There are some stories in the Bible that just make me sad. Anything to do with Tamar (either one, really), stuff about eating children, etc. But our family was just reading about the time there was a famine in the land, and it was because the Gibeonites were feeling upset because of the whole Saul thing (for a more complete rendering, please read 2 Samuel 21).
Anyhow, long story short, David up and killed a ton of descendants of Saul, just to make the Gibeonites happy. I think it's nice that the famine stopped, but seriously, at such a cost? That story just hurts me to read. Not to mention that it's not long after the whole Absalom story, which breaks my heart every time. Regardless, I'm discussing David and Saul.
I just find that whole Old Testament thing so hard to swallow sometimes. I mean, really, they had to kill those dudes to stop the famine? Wasn't there something else they could have done? Couldn't they have sent them some gift certificates to Camels, Ltd. or something? And when you think about Rizpa, the unfortunate concubine of Saul whose two sons were killed and left out to rot in the sun, you realize what a cruel situation it was.
Of course, I always wonder about Michal in all of this. Did she care about any of these going's-on? You'd better believe she was keenly aware of the fact that her sons with her ex-husband Adriel were being strung up by her current slash also-ex-husband David. How could she not? But did she care about Rizpa's sons? Did she care that Mephibosheth was living in the city, maybe even not too far from where she lived? I wish there was some way we could get a peek into the lives of the minoresque characters in the Bible. The dynamic between Michal and David is fascinating to me, and I often wonder if Michal, Jonathan, and David hung out, back in the day, when David was still just that kid who played the harp part-time for Saul. I know family dynamics these days aren't quite what they were back in the OT times, but still, the sense of family is pretty important, I think, no matter what era you're living in.
So the moral of the story is simply that the whole situation with David and Saul's kin makes me sad. Mephibosheth got a pretty good deal, but nobody else seemed to end up too happily. So much for the life of royalty, eh?
2 comments:
Wow. Though I don't always think as in-depth as you do about these things, when I recently read through David's story, I kept wondering why in the world it was so important he keep killing all these people. Wasn't there possibly something else to do? And Michal... wow. Don't get me started.
Oh, I'm totally with you. Michal is a story I dislike on so many levels. Her being taken back to David after she'd been married to Adriel and had all those kids? brutal! Personally, I think she was within her rights to be upset at David, you know?
But so true, all that killing, so crazy!
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