David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible* There are three sets of questions underlying this study. 1.

This is the html version of the file http://prophetess.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/masc.pdf.

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David J.A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible

(Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 205; Gender, Culture,

Theory, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 212-41.

David the Man:

The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible*

There are three sets of questions underlying this study.

1. What does it mean to be a man in our own culture? What

roles are available for young men to grow into, what images are

there for adult men to imitate, what criteria exist for defining

manliness?

2. And what was it like in the world of the Bible? Was it differ-

ent, or much the same?

3. How do our answers to the first set of questions determine

or influence our answers to the second set? How have our

images of biblical men been shaped by our own cultural norms?

1. Being a Man in the Modern West

In the predominant culture of the West, five major themes in the

construction of masculinity have been noted in one influential

analysis.1

This essay was originally delivered as a paper in the Hebrew Bible:

Gender Studies Section, Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting,

Leuven, August, 1994, and at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of

Religion, Cincinnati, November, 1994.

1. The typology is that of J.A. Doyle, The Male Experience (Dubuque, IA:

William C. Brown, 2nd edn, 1989), cited by Julia T. Wood, Gendered Lives:

Communication, Gender, and Culture (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing

Company, 1994), pp. 77-81. See also Joseph H. Pleck, The Myth of

Masculinity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981).

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1. The primary rule is: Don’t be female. J.A. Doyle calls this the

‘negative touchstone’ of men’s role. Whatever women do is ipso

facto what a real man must not do.2

2. The second rule is: Be successful. Men are trained to be

‘success objects’,3 and their worth as husbands, friends and sim-

ply as men is determined by their successfulness. ‘The object, a

boy soon gathers, is not to be liked but to be envied,...not to be

part of a group but to distinguish himself from the others in the

There are other important dimensions to the study of masculinity of

which this essay cannot, of necessity, take account. One is that of change in

western masculinity, and of the processes by which the prevailing norms

have developed. See, for example, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain

since 1800 (ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh; London: Routledge, 1991);

Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America

1800–1940 (ed. J.A. Mangan and James Walvin; Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1987); Clyde W. Franklin, II, The Changing Definition of

Masculinity (New York: Plenum Press, 1984); Michael S. Kimmel, Changing

Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (Newbury Park, CA:

Sage Publications, 1987). Cf. also the reviews introduced by Michael Roper,

‘Recent Books on Masculinity’, History Workshop 29 (1990), pp. 184-93; and

the review forum in Victorian Studies 36 (1993), pp. 207-26; James Eli

Adams, ‘The Banality of Transgression? Recent Works on Masculinity’ (pp.

207-13); Ed Cohen, ‘Mar(r)king Men’ (pp. 215-210); Mary Poovey,

‘Exploring Masculinities’ (pp. 223-26).

Another significant dimension is theorizing masculinity; see especially

Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern

Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); and Engendering Men: The Question of

Male Feminist Criticism (ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden; London:

Routledge, 1990).

A third dimension is the challenge to the concept of masculinity itself

posed by a deconstructive approach to the opposition male/female. See

especially Jeff Hearn, Men in the Public Eye: The Construction and Deconstruc-

tion of Public Men and Public Patriarchies (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. pp.

1-9.

2. Cf. Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1989), p. 3: ‘Masculinity...does not exist in isolation from femininity—it

will always be an expression of the current image that men have of them-

selves in relation to women’.

3. W. Farrell, ‘Men as Success Objects’, Utne Reader (May/June, 1991),

pp. 81-84.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

group.’4

3. The third rule is: Be aggressive. From childhood, boys are

encouraged to be tough, to fight, and not to run away. Competi-

tive sport emphasizes these values, and in many cultures

military training reinforces them.5

4. The fourth demand is: Be sexual. Men are supposed to be

sexually experienced, and to be always interested in sex.6 ‘Sex

isn’t a free choice when you have to perform to be a man.’7

5. Fifthly, the rule for men is: Be self-reliant. ‘Men are sup-

posed to be confident, independent and autonomous ... A “real

man” doesn’t need others, particularly women. He depends on

himself, takes care of himself, and relies on nobody.’8

Now there is nothing natural or God-given about these roles.

Masculinity, like femininity, is a social construction, the product

of historical processes, as much a human construct as the pyra-

4. Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case against Competition (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p. 168.

5. See also Brittan, Masculinity and Power, Chapter 4 ‘Masculinity and

Competitiveness’ (pp. 77-107).

6. Cf. W. Gaylin, The Male Ego (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1992).

7. Wood, Gendered Lives, p. 81.

8. Wood, Gendered Lives, p. 81. This is not of course the only analysis of

the male role that can be and has been made. Catharine Stimpson, for

example, identifies three ways in which ‘real men’ define themselves: they

earn money in the public labour force and so support their families; they

have formal power over the women and children in those families; they are

heterosexual with the women they dominate and bully other men who are

not heterosexual (Catharine R. Stimpson, ‘Foreword’ to The Making of Mas-

culinities: The New Men’s Studies [ed. Harry Brod; New York: Routledge,

1987], p. xiii. And here is another much-cited account of the typical male:

‘Someone who: is aggressive, independent, unemotional, or hides his emo-

tions; is objective, easily influenced, dominant, likes maths and science; is

not excitable in a minor crisis; is active, competitive, logical, worldly,

skilled in business, direct, knows the ways of the world; is someone whose

feelings are not easily hurt; is adventurous, makes decisions easily, never

cries, acts as a leader; is self-confident; is not uncomfortable about being

aggressive; is ambitious, able to separate feelings from ideas; is not

dependent, nor conceited about his appearance; thinks men are superior to

women, and talks freely about sex with men’ (Fay Fransella and Kay Frost,

On Being a Woman: A Review of Research on How Women See Themselves

[London: Tavistock, 1977, pp. 43-44], cited by Ann Oakley, Subject Women

[Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981], p. 64).

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mids or pewter, as Catharine Stimpson puts it.9 To be masculine,

as she says, is ‘to have a particular psychological identity, social

role, cultural script, place in the labor force, and sense of the

sacred’10—and all of those elements are socially constructed.

Different societies write different scripts for their men, so it is a

priori likely that maleness in the modern West does not closely

resemble maleness in ancient Israel. But this is at the moment a

rather new question, and we have as yet no resources to tell us

about Israelite masculinity. None of the Bible dictionaries, for

example, broaches this fundamental cultural subject, though

they are packed with trivia about the material culture of the

world of the Bible. We have to start more or less from scratch.

And we had better be open to the possibility of a plurality of

masculinities. Perhaps the society legitimated more than one

way of being a man—though perhaps not, since social pressures

tend toward uniformity rather than diversity.11 More significant

is the fact that not all males, in whatever culture, conform with

the social norms. The norms may privilege young, heterosexual,

strong and physical men, for example, and those who cannot be

so characterized will be deviants from socially acceptable male-

ness. But they will still be males. We can expect, then, to find in

our texts, as well as in our own society, representations of con-

flicting masculinities.

2. Being a Man in the David Story

My scope here is the David story (1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2),

which is of course not the same thing as: ancient Israel. How

typical the masculinity of this story is of the Hebrew Bible as a

9. Stimpson, ‘Foreword’ to The Making of Masculinities, p. xiii.

10. Stimpson, ‘Foreword’ to The Making of Masculinities, p. xii.

11. Even in a period of rapid social change such as our own, the

blueprint of gender stereotypes remains remarkably constant; cf. Wood,

Gendered Lives, p. 21; F. Cancian, ‘Love and the Rise of Capitalism’, in

Gender in Intimate Relationships (ed. B. Risman and P. Schwartz; Belmont,

CA: Wadsworth, 1989), pp. 12-25. Of course, it is all too easy to slip into

various intellectual sins over this matter of defining masculinity; David H.J.

Morgan, for example, warns against the errors of essentialism,

reductionism and reification (Discovering Men [Critical Studies on Men and

Masculinities, 3; London: Routledge, 1992], pp. 41-43).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

whole I do not know, yet; and how the literary representations of

masculinity in our texts relate to real men (not ‘real men’) in

ancient Israel I shall never know. But my guess is that the myth

of masculinity inscribed in the David story was a very potent

influence upon Israelite men, and I am quite sure that the con-

struction of masculinity in the David story was not invented by

its author—or by some historical David—but reflects the cultural

norms of men of the author’s time.

In the world of the David story, then, what are the components

of masculinity? Almost the first words we read about David go a

long way, it so happens, toward answering that question. In 1

Sam. 16.18 one of Saul’s servants describes him, to Saul and to

the readers: David is a mighty man of valour (lyj rwbg), a warrior

(hmjlm vya), intelligent in speech (rbd wbn), a beautiful man

(rat vya), and skilful in playing (ˆgn [dy).12

1. The fighting male

The essential male characteristic in the David story is to be a

warrior, a man of war (hmjlm vya) or mighty man of valour

(lyj rwbg).

Throughout the story, all the principal characters are warriors

who spend a lot of their time fighting and killing. Here is a list of

references to these activities:

David kills Goliath, 1 Sam. 17.50

He is said to have slain ten thousands, 18.7; 29.5

He is made the commander of a thousand, 18.13

He is commanded by Saul to fight Yahweh’s battles on Saul’s

behalf, 18.17

He kills 200 Philistines for their foreskins, 18.27

He goes on fighting Philistines, 18.30

He makes a great slaughter of the Philistines, 19.8

Doeg kills 85 priests, 22.18

12. He is obviously overqualified for the job of court musician, as

Brueggemann wryly observes (Walter Brueggemann, First and Second

Samuel [Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching;

Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990], p. 125). Heather McKay reminds me in

this connection of the stained-glass window in the parish church in Fairlie,

Ayrshire, in which the hyper-competent young David bows beneath the

weight of his shepherd’s crook, his throwing-stone, his scrip, his lyre—and

his psalm-book.

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David makes a great slaughter of the Philistines at Keilah, 23.5

There is a battle with the Philistines at Mt Gilboa, 31.1

The Philistines kill Jonathan and other sons of Saul, 31.2

An Amalekite kills Saul, 2 Sam. 1.10

David has the Amalekite killed, 1.15

Joab and Abishai kill Abner, 3.30

Rechab and Baanah kill Ishbosheth, 4.7

David has Rechab and Baanah killed, 4.12

He defeats Philistines, Moabites, Hadadezer, 8.1-3

He kills 22,000 Syrians, 8.5

He kills 18,000 Edomites, 8.13

Joab leads Israelites in battle against Ammonites and Syrians, 10.6-

David leads Israelites in battle against Syrians, 10.17

David kills the Syrian general Shobach, 40,000 horsemen and the

men of 700 chariots, 10.18

Joab besieges the Ammonites of Rabbah, 11.1; 12.26

David arranges for Uriah’s death, 11.15

Absalom’s servants kill Amnon, 13.28-29

David’s warriors kill 20,000 of Absalom’s forces, 18.7

Joab and his warriors kill Absalom, 18.14-15

Joab kills Amasa, 20.10

The men of Abel Beth Maacah behead Sheba, 20.22

David gives seven sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be killed, 21.6-9

David fights Philistines, 21.15

Abishai kills the Philistine Ishbosheth, 21.17

There are three further battles with Philistines, 21.18-20

David’s warrior Josheb-basshebeth killed 800 men at one time, 23.8

David’s warriors Eleazar and Shammah killed many Philistines,

23.10, 12

Abishai killed 300 men, 23.18

Benaiah killed an Egyptian (and perhaps two Moabites), 23.20-21

David commands the killing of Joab and Shimei, 1 Kgs 2.6, 8-9

(2.34, 46)

David’s body count, by this reckoning, is something like

140,000 men, in addition to the 15 individuals whose deaths he is

said to have been personally responsible for. According to the

biblical text of the David story, indeed, ancient Israel as a whole

was a warrior society: in Israel there were 800,000 warriors ‘who

drew the sword’, and in Judah 500,000 (2 Sam. 24.9). No matter

whether these figures have historical value or not; they are the

impression the text wants to create, they constitute the narrator’s

representation of his society.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

It is essential for a man in the David story that he be

strong—which means to say, capable of violence against other

men and active in killing other men. The language of strength is

pervasive; here are merely some examples:

David ‘prevails’ (qzj) over the Philistine Goliath, 1 Sam. 17.50

Joab speaks of the Syrians being ‘too strong’ for him or the Ammonites

being ‘too strong’ for his brother Abishai, 2 Sam. 10.11

Amnon ‘overpowered’ (qzj) his sister Tamar and raped her, 13.14

God has girded David with strength for battle, 22.40

Saul and Jonathan are lamented by David as ‘the mighty’, 1.19, 21, 22,

24, 27

David is surrounded by warriors known as his ‘mighty men’, 10.7;

16.6; 17.8; 20.7; 23.8, 9, 16, 17, 22

David himself is described by Hushai to Absalom as a man of war and

the men with him as ‘hardened warriors and as a bear in the

wilds robbed of her cubs’, 17.8, 10

Warriors should be ‘lion-hearted’, 17.10

The ‘hand’ as the symbol of power is almost a leitmotif of the David

narrative: 1 Sam. 17.37, 46, 47; 18.17, 21, 25; 20.16; 22.17; 23.4, 7,

11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20; 24.5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 21; 25.26, 33; 26.8, 9,

11, 23; 27.1; 28.19; 30.15, 23; 2 Sam. 1.14; 2.7; 3.8, 12, 18, 34; 4.1;

5.19; 8.1; 10.10; 12.7; 14.19; 16.8, 21; 17.2; 18.2, 12, 19, 28; 20.21;

21.9, 22; 22.35; 23.6, 10; 24.14, 16, 17.

Physical strength and the capacity to kill other men manifests

itself sometimes as what we might call courage, even to the point

of recklessness. Hebrew has no words for courage or bravery as

distinct from strength, but our modern versions sometimes are

right to translate words from the root qzj (‘be strong’) as

‘courage, courageous’.13 Thus in 2 Sam. 10.12, for example, Joab

says to his brother Abishai, ‘Be strong (qzj), and let us show our-

selves strong (qzjtnw)14 for the sake of our people and for the sake

of the cities of our God’. When Absalom commissions his ser-

vants to assassinate Amnon (2 Sam. 13.28), he tells them not to

fear: lyjAynbl wyhw wqzj ‘be courageous and be valiant’ (RSV; REB has

‘be bold and resolute’).

13. ‘Courage’ also appears in RSV in a non-military context in 2 Sam.

7.27: ‘therefore thy servant has found courage (lit. has found his heart) to

pray this prayer to thee’.

14. RSV ‘let us play the man’, following AV ‘let us play the men’, proba-

bly borrows the idiom from 1 Sam. 4.9.

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Or, to take another example, from a little outside the David

story itself, in 1 Sam. 4.9 the Philistines say to one another, hav-

ing learned that the ark of Yahweh has come into their camp:

‘Take courage (lit. be strong), and acquit yourselves like men, O

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have

been to you; acquit yourselves like men and fight’. This phrase

‘acquit yourselves like men’, literally ‘become men’ (µyvnal wyh,

repeated as µyvnal µtyyhw), means, very simply, that to be a man is

to fight. The whole ideology surrounding this utterance is a little

more complex than that, no doubt; for the purpose of fighting is

to resist slavery for oneself and to continue to keep others in

slavery; and the possibility that fighting may not ensure that

objective, and that the chance of being victorious can hardly be

greater than fifty-fifty, is silently suppressed. But as far as the

gender issue is concerned, it is simple: men fight.

2. The persuasive male

It is obviously also an important male role in Israel to be good

with words, as David is described by Saul’s servant (1 Sam.

16.18): he is ‘intelligent in speech’ (rbd wbn). The term ˆwbn

‘intelligent’ is used elsewhere of Joseph (Gen. 41.33, 39), of tribal

elders (Deut. 1.13) and of Solomon (1 Kgs 3.12), but nowhere else

in the combination rbd wbn ‘intelligent in speech’. Fokkelman

thinks that this quality, ‘so closely linked to the cares of state, the

public interest, and the law’, must be ‘an anticipation of David’s

functioning as king’;15 but it is something true of David long

before he is king, something that belongs rather with his mas-

culinity than with his kingship.

Where is this characteristic of David’s, intelligent speech, evi-

dent in the text? Ralph W. Klein points to 1 Sam. 17.34-36, where

David persuades Saul that he is capable of withstanding Goliath,

24.10-15, where he explains to Saul why he did not kill him in the

cave, and 26.18-20, where David asks Saul why he continues to

pursue him, and Saul admits that he has done wrong (26.21).

15. J.P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel: A Full

Interpretation Based on Stylistic and Structural Analyses. II. The Crossing Fates

(I Sam. 13–31 & II Sam. 1) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1986), p. 137. A.R.S.

Kennedy thought that the phrase connects closely with ˆgn [dy ‘knowing how

to play (an instrument)’, in reference either to the recitative that

accompanied the music or to David’s ‘ready wit’ (Samuel: Introduction,

Revised Version with Notes, Index and Maps [Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack,

n.d.], p. 119). But this requires deletion of the phrase hmjlm vyaw lyj rwbgw as a

secondary intrusion.

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These are all effective examples of the power of words, not in

any magical sense, but as instruments of control. To be master of

persuasion is to have another form of power, which is not an

alternative to, and far less a denatured version of, physical

strength, but part of the repertory of the powerful male. We

think of Odysseus too, who is before everything

, not

merely ‘much travelled’ but ‘versatile, ingenious, wily’.16

Intelligent, eloquent, persuasive speech forms part of a wider

category of ‘wisdom’, to which Norman Whybray has drawn

attention as an important motif in the ‘Succession Narrative’.17 In

2 Sam. 14.20 the woman from Tekoa says that the king ‘has wis-

dom like the wisdom of the angel of God to know all things that

are on the earth’, and in 1 Kgs 2.6, 9 David assumes royal wis-

dom in his successor Solomon by urging him to ‘act according to

your wisdom’ in seeing that Joab and Shimei are killed. Among

the examples of ‘wisdom’ in the David story cited by Whybray

are: David’s attempts to extricate himself from the results of his

adultery with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11.14-25), Joab’s use of the

woman of Tekoa ‘in order to change the course of affairs’ (RSV),

Absalom’s words by which he ‘stole the hearts of the men of

Israel’ (2 Sam. 15.1-6), and David’s sending Hushai to give false

advice to Absalom (2 Sam. 15.33-35).

The fact that there are also intelligent and persuasive women

speakers in the David story, such as Abigail and the woman of

Tekoa, by no means undercuts the assertion that this is a charac-

teristic of masculinity.18 It is precisely because our own culture

16. Homer, Odyssey 1.1. He is, according to W.B. Stanford (The Odyssey of

Homer [London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1959], pp. xii-xiii), ‘a symbol of the

Ionic-Greek Everyman in his eloquence, cleverness, unscrupulousness,

intellectual curiosity, courage, endurance, shrewdness’.

17. R.N. Whybray, The Succession Narrative: A Study of II Sam. 9–20 and

I Kings 1 and 2 (Studies in Biblical Theology, 2/9; London: SCM Press, 1968),

pp. 57-60, 90.

18. It would be interesting to know if eloquence was perhaps not

expected of a woman in ancient Israel. In Luther’s Germany it wasn’t.

Praising his wife’s fluency, he remarked one day at table, ‘[E]loquence in

women shouldn’t be praised; it’s more fitting for them to lisp and stammer.

This is more becoming to them. In men speech is a great and divine gift’

(Martin Luther, in Luther’s Works. 54. Table Talk [ed. and trans. Theodore G.

Tappert; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967], p. 317).

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insists so strongly on defining a man as ‘not a woman’ that we

are tempted to think that anything a woman can do cannot also

be characteristically male; but that is a fallacy.

3. The beautiful male

One of the distinctive features noted by Saul’s servant about

David is that he is a beautiful man: he is a rat vya, ‘a man of

(beautiful) form’ (1 Sam. 16.18). Beautiful people in the Bible are

both male and female: Rachel is ‘beautiful of form’ (ratAtpy, Gen.

29.17), as is Abigail (1 Sam. 25.3); Esther is harm tbwfw ratAtpy ‘fair

of form and beautiful in looks’ in Est. 2.7,19 and Bathsheba is

‘very beautiful in appearance’ (dam harm tbwf, 2 Sam. 11.2). Among

the males there is Joseph, who is ‘beautiful of form and beautiful

of appearance’ (harm hpyw ratAhpy, Gen. 39.6), and Adonijah, who is

‘very beautiful’ (dam ratAbwf, 1 Kgs 1.6).20 Saul is a ‘handsome’

(bwf)21 young man (rwjb) and there is none among the Israelites

more handsome (bwf) than him; he is taller than any other

Israelite (1 Sam. 9.2). David is ‘ruddy’ (ynwmda)—whatever exactly

that means, it obviously refers to some aspect of physical

beauty22—and ‘fair of eyes’ (µyny[ hpy)23 and ‘beautiful in appear-

ance’ (yar bwf) in 1 Sam 16.12. In 17.42 he is ‘ruddy’ (ynwmda) ‘with

beauty of appearance’ (harm hpyAµ[).24 Of Absalom we hear that ‘in

19. And Tamar is hpy ‘beautiful’ in 2 Sam. 13.1.

20. The same phrase may lie behind LXX’s

here; it is

at 1 Kgs 1.6.

21. Moses as a child is also seen to be bwf ‘beautiful’ (Exod. 2.2).

22. It is generally thought to refer to the colour of the skin, but Kennedy,

Samuel, p. 118, thinks (following Klostermann) that it may be the colour of

the hair, and finds it interesting to think of David as the red-haired ‘darling

of the songs of Israel’ (2 Sam. 23.1), ‘or, as Browning has it in his Saul,

“God’s child with his dew, On thy gracious gold hair”’.

23. P. Kyle McCarter, Jr, I Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction,

Notes and Commentary (Anchor Bible, 8; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980),

p. 275, emends ‘with some confidence’ µ[ ynwmda to µy[nw µda ‘ruddy and

attractive’ (cf. µwda ‘ruddy’ in Cant. 5.10).

24. Some manuscripts have µyny[ hpy ‘beautiful of eyes’; cf. LXX

. McCarter, I Samuel, p. 275, deletes harm hpyAµ[ ynwmdaw

as an expansion inspired by 1 Sam. 16.12; Peter R. Ackroyd is similarly

tempted (The First Book of Samuel [The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the

New English Bible; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], p. 145).

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all Israel there was not a man so much to be praised for his

beauty (lit. there was not [such] a beautiful man, hpyAvya)’; ‘from

the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no blemish

in him’ (2 Sam. 14.25). And there is of course the servant of Isa-

iah 53, who because of his disfigurement has no ‘form’ (rat) or

‘splendour’ (rdh) that ‘we’ should gaze upon (har) him, and no

‘appearance’ (harm) that ‘we’ should desire (dmj) him (53.2); it is

implied that ordinarily one would expect a high-ranking ‘servant

of Yahweh’ to be beautiful in form and face, and to be sexually

attractive (dmj) to ‘us’ (? males).

Samuel is obviously impressed by male beauty. When he ‘sees’

Jesse’s eldest son Eliab, he thinks, ‘Surely here, before the LORD,

is his anointed king’ (1 Sam. 16.6 REB). The word ‘beauty’ is not

there, but the word ‘sees’ is; what the male gaze sees attracts it,

though its super-ego may feel uncomfortable about feeling

attracted. Says Yahweh to Samuel, ‘Pay no attention to his out-

ward appearance and stature...The LORD does not see as a mor-

tal sees; mortals see only appearances but the LORD sees into the

heart’ (v. 7 REB). But then Samuel catches sight of Saul, ‘hand-

some, with ruddy cheeks and bright eyes’ (v. 12 REB), and, with

wondrous irony, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, ‘Samuel and

the narrator are dazzled’;25 and Yahweh, who of course does not

see as a mortal sees, seizes the moment: ‘This is the man; rise and

anoint him’ (v. 12), he commands.

Beauty is not generally a state to which a man who does not

have it can aspire,26 but obviously it is very desirable, in the

world of the David story, for a man to be beautiful. Beauty is to

be seen, at the least, in bodily shape, in the eyes, in the skin

colour, and in the height. The language used here is not of some

25. Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation: A Bible

Commentary for Teaching and Preaching; Louisville: John Knox Press,

1990), pp. 122-23.

26. I should not omit the concept of ‘body building’, however. Rowena

Chapman writes archly of those ‘paragons of male aesthetics, rippling

poems of perfect pectorals and shuddering quads, testimonies to current

canons of male beauty...Everyone knows you don’t get a body like that just

by whistling[;] it requires effort, patience and commitment’ (‘The Great Pre-

tender: Variations on the New Man Theme’, in Male Order: Unwrapping

Masculinity [ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford; London:

Lawrence & Wishart, 1988], pp. 225-48 [237]).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

diffused notion of ‘good looks’, but reflects some quite precise

and analytical thought about what makes a man beautiful. From

the description of Absalom we learn that beauty is not regarded

by men in Israel as a mere accident of birth that is for the most

part to be shrugged off as the way the cookie crumbles. Rather, it

is an aspect of ‘real manhood’ for which a man can expect praise

and admiration.

4. The bonding male

A further important characteristic of maleness in the David story

is friendship between males, specifically the type of friendship

now known as ‘male bonding’.27 Friendship is not of course a

simple category, and several typologies have been advanced that

identify friendships along a continuum ranging from the

‘affective’ to the ‘instrumental’.28 Those friendships within the

David story have strong elements of the types at both poles.

Noting how little David and Jonathan seem to know one another

or how few things they do together, we need to recognize that

there is more than one kind of friendship, and that emotional

intimacy is not necessarily part of male friendship, or at least

that ideas of intimacy are not necessarily the same for men and

for women. In a word, ‘male bonding is not a vehicle for

male–male emotional relationships, but rather is a substitute for

27. The term seems to have been first used by Lionel Tiger, in his Men in

Groups (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1969). Among recent studies of

male bonding in literary texts may be mentioned those of Donald J. Geiner,

Women Enter the Wilderness: Male Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s

(Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), advancing the

questionable theory that in the last decade the tendency in (white, male)

American novels has been for male bonding to be less exclusive of women;

Anne J. Cruz, ‘Homo ex machina? Male Bonding in Calderón’s A secreto

agravio, secreta vengenza’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 25 (1989),

pp. 154-66.

28. Cf. Y.A. Cohen, ‘Patterns of Friendship’, in Social Structure and Per-

sonality (ed. Y.A. Cohen; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961); E.

Wolf, ‘Kinship, Friendship and Patron–Client Relationships in Complex

Societies’, in The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (ed. M. Banton;

London: Tavistock, 1966), pp. 3-27; Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow,

‘Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: The Myth of Male Friendship’, in The

Making of Masculinities, pp. 241-58 (243-45).

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them’.29

In their delightfully entitled paper, ‘Gilgamesh and the Sun-

dance Kid: The Myth of Male Friendship’, Dorothy Hammond

and Alta Jablow have traced a widespread myth of male friend-

ship, which ‘dramatizes the devotion between male friends, usu-

ally a dyad, forged in an agonistic setting’,30 from its classic

expression in the Gilgamesh epic, through Homer and the Bible

to the Song of Roland, bush ‘mateship’ in the short stories of the

Australian writer Henry Lawson, comrades in arms in films of

the world wars, heroes of frontier America like the Lone Ranger

and Tonto, near-mythic figures like Butch Cassidy and the Sun-

dance Kid, and even, with a gender twist, to Cagney and Lacey.

In its classical formulations, as with Gilgamesh and Enkidu,

David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pyla-

des, Castor and Pollux, Damon and Pythias, the friends are typi-

cally heroes: ‘aristocratic, young, brave, and beautiful. In their

free and wholehearted response to one another, they openly

declare their affection and admiration. They engage in many

adventures and battles, sharing danger, loyal to the death.

Throughout life, they remain devoted and generous to each

other.’31 Such male friendship is of course not the opposite of

female friendship, and I am not suggesting that the Hebrews

knew of no other ways for men to be friends except on the pat-

tern of David and Jonathan. But I am arguing that this model of

heroic male bonding is one important way masculinity was con-

structed in ancient Israel and, as well, that the David narrative

itself had a significant role in sustaining that construction.

According to Hammond and Jablow, the function of male

friendship in this tradition was to provide a source of support

that was freely chosen without the constraints of kinship, a sup-

port that perhaps had emotional dimensions that could not be

29. Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity, p. 150 (italics mine). And, while

‘males measure no lower than females in sociability, they do measure lower

in intimacy’ (p. 149). Cf. also Drury Sherrod, ‘The Bonds of Men: Problems

and Possibilities in Close Male Relationships’, in The Making of Masculinities,

pp. 213-39 (217): ‘[w]omen seem to look for intimate confidantes, while men

seek for partners for adventure’.

30. Hammond and Jablow, ‘Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid’, p. 245.

31. Hammond and Jablow, ‘Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid’, p. 247.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

provided within a system of kinship and arranged marriages.

Such male friendships operated especially in the public domain,

which meant in practice in many societies, in warfare. In that

context, familial support was unavailable, and warriors needed

the support of likeminded and equally isolated men. At least in

classical Greece, and probably also in Israel, such male friend-

ships had no overt homosexual element; certainly in Greece,

homosexual love was typically between an older lover and a

younger beloved,32

whereas male bonding friends were

peers—as were Jonathan and David.

The ideology of such male friendship contains these elements:

loyalty to one another, a dyadic relationship with an exclusive

tendency, a commitment to a common cause, and a valuing of

the friendship above all other relationships. In such a friendship

there is not necessarily a strong emotional element; the bond

may be more instrumental and functional than affective. Perhaps

that is the nature of the bond between David and Jonathan, and

that is one of the ways in which they subscribe to, and promote,

the Hebrew ideology of masculinity.

5. The womanless male

One of the concomitants of strong male bonding is of course a

relative minimizing of cross-sex relationships. It may seem

strange to speak of David, a man with eight principal wives and

at least ten others of secondary rank (2 Sam. 15.16), as

‘womanless’. But it is a striking feature of the David story that

the males are so casual about women, and that women are so

marginal to the lives of the protagonists. There is in this story, on

the whole, no sexual desire, no love stories, no romances, no

wooing, no daring deeds for the sake of a beloved. This is not a

world in which men long for women. It is rather a matter of

pride for David and his men, in fact, that they have kept them-

selves ‘clean’ from women: ‘ , he avers.

There is sex in the story, of course, but it is perfunctory and

usually politically motivated. The classic case in the David story

is that of Absalom, who has sex with ten of his father’s

secondary wives ‘in the sight of all Israel’ simply in order to lay

32. Cf. Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1978).

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Interested Parties

claim to the throne of his father (2 Sam. 16.21-23). Even in the

Bathsheba episode, the sex is essentially an expression of royal

power, and it is much more like rape than love.

In the one case where sexual desire comes into the foreground,

it is accompanied by strongly negative connotations. Amnon

‘loves’ his sister Tamar (2 Sam. 13.2). But such love is not good

for him: he is in distress (rrx) to the point of becoming ill (hlj

hithpa.) ‘on account of’ (NIV) (rwb[b) her, but perhaps rather we

should translate it ‘because of her’—as if it were her fault.33 He is

no longer in control of himself, but feels compelled to satisfy his

lust, which he can only do by trickery, incest and rape. And the

desire he experiences is unsatisfying and ephemeral: his love for

her immediately turns to hatred. What is more, his desire has

fearful consequences: he himself becomes hated by his brother

and the object of his father’s anger, and eventually he meets his

death—just because of his sexual desire and experience. The

message plainly is that sex can damage your health very

severely, and nothing in the narrative of David goes to show that

more definitively than the key episode of David and Bathsheba

(2 Sam. 11).

We have to conclude that David does not actually like women

very much, and certainly has no fun with them. If he can say that

Jonathan’s love has been ‘wonderful’, better than the love of

women, and he has (as far as I can judge) never been to bed with

Jonathan, it doesn’t say a lot for his love life.

But more important than David’s sexual experience is the

image of masculinity that the David story promotes. It says loud

and clear, if only ever implicitly, that a real man can get along

fine without women; he can have several women in a casual kind

of way, but he has nothing to gain from them except children,

and he owes them nothing. Hanging over every woman is the

spectre of fatal attraction; like the ‘wily’ woman of Proverbs 7,

every woman is potentially a road to Sheol, a way down to the

chambers of death (Prov. 7.27). A man does well to steer clear of

women, a man does not need women, a man is not constituted

by his relationship with women. It is a different story if we sub-

stitute ‘other men’ for ‘women’ in the previous sentence.

33. Cases where rwb[b implies responsibility are, for example: Gen. 3.17;

8.21; 12.13, 16; 18.26, 29, 31, 32; 26.24.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

f. The musical male

A final characteristic of David, according to the glowing report

of the servant of Saul, is that David is ‘skilful in playing the lyre’

(ˆgn [dy)), lit. ‘knowing, i.e. experienced at, playing [a stringed

instrument]’, 1 Sam. 16.18). I thought at first that musicianship

was not an especially masculine trait in David, but just an acci-

dental feature of his characterization, more dependent on his

role in the narrative (like the notation that ‘Yahweh was with

him’) than upon the Hebrew construction of masculinity. In any

case, I would not want to lay too much weight upon this speech

by a servant of Saul; it is certainly not meant by him to be a

definitive summary of the characteristics of Israelite masculinity.

Nevertheless, the servant of Saul certainly encourages us to

ponder whether this element in the picture of David—alongside

his being a warrior, a persuasive speaker and a beautiful

man—may not itself be an expression of his maleness.

We ourselves are hardly inclined to distinguish between the

sexes in the matter of musical ability, and would readily ascribe

the predominance of males as composers of music and as orches-

tral conductors, for example, to more general social structures.

My own modern construction of masculinity was no doubt an

important reason why I did not myself immediately recognize

David’s musical talent as a masculine trait.34 Is it, though? What

is the evidence?

In the Hebrew Bible, women as well as men make music. But is

the music-making they engage in a gendered activity? Women

are singers, accompanying themselves with timbrels and tam-

bourines and other assorted idiophones (like the vylv, [?]

‘sistrum’) and membranophones (like the πt, [?] ‘timbrel, tam-

bourine, drum’).35 The playing of stringed instruments, on the

other hand, seems to have been largely a male activity. It would

34. I am grateful to Francis Landy for urging me to consider David's

musicality more seriously.

35. For the categories, see Ivor H. Jones, ‘Music and Musical Instru-

ments’, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (ed. David Noel Freedman; New

York: Doubleday, 1992), IV, pp. 930-39. For the sistrum as played by

women, see 1 Sam. 18.6; for the timbrel, Exod. 15.11; Judg. 11.34; 1 Sam.

18.6; Jer. 31.4.

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not be that ancient Israelite women were incapable of playing

stringed instruments, of course, but rather that skill in

playing—playing ‘with the hand’ (wdyb, 1 Sam 16.16, 23), i.e. with

dextrous use of the fingers, would be a male preserve. If we look

at the references to the lyre (rwnk, often translated as ‘harp’),

which is David’s speciality, and is referred to more than 40 times

in the Hebrew Bible, the only place where a woman plays it is in

Isa. 23.16: it is Tyre as a prostitute who takes a lyre and makes

sweet melody (ˆgn byfyh).36 The exception proves the rule. Women

never play the lbn, (?) ‘lute’ or the bgw[, (?) ‘harp’.

Perhaps we should conclude therefore that David’s kind of

music, and his pre-eminence in playing it, is represented in the

narrative as an essentially male trait.

g. A Conflict of Masculinities?

Now that we have reviewed what seem to be the leading male

characteristics in the figure of David, there is another question

that needs yet to be raised. It is, Are there are any conflicting

masculinities within the David story? Focussing exclusively on

David, I ask, Does David himself conform entirely to one set of

models for maleness? Are there ways, for example, in which

David breaks free of the role of the traditional male, are there

any hints that David might be something of a ‘new man’?37

At first sight this may seem to be so. There are several episodes

in which David acts contrary to what seem to be the standards of

a traditional masculinity. Joab puts it famously when he says,

‘You love those who hate you and hate those who love

you...Today I perceive that if Absalom were alive and all of us

were dead today, then you would be pleased’ (2 Sam. 19.6). We

(I mean, we modern westerners) are rather attracted to this trait

in David—even if it does not immediately resonate for us with

36. In Sir. 9.4 also the reader is advised not to dally (or sleep) with tnygnm;

whether they are women who play instruments or ‘singing girls’ (as JB,

NAB) is not certain. In the LXX the term is

, but in Hellenistic

Greek,

seems to mean ‘sing’, with or without accompaniment (in

classical Greek it was ‘pluck [a stringed instrument]’).

37. See the brilliant essay by Rowena Chapman, ‘The Great Pretender:

Variations on the New Man Theme’, in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity,

pp. 225-48.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

Christian overtones. Many readers would agree with Cheryl

Exum that the whole episode of Absalom’s revolt brings before

us a ‘rare, intimate view of David’ and that ‘[i]n his vulnerability

the king becomes most sympathetic’.38 At the very least, we are

inclined with her to find marks of ‘tragic conflict’ and ‘grief, so

tragically excessive’, and to behold a man who ‘endures, broken

in spirit’, a man in extremity, who has ‘expended all emotion’.39

But what if the burden of the text, reading with the grain of its

gender codes, that is to say, is not that David is somehow noble

and tragically heroic in this scene, but is simply a failure as a

man, as a male. What reason have we to think that the narrator

has any sympathy for David? On the contrary, he has Joab

roundly rebuke David in terms no one has ever dared use with

him before,40 and David, for his part, does not defend himself

against Joab’s criticism but meekly capitulates, arising and tak-

ing his seat in the gate (19.8). In short, we ourselves may find

David interesting precisely because he sometimes lapses from

the ideals of traditional masculinity; but that does not mean that

the text has relaxed its allegiance to those norms for an instant.41

The text represents David as a great hero, but a fallible one; and

his fallibility only serves to inscribe yet deeper the authority of

the cultural norms of his time.

Reading from this direction, perhaps another unexpected

episode in the David story makes better sense. While the child of

his union with Bathsheba is dying, David fasts and will not be

roused from his identification with the child in its weakness; but

38. J. Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 130. There is an appeal

in a footnote to Charles Conroy, Absalom Absalom! Narrative and Language in

2 Sam. 13–20 (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1978), pp. 111-12. And cf.

Walter Brueggemann, David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory

(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 47: ‘If there had been no interiority to

David, if there were only public events, the narrative would scarcely attract

us’.

39. Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, p. 135.

40. As Exum notes (Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, p. 135).

41. Brueggemann sees this when he words Joab’s rebuke as a warning

that ‘if [David’s] personal pain is allowed to erode a good public presence,

the whole fragile “house of authority” will quickly collapse’ (David’s Truth,

p. 72).

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the moment the child has died, David pragmatically resumes his

normal activity and abandons his grieving (2 Sam. 12.15-23).

Readers of David’s behaviour, starting with his puzzled servants

in the text, have often found something both fascinating and

repellent here,42 but none, I think, has seen it as the outworking

of a gender code. If men of David’s time are to be strong, David’s

response to the child’s death is the ultimate macho act, the fitting

conclusion to a narrative of aggressive masculinity that began

with the rape of Bathsheba and continued with the cynical dis-

posal of her husband. In this story, even God is treated by David

in a purely instrumental way: David fasts and prays only so long

as he thinks he can affect God’s determination of the outcome;

the moment God takes the child’s life, David knows he is

defeated, and abandons his weapon of a self-serving piety.43

Whether the excessive grief over the dying child conformed with

the male script of his culture or not I do not know; but if it did

not, David certainly compensated very shortly for his lapse from

its standards.

What of the occasions when David capitulates to fate? Are

these signs of a character that is in resistance to male norms of

success and indomitableness? Are they the hint of a narrator that

there can be more to being a man than playing out traditional

gender roles? I am thinking of the time when David hears the

news that Absalom has been proclaimed king in Hebron and

promptly vacates Jerusalem (2 Sam. 15.13-23). When Abiathar

and Zadok volunteer to bring the ark with David into exile,

David tells them to take it back: ‘If I find favour in the eyes of

Yahweh’, he says, ‘he will bring me back and let me see both it

and his habitation; but if he says, “I have no pleasure in you”,

behold, here I am; let him do to me what seems good to him’

42. Though some think it ‘an act of profound faith in the face of the most

precious tabus of his people’ (Walter Brueggemann, In Man We Trust: The

Neglected Side of Biblical Faith [Richmond: John Knox Press, 1972], p. 36), or

an affirmation of David’s ‘belief in Yahweh’s freedom to repay as he

chooses’ (David M. Gunn, The Story of King David: Genre and Interpretation

[Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 6; Sheffield:

JSOT, 1978], p. 110).

43. Brueggemann, David’s Truth, p. 53, acknowledges that ‘the over-

riding mark of David is his self-serving’.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

(15.25-26). A little later, he is faced by Shimei, cursing and

throwing stones. But David resists Abishai’s offer to ‘go over and

take off his head’ (16.9), saying, ‘Let him alone, and let him

curse, for Yahweh has bidden him. It may be that Yahweh will

look upon my affliction, and that Yahweh will repay me with

good for this cursing of me today’ (16.11-12). Is David being

portrayed in these incidents as ‘a man of stunning faith’, moved

by ‘more than moral courage of a tragic kind’?44 Or is it David

abandoning the soldierly norms by which he has lived, making

himself more sympathetic—to pacifists at least—in the process,

but not in the least inspiring the hearers of his story to a post-

masculinist worldview? Is it not, from the point of view of the

narrator, a weakness in David as a man (though it is perhaps a

strength in him as a human being, from our point of view) that

he has caved in at the first rumour of opposition to him by

Absalom?

There is no ‘new man’ here in the David story. There is a fully

fledged traditional male, who for the most part recapitulates

everything scripted for him by his culture, but now and then

conspicuously fails—so conspicuously that any non-feminized

reader knows immediately that it is a failure that is not to be

excused or imitated, but is a sorry example that serves only to

reinforce the value of the traditional norms.

3. The Conflict of Masculinities: Ours and Theirs

There are similarities and dissimilarities between our modern

western masculinity and that of the David story. The most strik-

ing, and even perhaps the most foundational, of the dissimilari-

ties is the modern self-definition of maleness over against femi-

ninity. In David’s world, evidently, the spheres of men and

women are so distinct, their cultural scripts so divergent, that

neither defines self over against the other. If our culture repre-

sents the ‘feminization’ of society, as has been argued,45 it makes

44. Brueggemann, David’s Truth, p. 53.

45. Such ‘feminization’ has been seen, historically, most clearly by its

opponents, such as the Boy Scout movement. See, for example, Joseph H.

Pleck, ‘The Theory of Male Sex-Role Identity: Its Rise and Fall, 1936 to the

Present’, in The Making of Masculinities, pp. 21-38 (23); Michael S. Kimmel,

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Interested Parties

sense that males now tend to define themselves oppositionally,

having lost a distinct idea of their own role.

The foundational character of this oppositional self-definition

is illustrated graphically, if rather trivially, by the idea of male

beauty. In a world—like David’s—in which men do not have to

be the opposite of women, there is no problem with men think-

ing of themselves and of other men as beautiful, indeed of

beauty being a desirable male characteristic. But in our world,

men go out of their way to avoid the idea, and have developed a

language to repress it.

Perhaps another example where the oppositional self-defini-

tion has had influence is that of the persuasive male. In our cul-

ture, skill with words, especially persuasive speech, tends to be

regarded as a female characteristic, and it does not figure among

the typically male ideals analysed by Doyle and Wood. A charac-

teristic male of our time is rather the strong silent type.

It is interesting to wonder how the evident lack of interest in

sex in the David story, by contrast to our contemporary insis-

tence on its near obligatoriness, fits in with the profile of mascu-

linity in the text. Can it be that contemporary absorption in sex

coheres with a masculinity that is not so sure of itself, that is

troubled about self-definition and functionality? If sex is as much

a way of finding oneself as finding the other, might finding one-

self be a peculiarly modern desire, one that is not shared by the

world of the text?46

There are of course also the similarities to be considered. The

crucial one is the demand to be aggressive. The idea of the war-

rior as the ideal of maleness is instantly recognizable in both

cultures, even if most of the fighting today is done either by

proxy in distant wars or metaphorically on the sports field or in

the boardroom. Toughness and strength are still the cultural

‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’, in The

Making of Masculinities, pp. 121-53 (143-49); Michael Messner, ‘The Meaning

of Success: The Athletic Experience and the Development of Male Identity’,

in The Making of Masculinities, pp. 193-209 (196).

46. Cf. Robert Nozik, ‘Sexuality’, in Gender Basics: Feminist Perspectives on

Women and Men (ed. Anne Minas; Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1993), pp. 302-

306: ‘It is not only the other person who is known more deeply in sex. One

knows one’s own self better in experiencing what it is capable of’ (p. 303).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

script for boys and men, though what counts as toughness is not

necessarily the same in the two cultures. David can cry, for

example, without detriment to his masculinity, but a man who

cries publicly today is still something of a deviant, an embar-

rassment at least, even if nothing worse.

The idea of success is common to both cultures too, of course.

