DAVID SENDING URIAH TO JOAB
David’s attempt to win the Jebusites and their town for Israel by peaceful means, miscarried. Their rocky eyrie, Zion, appeared to the Jebusites so strong that the lame and blind would suffice to defend it. Undismayed by their scorn, David proceeded to use force, and stormed town and citadel. The citadel he took possession of himself and called it David’s citadel (the city of David) after having first restored the building for his own purposes. Hiram of Tyre, to whom the friendship of his powerful neighbour must have been a matter of some importance, is said to have assisted him with cedar wood and workmen. The former masters of the town seem, like the Philistines after them, not to have been treated according to the usage of war, but to have been spared. At least in later times we find the Jebusites living with Israel in Jerusalem.
DAVID’S GREATNESS IN TIME OF PEACE
But the conquest of Jerusalem by David, and the selection of this town as the capital of the country, had yet a further significance. A royal sanctuary was a necessary adjunct to the king’s residence and the capital of the country. But religion in Israel was a popular institution. No affair which touched the whole nation could dispense with it. The national capital, the centre of the life of the people, must, if it were to answer its purpose, also be the centre of the religious life. In order, therefore, to make Jerusalem, as a capital, what it might be and what by David’s means it actually was to become for Israel, it must be the centre of Jehovah’s worship.
Jewish King performing a Religious Rite
David’s greatness is raised to a still higher level by the fact that he thought of this also. History is made by the man who recognises the spirit of his time and of his country, and is in a position to step forward and act decisively in consonance with it. David perceived that the spirit of his nation and its destiny only worked in the close connection of the national with the religious life. He had an eye for the most secret inner existence of his nation, according to which it must be the people of religion, God’s people. Thus he became at once the historical, and what was inseparable from this, the religious hero of Israel. We need neither overlook the weakness and despotic whims of David, nor transform the man, by nature a hero, into a feeble saint, in order to appreciate his deep religious character and his importance for the religion of Israel. As David had glorified Israel’s past, so he had done for its future, and in days of tribulation his name revived Israel’s sinking hope and faith in God. Jehovah, the God of Israel, became through him the chief dweller at Jerusalem, the neighbour and almost the household companion, nay more, the host and father of its king. Jerusalem, the royal city, is at the same time the city of God, the holy city; David’s Dynasty is Jehovah’s royal house, and its members Jehovah’s sons, and even the hero of the last days, who shall save Israel and the world from all their woes, can henceforth be pictured in no other way than as a second David, the great son and antitype of the glorious founder of the holy city.
The ancient sanctuary of the time of Moses, the Ark of God, had been almost forgotten since the evil days when it fell into the enemy’s hand. The Philistines indeed, smitten with a solemn awe, had restored the ark. But neither Saul nor the priesthood of Nob, which had succeeded that of Shiloh, nor any one else in Israel, had interested himself in it. It might seem that its sojourn in the enemies’ country had desecrated it. Or probably the small measure of good fortune it had brought to the arms of Israel’s hosts at Aphek had shaken the belief in its virtue.
Not so David. The scruples of superstitious Saul and of his age, did not terrify him. He saw what the Ark of God was and that it was what he needed: the ancient sanctuary of Israel, which assured Jehovah’s presence in the desert, and with which great memories were connected. For him the fact that it had long, and perhaps in the first instance, had its location with the tribe of Joseph, could only be an additional reason for once more restoring it to honour. Everything must depend on his winning over to himself and Jerusalem that northern group of the tribes.