Читать книгу In Search of Soul - Alejandro Nava - Страница 12

2

On Hebrew Soul

De Eloquentia Vulgaria

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.

—Federico García Lorca¹

Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me

And true savant of this dark nature be.

—Wallace Stevens

At the end of Socrates’s Symposium, late in the night when all the revelers at the party have succumbed to sleep except for Agathon and Aristophanes, Socrates shares a prophecy of a poet yet to come. He dreams of a poet who will combine tragic and comic styles in a new, comprehensive manner. Presumably this artist will make poetry out of the wild discord and contradictions of human life—out of grief and laughter, violence and love, the sublime and the ordinary—adding bits and pieces of each to make a rich brew. If one is persuaded by Eric Auerbach’s argument in Mimesis, however, this prophecy never materialized in ancient Greece. While the Greeks mastered tragedy and comedy, high and low styles, they generally kept the two apart, rarely allowing the experiences and characters of ordinary, everyday life to play a significant role in anything but comedy. For the marriage of these disparate styles another kind of genius had to emerge, outside of the aristocratic culture of the Greeks, and it did so at the hands of barbarians at the farthest edges of the Greco-Roman world, nomads and tribes that came together to produce the sacred writ of the Bible.²

By joining together the incongruent themes of tragedy and comedy, the Bible turned the spectacle of lowly, poor lives—shepherds and wanderers, exiles and refugees, the conquered and colonized—into the stuff of sublimity. For the first time in Western history the lives of the ordinary, poor, and rude were the subject of lofty narratives, with themes that were as sublime as anything found in Greek tragedy or philosophy. In contrast to the emphasis on the ruling classes in Greek tragedy, nothing was too humble or too coarse for biblical texts. They inscribed everything in their pages and made the long treks of exiles and slaves sacred history. Access to the Bible’s tree of knowledge, to its soul, is only possible if we have the eyes and ears to recognize the unlikely wisdom that comes from the experiences of the dispossessed, that oozes from the Bible’s lowest branches like thick sap.

I begin this chapter with a consideration of the terminology of nephesh in the Hebrew Bible, but I also explore the meaning of this concept from a more elevated, bird’s-eye perspective, one that surveys the dense, tangled forest of the soul from a literary and narrative perspective, in the last part of this chapter. Because the concept of the soul is the product of a story—a “living book” as Teresa of Ávila said—I do my best to unspool the narrative threads of this story, with a specific focus on the way the Bible commingles tragedy and comedy and hence weaves together its drama with high and low strands of thought. As I discuss later in the chapter, the result is a pattern that features, in bold color, the sensibilities of the outcast, the outsider, and the downtrodden, so that if one can speak of the heart and soul of the Bible, it will be found in the Bible’s predilection for these themes. Later interpretations of “soul” in Western history—say in African American or Latin American Christianity—addressed many of these themes when they spoke of “soul,” even when it was transfigured in a newer, more modern light. But here I begin with a discussion of some of the basic qualities, tones, and inflections of nephesh in the Bible.

NEPHESH AND THE BREATH OF LIFE

As an entry point, I begin with nephesh’s association with the life force of a living being: the soul is related to the needs and respirations of the human body, to the blood and oxygen coursing through one’s veins (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 17:11) or to the throat, where life is maintained by the absorption of food and respiration of air (Ps. 107:5; Eccles. 6:7; Isa. 29:8; Prov. 6:30). Nephesh is a source of life, the secret power that enlivens the body and spirit of a person, the gush of life vivifying and quickening the substance of man and woman, bringing it into being. More encompassing than corporeal or spiritual needs alone, the soul is a shrine or reservoir for a variety of passions and hopes, both sensual and intangible.

