As a teenager I was fascinated by the story of King David. It was a part of the Bible I read over and over again. Looking back on it, I think it’s because David is the most complete and the most human character in the Bible, even including Jesus. D espite his flaws and his repeated failures he keeps trying to do right and enjoys tremendous success. Plus, there’s lots of action, plenty of blood and guts and a fair amount of sex. At one point I even wrote an ancient history assignment about King David’s role in Israelite history. However, I lost marks because of my naïve acceptance of the Biblical accounts as accurate history, my failure to evaluate them as sources. To be fair to my teenage self, back in the 1970s most historians had a fairly generous view of the historicity of Samuel and 1 Kings. Not that I knew anything about it at age 16, but most critics regarded elements of these stories as reaching back to two narratives written close to the time of David himself –
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson