes a hero and a king by defeating Shaul, but the choices needed to bring the tribes of Israel together are bloody ones.

It seems like an old story: what is the barrier between our desire for power and our desire to use power for justice? How far is too far in the service of what we call a greater good? These are, if you'll allow me to say so, Game of Thrones questions, and if you squint, a lot of the head-rolling and sword-stabbing of The Secret Chord recalls those books. But David's iniquities don't stop with the necessary, as symbolized by his actions toward Batsheva, whom he lusts for after seeing her bathing on her roof, and her husband Uriah, whom David sends to his death to cover up his misdeed. There is no greater good in this scenario, only David's lust, weakness, and cruelty. This horrible act is repeated among David's sons, like Amnon, who rapes his own sister Tamar, and Avshalom, who rebels against David through his own desire for power--gruesome sins that serve only the most base human instincts.

OK, that's a little Game of Thrones-y too. But the interesting thing here is that, while David is punished sorely by the Name for what he does to Batsheva, God never removes his anointing, or his favor, from David. There's a familiarity to this for me; I had always heard the story of David and Bathsheba as an illustration of how God uses flawed people. But David isn't just flawed; Brooks' account reminds us that David can actually be monstrous, and yet the Name works through him even still, with the result that David's wise son Shlomo (Solomon) becomes the King of Israel.

One thing I liked about The Secret Chord is that much of its focus is on the women whose voices are largely absent in the Bible's account of David's life. Batsheva is one of these, who tells Natan pointedly that what David did to her was a rape. But in writing David's biography, Natan uncovers woman after woman who has been misused not just by David, but by the patriarchal demands of the Jewish political state. There's David's first wife Mikahl, forgotten, remarried, and then reclaimed from her loving husband to wither and suffer in a remote room of the palace. There's Tamar, raped and disfigured by Amnon. Even when not subject to physical abuse, women here find themselves little more than pawns in bloody male games. Combined with the novel's insistence on David's anointing, there's a forebidding and difficult tension here.

A shallow reading might be something like, yes, abuse is bad, but we must ignore it so that our political ends are met. (You can come to your own conclusions about whether that's an ideology on the table in this, the Year of Our Lord 2020.) A better reading might say something about the reality of sin and its violent consequences, and to force us to recognize what a radical thing we say when we say that God forgives, or absolves, or that God has a "plan for us."