Because nephesh is connected to the breath of life (in its verb form, it can mean “to respire or breathe”), it also suggests something deeply intimate and interior to the human person and thus can be used in the Bible with a personal pronoun, as in “my nephesh” (Gen. 19:19; Judg. 16:30; Ps. 54:6). In this form the term seems to indicate the sanctity of personal identity, that which constitutes the unseen fabric of a singular human being. With this nuance added, nephesh is the life or spirit that defines and distinguishes one person’s existence from others, the quintessence that makes one unique and peculiar. As a product of God’s maternal care in the womb, the soul is irreplaceable and inimitable: “You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). In this vein, Robert Alter notes that nephesh can mean a person’s essential self, in addition to “life force” or “vital spirit.”³

Notwithstanding this intimacy between God and the human soul, however, the Hebrew soul remains a creature of flesh and blood; it is not inherently divine. The Torah leaves no doubt on this point: Like the grass of the earth and flowers of the field, the human person will wither and drop its leaves, fade, and return to the dust, says the poet and prophet Isaiah (Isa. 40:6–7). The human soul is fragile and impermanent, vulnerable to events outside its control and always vexed by the burden of the grave (Josh. 2:13; 1 Sam. 19:11; Ps. 34:23). Given the omnipresence of death and destruction in ancient Jewish history (individually and collectively), it is only natural that nephesh would be marked by the heavy and at times awful destiny of Israel. If biblical authors speak of Israel as often tottering on the edge of ruin, it is scarcely different when they consider the human soul: it is human-all-too-human. Consider the distressed effusions of the soul in the following psalm:

For my soul is sated with troubles,

my life’s reached the brink of Sheol.

I’m counted with those who go down to the Pit,

in darkness, in the depths.

Your wrath lies hard upon me,

With all your breakers you afflict me. (Ps. 88:3–8)

The image here of descent into the Pit (similar to the “Pit” of lions into which Daniel is thrown or the “Pit” of the whale in the Book of Jonah) is of course a confrontation with the underworld. The psalmist here is in an existential struggle, fighting for his life, doing what he can to keep the breakers from submerging his soul. With troubles all around and God’s displeasure upon him, the poet seems to be dying many small deaths: “We consume our years like a sigh” (Ps. 90:10).

Although the author of the psalm directs his blackest emotions at the heavens here, we cannot overlook the fact that he (apparently miraculously) continues to live and write. It is impossible to read the scriptures and not notice the myriad forces that menace and threaten one’s personal identity, but at the same time, the Torah is a tribute to the remarkable capacity of the human soul to survive to tell the tale, an achievement of both grit and grace. Snatched from the grip of Sheol, these moments of survival suddenly become the occasion for praise by the psalmist. It is natural, then, that the Psalms pair, in almost exactly equal quantities, psalms of supplication with psalms of praise. (These two types comprise two-thirds of the Psalms.)⁴ While the psalms of supplication give voice to the crushing weight of sorrow and suffering, the psalms of praise are jubilant, celebratory, and restorative; the former describe the downward slope into the depths of anguish, and the latter record the capacity of the soul to ascend from the pits of life (Psalm 121 is specifically called “a song of ascents” in this regard). The Psalms represent the soul in rich, polyphonic notes, both high and low, exultant and downhearted, a rowdy mixture of fears and torments on the one hand and undaunted spiritual aspirations on the other.

NEPHESH AND TRANSCENDENT LONGINGS

Besides suggesting respiration, personal identity, and life force, nephesh is also associated with immeasurable and sublime longings. Derived from the root wh (to desire) and the verb ns (to rise), nephesh is related to hopes and cravings that would elevate the mundane existence of humanity. In this sense, while nephesh is as vulnerable as a naked body in the desert and as susceptible to decomposition as any other creature of earth, it also embodies the ethereal and transcendent desires of man and woman, their ferocious appetite for God. However brief and transient our lives are, human beings have inexhaustible desires that distinguish us from all other animals, and nephesh is the source of these emotions, the restless energy that makes us long and hanker for impossible things: love, righteousness, God. “As a deer yearning for streams of water, so my soul yearns for you, God. / My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. / O when shall I come to appear before God?” (Ps. 42:1–2; see also Ps. 25:1; 130:5; Song of Songs 1:7).

The nephesh represents the far-reaching and untethered desires of humankind, the Abrahamic drive to seek, to strive, to reach for the unknown. Insatiable and infinite in its hunger, the soul is forever wanting, forever roaming in search of new worlds and new possibilities. The soul stretches out and follows “knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”⁵ It is endlessly drawn toward God, a moth to the flame.

