2 - A Pair of Kings

Before we get to current events, how about a little ancient history?

David was a prince. In the modern sense. Even more so in the very modern sense. He was so taken with Saul’s son that he said Jonathan’s love was “wonderful, passing the love of women.” Including, that means, Bathsheba’s. I’m sure David is the darling of the divided sex – half man, half woman. But David was a ladies man. Did a bad thing for a woman, or rather for himself. Had a husband offed, by sending a note to his captain to put him in the front lines and keep him there. David felt this was the most honorable way to take a woman who was another man’s wife. People still do it today. Get the guy out of the way, into the hereafter. No word of what Bathsheba thought of this, but the Lord was pissed.

The Lord, when he got to coveting, did not find it necessary to get rid of Joseph. He left him on the scene to bring up Mary’s brat.

Still, David is his prize. It is always in David’s name that he gives another chance to his polluted, idolatrizing, thankless, recalcitrant “chosen” people. (Maybe “most recently chosen” – he seems to have run off others, before, for rule infractions.)

David’s son, Sol, starts off like a house on fire, goes into mining and turns the whole realm to gold. Silver flows in the streets. Nothing’s made of wood anymore. It’s all marble.

The Queen of Egypt comes to visit and is mortified to recognize that he has the very best of everything. Even his people are happy.

But Sol appears to have fallen, perhaps to whoredom. He had wives by the trove. He couldn’t have had time to check them all out. Just had them wrapped and sent. God did not like his ways, and Solomon died in disgrace. This might be a textbook case of “power corrupts”. Maybe he stopped sharing. Maybe he started ordering people around. Maybe there was hanky-panky in the awarding of construction contracts for the house of the Lord.

People had come from far and wide, not to see his palaces, but to seek Sol’s wisdom. Yet he seems to have taken a turn for the cruel (if that’s believable.)

Following Solomon is a sequence of good guys and bad guys, more bad than good, and wicked constituents always, so it hardly matters. The Jews become as the pagans around them, they’re struck down by an angry God who forces others to fight against them and lets his people lose, until finally, two pages from the end of Kings, Nebuchadnezzar is the King of Babylon. He comes and rounds up all the Jews that are left, which is only Judah, David’s house, in Jerusalem, and takes them away – to Iraq, where his fiery furnace qualifies as a WMD – leaving only the poorest remnant of people behind.

I believe I am now at the high point and the low point of the story. It can’t get more dramatic than this; my heart is beating fast at this cliff-hanger break in the action.

But now we cut to king-making in the good old US of A.