The Life of David (Jewish Encounters) by Robert Pinsky

By Robert Pinsky

Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed huge in delusion and legend during the centuries, and he keeps to hang-out our collective mind's eye, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the main approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the U.S., plumbs the depths of David’s lifestyles: his triumphs and his disasters, his attraction and his cruelty, his divine future and his human humiliations. Drawing at the biblical chronicle of David’s existence in addition to at the later commentaries and the Psalms——traditionally thought of to be David’s personal words——Pinsky teases aside the various strands of David’s tale and reweaves them right into a wonderful narrative.Under the clarifying and pleasing gentle of Pinsky’s erudition and mind's eye, and his mastery of photo and expression, King David——both the fellow and the assumption of the man——is introduced brilliantly to life.From the Hardcover version.

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It was no gangster story of making himself king by grabbing power, shouldering others aside, crushing or subverting or outright assassinating his rivals. Yet the prophet Samuel read God's will accurately in choosing Saul. His capacity to lead, his ruthlessness, his willingness to murder and lie and extort in the name of policy, the art of playing courtiers and colleagues one against the other, all were doubtless rooted more firmly in Saul for being not inborn, as they might be for some prince born to intrigues and courtly assassinations.

Saul had r> given her to Phaltiel from Gallim! He r> had, he could? T h e story of Abigail deflects attention in a way that makes this turn in the story of Michal the more startling. Is Michal then forgotten, a closed chapter in David's long life? No, on the contrary. Many years later, after the long war between the House of Saul and the House of David; after David has sung his great elegy for Saul and Jonathan; many wives and concubines later; after the births of David's son Amnon the firstborn, of Ahinoam of Jezreel, and Chileab the second born, of Abigail the widow of Nabal of Car mei, and the thirdborn, Absalom the son of Maacah the daughter of Talmai King of Geshur—these people are not all j e w s — and the fourthborn Adonijah, of Haggith, and the fifthborn Shephatiah, of Abitai, and the sixthborn Ithream, of Eglah; after Abner Saul's general becomes more powerful than Ishbosheth, Saul's ineffectual son and heir: after all of The Life of David this, and all of these years, Abner the general representing the House of Saul sends messengers to David at Hebron, saying: "Whose is the land?

But neither man would likely be at that stage of life where a man of power, developing spiritual hungers, turns toward religion or poetry or in our contemporary life a twelve-step program. So neither man necessarily would consciously think outright, Someday this one will write my death-lament. But aware mainly of David's surprising victory, they might each have had a presentiment about his eloquence, or his sheer infuriating grace, the quick elegiac ivy of art that attaches itself to stone or to living limbs, and beautifies and outlasts them.

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