Because it is sealed with the imago Dei, the nephesh also participates in the divine nature of God and shares with him the uncanny powers of creation. Endowed with the ability to name the things of creation, human beings have been given the art of language, with the potential to make something out of nothing, life out of death, order out of chaos, and beauty out of a blank canvas. Lest this blessing become a curse, however, biblical thought is relentless in rebuking man for his vanity and actions that disdain mortal limits. The children of Adam are constantly reminded of their origins in the earth, that they are made of dust and ashes. (The name “Adam” is, after all, derived from the Hebrew adamah, or soil.) Recall this solemn moment in Genesis: “The Lord God fashioned the human from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature” (Gen. 2:4–47). Working with earth and clay, God infused this organism with his own spirit and thus imbued it with dignity and divine properties. The soul is thus bifurcated, a curious mixture of both chthonic and transcendent qualities.

NEPHESH AND THE HEART

Since the Bible often pairs soul and heart, we should consider the points of contact between these two, as in the great commandment in Deuteronomy, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your might” (Deut. 6:5), and Josiah’s determination to follow the Lord’s decrees with “all his heart and soul” (2 Kings 23:3). This injunction is of supreme significance and is to be fixed on one’s arm and forehead, inscribed on one’s doorposts, engraved on one’s heart, and recited to one’s children. Everything that one is, everything that one can be, is contained in these words and implies a total, comprehensive dedication to the covenant with YHWH. “Heart” and “soul” bleed into each other; both can be seen as repositories of the transcendent, spiritual qualities of human beings, and both are centers of love and reverence. Together, they are the intimate sanctuaries of human nature, in which God confers life, wisdom, and understanding, “where individuals face themselves with their feelings, their reason, and their conscience, and where they assume their responsibilities by making decisive choices for themselves, whether those are open to God or not.”⁶ To retreat into the deep caverns of the heart and soul is thus to find the real “me,” the oldest and nearest and truest “me.” Somewhere deeper than our public personas lie heart and soul, where God will suddenly confront us with the most momentous and vital of decisions, will undress and strip away our egos, leaving something of greater value, something made of dust, debris, and sublimity.

It can be assumed that every atom of one’s being is summoned in these moments of crisis and revelation, so that all of one’s emotions are roused: sadness and anguish, love and joy, bitterness and confusion, delight and praise (Jer. 13:17; 1 Sam. 1:10; Ps. 31:8, 35:9; Song of Songs 1:7). The Bible makes prodigal use of human sentiments, preferring the idioms of pathos, poetry, song, and prayer to philosophical discourse. By gathering together the untidy array of human desires, it employs a volcanically emotive manner of speech, combining spontaneous, heart-felt effusions with moments of carefully scripted artifice. The balance between artlessness and artifice gives many of these texts a vitality and throbbing pulse that separates this stormier art from other more polished, cerebral styles.

Though there are numerous cases in which heart and soul touch and melt into one another, there are also boundaries drawn in the Bible. It seems, for example, that biblical writers assigned a special place to knowledge when speaking of the geography of heart: the heart, not the mind, is the dwelling place of human reason. Hence the author of the Psalms can pray that “the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart” will be acceptable to God (Ps. 19:14). If reason operates from the terrain of the heart, as this text implies, we can assume that human knowledge, in the biblical view, is undivided from the emotions and shares a kinship with them.

The Melodians’s classic song the “Rivers of Babylon” ruminates on this exact sentiment. When they pray that God will receive the words of their mouths and the meditation of their hearts, the song beautifully explores the tangled threads of knowledge and emotions in the Bible. Better than many academic exegetes, they capture the desolation of the Psalms, as well as their impossible dreams and hopes. In a wistful, plaintive key, the song pleads for justice and redemption in a world far away from home, somewhere in exile on the lonely shores of the river of Babylon, believing that the musings and ponderings of the heart will guide those in bondage to a land of freedom and truth. In the magic of such art, affect is subtly transformed into knowledge and knowledge into affect:

By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down

And there we wept when we remembered Zion

Cause the wicked carried us away, captivity

Requiring of us a song

How shall we sing King Alpha’s song

In a strange land?⁷

Indeed, how shall we sing God’s song in a strange land? This is the question that has been the provocation and inspiration for a lot of black music in the Americas. In drawing on the biblical text, The Melodians saw themselves and their peoples through the predicament of the ancient Israelites, and they joined their melodies and prayers with the black Israelites in captivity and diaspora. By summoning the spirit of Moses and using the narratives of the Bible to confront the oppressive pharaohs of their age, reggae artists were faithful to Hebrew conceptions of redemption and justice. And they were faithful to the rebellious and melodious understanding of nephesh in the Psalms, its curious ability to achieve wisdom through the right ingredients of protest, passion, affection, melody, and cadence. What Bob Marley called a “soul rebel” (the title of Bob Marley’s 1970 studio album) belongs to this Hebrew bloodline of nephesh.⁸

In this world of the Psalms, then, the heart is capable of penetrating insights, so that human reason is never estranged from the passions and sentiments. A crucial biblical insight follows on the heels of this understanding, one that is key to my study: namely, that knowledge of the heart is accessible to all, educated or illiterate, lowly or highborn. In the biblical vision God makes wisdom lavishly open to everyone (and flagrantly, too, when it threatens the official scribes and priests). Since the Sinai covenant was established with all the Israelites, both the lettered and the unlettered, knowledge and obedience are enjoined on all; it is not a covenant made only with a philosophical or aristocratic elite. “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart; and thou shall teach them diligently to thy children” (Deut. 6:6–7).

Since it makes no discriminations between rank, class, or wealth, divine wisdom is widely disseminated in this tradition. If anything, the Hebrew God seeks out those barren of such distinctions and rescues them from oblivion and disregard (cf. Hannah’s prayer, 1 Sam. 2:7–8). In the biblical vision the heart of the humble person is more likely to be the bearer of wisdom than the puffed-up heart of the proud and powerful one. The heart is a conduit of a special kind of knowledge unlike anything the eye can see or ear can hear, a custodian of an ironical wisdom, as in this pivotal text when Samuel goes against convention to anoint Jesse’s youngest son, David: “And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Look not to his appearance and to his lofty stature, for I have cast him aside [Jesse’s oldest son, Eliab]. For not as man sees does the Lord see. For man sees with the eyes and the Lord sees with the heart’” (1 Sam. 16:7). In the ways of the corrupt world, the firstborn will always inherit position and power, but the biblical God casts this preference aside and exalts the lowly, a transformation of great historic significance. In the prophetic tradition (as in this case of Samuel’s choice of David), the eyes of the seer—clouded over and blind to the world’s values—follow this intuitive vision of the heart, in which truth and justice are revolutionary and subversive of the status quo.

Isaiah puts it this way: “I dwell in a high and holy place, say the Lord, but with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isa. 57:15). Though God comes from on high, he appears on the stage of human history among the simple and lowborn. And this message is central to the story of Exodus, in which God appears to Moses as a God of the oppressed slave. Though Moses was summoned to mountainous heights, he was assured that the God of his ancestors had seen the Israelites’ afflictions and heard their cries, and “therefore I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians” (Exod. 3:7–8).

In branding this memory of slavery on the soul of the Torah, the biblical authors demanded that its hearers and readers constantly revisit this sacred theophany, never allowing comfort or success to induce the stupor of forgetfulness. For our purposes, this means that the matter of soul in the Bible is represented in earthly shades and colors, in black and brown hues that are indicative of the struggles of the lowly. Any search for soul in the Bible must accordingly travel with the Israelites through these narratives of captivity and exile, cross the river Jordan, and always welcome the Other who comes in the form of the poor and enslaved. These circumstances and injunctions alone place the Hebrew concept of the soul at an infinite distance from Greek, aristocratic conceptions of the soul (whether the aristocracy of the hero, as in Homer, or the aristocracy of the philosopher, as in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle).

NEPHESH IN ITS NARRATIVE CONTEXT

The Inscrutability of God and Man in the Bible: The Shadows of Nephesh

Auerbach opens Mimesis, his extraordinary journey through Western literature, with a contrast between Homer and the Bible, the Greeks and the Jews. Though his subject is the story of literature from antiquity to the twentieth century, one of its key themes is the formative influence of biblical narrative on the entire scope of Western literature. In considering biblical narrative with such care and insight, Auerbach was something of a rare fish in literary circles of the early twentieth century, swimming against the stream of interpretation that regarded the Bible with enlightened condescension, ranking it far below the Greek imagination.⁹ As an exile himself—a German Jew forced into exile by the Nazis in 1935—he regarded the urgent realism of the Bible, especially the narratives of expulsion and bondage, as a key to his own self-understanding and more generally as a key that might unlock the hermetic codes of modern literature.

By concentrating on the form and style of these sacred texts and contrasting them with Homer, Auerbach made various discoveries. One in particular has to do with the laconic and rough tongue of biblical narratives. In Auerbach’s reading, biblical narrative is far more restrained than Homer’s epic poetry: it holds much back and does not explain everything; it leaves things and characters partially unsaid, unknown, and unexplained; and it controls language with an ascetic discipline. His primary example is the command to Abraham in the matter of his son, Isaac (Gen. 22:1). From out of nowhere, from some mysterious height or undetermined depth, God suddenly appears to Abraham and demands obedience. In contrast to Homer’s narratives, very little is said about the setting in which this happens, the characters, or their motives, and even less is said about the nature of this unpredictable, unfathomable God. The contrast with Homer is illustrative: “Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come like Zeus or Poseidon from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations of his own heart been presented to us.”¹⁰ In contrast to Homer’s depiction of the gods, the Bible veils God with profiles of indeterminacy; he is devoid of anthropomorphic features, totally Other. In painting pictures of the divine with words instead of images, Israel deconstructed the common representations of pagan gods, choosing to envision God in impalpable, imponderable forms, without a vast array of visualizations. As a fitting illustration of this perspective, the symbol of emptiness became a rich allegory for the Jews, a signifier of the desert-like barrenness of YHWH. Legend has it, for example, that when Pompey conquered Israel and approached the Holy of Holies, he was startled to find an empty room. According to Tacitus, he remarked: “The shrine had nothing to reveal.” Pompey, it seems, expected something tangible, some effigy in burnished gold or bejeweled silver, but he found nothing of the sort. The significance of emptiness was lost on him; it was a blank and meaningless sign to him and his legions, but for the Jews there was splendor in emptiness. YHWH was an anagram of the desert landscape itself, a luminous void, making all images of G-d evaporate in the sun like puddles of water on the burning desert soil, turning them into a fleeting mirage that forever recedes before one’s eyes.¹¹

Similar mirages or shadows are apparent in the Bible’s representation of its key characters. Though we clearly learn about biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible, there is nonetheless a shroud of secrecy, a penumbra of obscurity, and a subtle haziness that keeps them hidden from human knowledge. In considering these characters, we are faced with an impossible question like the one Moses poses to God: What is your name? The response, “I am who I am, YHWH,” is an answer with gaps and fissures, lacking in vowels, a reminder of divine ineffability. When Isaac is introduced, for example, we are only told that Abraham loves him, not whether he is handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, kind or cruel. Details are scant. In fragmentary speech and resounding silences, the narrative simply instructs Abraham to take Isaac and “go forth” (in the same spirit of Abraham’s first summons to leave his homeland and migrate to a new land in Gen. 12:1–3, a model for all intrepid explorers).¹² In the space of this terse narrative, we are introduced to the riddling and puzzling richness of the Bible. By leaving so much in a cloud of indeterminacy or secrecy, this narrative arouses in its readers a taste for mysteries that exist beyond the borders of what can be said and thought. The story pulses with hidden meanings and challenges the reader’s imagination to compensate for what is missing.¹³ In the silences, gaps, and missing vowels, biblical stories refrain from telling us what to think about each and every episode or character and subsequently invite us—or confront and cajole us—to supply our own meaning. As economical and austere as the narratives may be, there is untold treasure hiding here, gold mines under the dry desert soil.¹⁴

Thus the reader journeys through the course of biblical narrative, as through the course of life, a lot like Abraham does, mystified and bewildered but beguiled and allured by the unthinkable. Homer’s narrative, by contrast, is a paean to what can be expressed and thought. (The Greek philosophers, of course, extended this confidence even further.) He gives us a feeling that almost everything can be described and understood: the passions of gods and men; the delights of physical existence; the adventures and dangers of life; the fears, cruelties, and valor of human beings; and even the awful and ennobling reality of death. Whereas Homer seeks to diminish the mystery of life, the Bible extends the obscurity and envelopes us in that mystery, placing human beings within its vast canopy. The Bible abhors transparency.

In consequence, nephesh is a foil to transparency and a metaphor for the strange, opaque, twilight regions of the human person, for what is shadowy and slippery about human identity, for what only God can see (1 Sam. 16:7, 25:37; Ps. 44:22, 64:7). Though the soul is as intimate as one’s own breath, it remains a trace of the sacred Otherness that resides within us all, a mark of the unknown, as if it were engraved with a hieroglyph that stubbornly defeats decryption, like the tattoos on the body of Queequeg in Moby Dick (undecipherable “mystical treatises,” in Melville’s words).¹⁵

While much of modern thought has sought to shrink the scope of the unknown, I agree with Emerson that artists—he singles out preachers, poets, and musicians—pay homage to the enigmas of life. “After the most exhausting census has been made . . . this is that which the preacher and poet and the musician speak to: the region of destiny, of aspiration, of the unknown.”¹⁶ Perhaps intuitively, poets, preachers, and musicians build their works of art out of the dark materials of wonder and sublimity. They recognize the persistent presence of foreignness in the shadows of our being, even after the most careful and exhaustive census is performed. They are the best exegetes of the Bible.

The Mutability and Eccentricity of Nephesh: A Center of Surprise

Since the obscurity of the divine also extends to biblical characters, these souls are resistant to explanations that presume to offer absolute clarity. The shadows of the narratives cling to all of the characters like a spider’s web that has them—and us—in its clutch. One might say that the most intriguing characters of the Bible are the most entangled, the most scrambled and confused, the most human. There are so many layers to their mysterious souls because they undergo many surprising and dramatic changes, and they are never static. These characters advance and retreat, develop and regress, and are always subject to the wayward misfortunes and humiliations of life. Though freedom is a crucial attribute of these creatures, the narratives also show them bandied about and dragged along by events, leaves carried by the wind. No one epithet adequately summarizes these characters, because they have undergone too many changes for one designation to stick. Jacob (Ya’aqov) is a “heel-grabber,” but this label reveals nothing about the actual changes and revolutions in the course of his life. At the most, this label characterizes the genius of “Israel” (Jacob’s new name after wrestling with God) as a tradition of art and spirituality that confronts God with the wiles of a trickster, the combativeness of a wrestler, and the agony of a wounded warrior. It epitomizes the kind of wounded wisdom that is central to the painful history of Israel.

With an eye trained on the surprises, agonies, and eccentricities in biblical art, we learn something valuable about the soul: it is a “center of surprise,” in Robert Alter’s nice choice of words.¹⁷ Though awakened and infused with the divine breath of life, the soul of biblical characters is also made of the stuff of earth: dust, mud, and funk. What else can account for the imperfections and follies of people as seen in biblical narrative; what else explains their astonishing array of beauty and vileness? The highest aptitudes and possibilities of human beings are surely celebrated and extolled in the Bible, but rarely without digging into the lows, nadirs, and dregs of their lives. Rabbi Hillel caught this play of irony in the Bible in his aphorism, “My humiliation is my exaltation; my exaltation is my humiliation.”¹⁸ And the same irony appears in biblical narrative: the exaltation of biblical characters is menaced by failures, humiliations, and shameful deeds.

Indeed, almost all of the biblical patriarchs rise and fall, the way Skip James’s famous blues voice much later would rise on soaring, falsetto notes, then suddenly fall into hot and dirty wails.¹⁹ Though chosen and blessed by God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob each has his moment of slithering in the dust, creeping as a matter of survival, getting by the fly way. Each experiences life as a refugee or slave, for example. Moses is no different; he survives a murder conspiracy, endures exile, and then dies in the middle of the desert. The ebbs and flows of David’s life may surpass them all, though. Robert Alter sizes him up well:

David, in the many decades through which we follow his career, is first a provincial ingénu and public charmer, then a shrewd political manipulator and a tough guerilla leader, later a helpless father floundering in the entanglements of his sons’ intrigues and rebellion, a refugee suddenly and astoundingly abasing himself before the scathing curses of Shimei, then a doddering old man bamboozled or at least directed by Bathsheeba and Nathan, and, in still another surprise on his very deathbed, an implacable seeker of vengeance against Joab and against the same Shimei whom he had ostensibly forgiven after the defeat of Absalom’s insurrection.²⁰

David’s volatile life is given theatrical exuberance in the Bible. He changes costumes, masks, and performances like an itinerant actor, flipping and flying like a circus acrobat. It’s almost impossible to ascribe a single essence to his character because it is constructed of many personas and personalities: shepherd, soldier, king, poet, musician, lover, father, and through it all, a man with an extraordinary divine destiny. And even this latter role, with its related heroism, doesn’t exempt him from the tribulations of life: the violence and turmoil in his kingdom; the heartbreaking deaths of Jonathan, Absalom, and his son by Bathsheba; the iniquities and mutinies of his children; the humiliating experiences of life as a refugee; and so forth. In old age he ends up disheveled and doddering, after spending a life fraught with unrest and turmoil. We imagine him at this point with a dazed and confused look, reeling from the mercurial fluctuations in his life, from everything added and subtracted to his days on earth. His biographers charge his persona with the same friable ephemerality and floundering fallibility that any other human being has, showing us flashes of his eventful life in his sallies and sorties, his conniving and scheming, his victories and defeats. There is not one life story in David, but multiple histories, multiple acts, and multiple dramas.

In these episodes of David’s life the Bible is concerned with the whole arc of David’s life, not his individual psychology. Unlike a modern novel, the Bible generally does not give us access to the inner life of David’s soul. We may get glimpses of his psyche through his prayers—especially if we give him credit for the Psalms—but his innermost being remains opaque to everyone save God.²¹ His actions are often surprising and unpredictable for this exact reason: we are not privy to his motives and subjective consciousness. When he acts, we don’t know what to expect, such as when he weeps and fasts for his son while he is still alive, but when the son dies, he washes, changes his clothes, worships the Lord, and eats. His behavior provokes dismay and curiosity in his servants, as in the reader. We expect acts of penance and abstinence after his death, but his explanation is convincing and eloquent. “Now that he is dead, why should I fast?” David remarks. “Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam. 12:23). David’s whole life is made up of similar surprises.

Consider the somersaults of the life of Joseph as well. He goes through numerous meteoric ascents and precipitous plunges. As a child, Joseph has grandiose dreams of success and power; in one he sees bowing before him his brothers’ sheaves of grain, and in another the sun, moon, and eleven stars (Gen. 37:5–9). Apparently naïve about the envy and enmity such presumptuous dreams might provoke, he tells his brothers about them and becomes the object of their jealousy and anger. They first plot his death and then, after reconsidering, sell him as a slave. Later, in Egypt, Joseph’s destiny will ebb and flow even more: no sooner does he become the household servant of the captain of pharaoh’s guard (Potifar) than he is falsely accused of seducing Potifar’s wife and ends up imprisoned. Despite being the chosen and beloved son of Jacob and being blessed by God, Joseph suffers more degradation and loss than any other brother. First thrown into a pit (and the language of the pit, bor, is related to the depths of Sheol in the Psalms), then sold as a slave, and then kept prisoner, Joseph’s character is measured by extraordinary adversities. Eventually, though, after gaining the trust of the pharaoh through his dream-interpreting skills, he is released from prison and given a powerful position. Now the story seems to bear out his exalted dreams in childhood—but with one major caveat.