There is no point in fighting except to win, and success in the

David story is measured by the body count. The idea of success

in modern masculinity is very much more broadly based, how-

ever, and the modern male can easily be made to feel less than a

man if he is unsuccessful in any area of his life. The problem

with the criterion of success, especially when it is couched com-

petitively, as in warfare or in sport or, often, in business, is that

there are very many more failures than successes, so that the

very structure of the male ideal ensures that most males will feel

themselves inadequate in some way or other; the system is a

‘structure of failure’. In the case of the sports world, for example,

though the emphasis on competitive sports throughout the 1960s

was founded on the premises that ‘sports builds character’ and ‘a

winner in sports will be a winner in life’, the very opposite

proves to be the case. And the criterion of success itself is self-

defeating, since ‘success’ is almost never attainable in any abso-

lute or permanent sense; it can only be an aspiration, so long as

the message is conveyed that ‘you’re only as good as your last

game’.47 Whether the same intensity and comprehensiveness

attaches to the idea of success in the David story is doubtful.

As for the idea of self-reliance, here too there are clear reso-

nances between the ideals of masculinity in our culture and in

David’s world. But the meaning of self-reliance, and its depth,

are different. The ideal of the supportive friend as part of the

essence of maleness makes a lot of difference on this front.

So, even the similarities between their world and ours contain

dissimilarities. What happens to those dissimilarities, I now ask,

when readers from our culture read the David story?

47. See further, Michael Messner, ‘The Meaning of Success: The Athletic

Experience and the Development of Male Identity’, in The Making of Mas-

culinities, pp. 193-209 (193-95, 199).

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4. The Triumph of Modern Masculinity

The thesis of this final section is that the profile of masculinity in

the modern world has, in the literature about David, over-

whelmed the quite distinctive portrait of Hebrew masculinity in

the David story.

1. Approval

The most striking aspect of the modern scholarly response to the

figure of David in the biblical narrative is the strong note of

approval that is struck. Why do scholars so unanimously defend

David and gloss over his faults? Have they perhaps been over-

influenced by the tone of the biblical narrator, who is remarkably

reticent and averse to making judgments of the characters?48

Have they perhaps read the narrative, which rarely if ever criti-

cizes David, as approving of David’s behaviour and character,

and have they adopted the narrator’s standpoint, whether

consciously or not? This does not seem to be a probable

explanation, since biblical narrators everywhere are notoriously

reticent and scholars may be expected to take critical account of

that fact.

Perhaps we should consider the theological dimension of the

David figure, whether or not the sentence about his being ‘a man

after God’s own heart’ is taken literally or not. Those who see

David as a prefigurement of the messiah, as, for example, ‘the

kingly ideal...in the image of which [Israel] looked for a coming

Messiah, who should deliver his people and sit upon the throne

of David for ever’,49 might be inclined to minimize the negative

aspects of David’s character. This is no doubt a very powerful

force in the interpretation of the figure of David, even up to the

present day, as the conclusion of the article on David in the most

48. A famous exception, so it is often said, is 2 Sam. 11.27, where the nar-

rator writes apropos of the Bathsheba affair that ‘the thing that David had

done displeased Yahweh’. It is more probable, however, that this sentence

is nothing more than a motivating sentence for the succeeding narrative of

the death of the child of Bathsheba and David. On the matter of the narra-

tor’s reticence, cf. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George

Allen & Unwin, 1981), pp. 114-30.

49. T.H. Jones, ‘David’, in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary (ed.

J.D. Douglas et al.; Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1980), I, pp. 364-69 (369).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

recent of scholarly Bible encyclopaedias will show:

Ultimately, however, David’s lasting significance lay in his posi-

tion as YHWH’s chosen king for Israel and as the father of the

royal dynasty that YHWH chose to bless. He occupied a midpoint

between his great ancestor Abraham and his great descendant

Jesus. The promises made to David stood in continuity with those

to Abraham, and they pointed to a messianic ideal of great

promise for the world, an ideal that, so Christians have affirmed,

found its expression in Jesus, the Christ.50

If that kind of assertion of mythical and cosmic significance is to

form the conclusion of one’s account of David, it is understand-

able that the character of David is likely to have met throughout

the history of interpretation with considerable approval. Yet

even this angle of approach, which is of course not shared by all

scholars, does not satisfactorily account for the degree of

approval David is accorded at the hands of scholars generally.

What I should like to suggest is that what male scholars (most

who have written on the David story are males, not surprisingly)

are responding to in the character of David is his masculinity, of

which they themselves approve or to which they themselves are

attracted. They view his masculinity through the lens of their

own, of course, but there is enough commonality for them to

identify themselves and their own desire with David. This is a

gender-based hero-worship. They can, and must, excuse his

faults and crimes because he is at bottom a man after their own

heart—which is to say, their own image of masculinity. One

writer of an current encyclopaedia article puts his finger on it

exactly, if rather quaintly: ‘he was all that men find wholesome

and admirable in man’51—‘wholesome’ meaning that they

approve of David, and ‘admirable’ meaning that they desire to

be like him.

2. Success

A second main characteristic of the way in which the figure of

David has been shaped by the norms of modern western mas-

culinity is this: he has been aligned with the masculine model of

50. David M. Howard, Jr, ‘David’, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, I,

pp. 41-48 (48).

51. Jones, ‘David’, in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, I, pp. 364-69 (369).

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success.52

Thus J.M. Myers, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, con-

cludes his article on David with an ‘estimate’, which displays

David as wholly successful in every area of his life. David was

honourable, dignified and loyal; he had a ‘rare quality of diplo-

macy’ (the choice of Jerusalem as his capital was ‘another master

stroke of diplomacy’); he was a great warrior and an excellent

general; he was shrewd as a politician; he was a ‘deeply religious

man’; he was a poet and musician of note; and ‘finally, David

was a great organizer’.53 That is to say, everything that David

does, he does excellently and entirely successfully. What David

does not do well has been totally suppressed from the ‘estimate’.

The commentator is comfortable with his article on David only if

can show David to have been a success, for the commentator is

scripted to desire success himself.

To take another example, David M. Howard, in The Anchor

Bible Dictionary, finds David to have been ‘a shrewd military

strategist and motivator’, a skilful politician, and a talented

administrator of the military, civil and religious bureaucracies.

He had renowned skills as a ‘poet, musician and sponsor of

music’. He displayed ‘a fine religious sensitivity for the most

part’, as evidenced by his ‘relationship with his God, his concern

for others’ welfare, his ready repentance when confronted with

his sin, and his concern for the religious matters pertaining to the

temple and the cult’.54 Everything that David does prospers, and

although there is one point at which David is not perfect—his

‘sin’—somehow that too becomes a sphere of success: David,

admirably, shows ‘ready repentance when confronted with his

52. I do not suggest that this focus entirely misconstrues the Hebrew

narrative, for a sentence like 1 Sam. 18.14 encapsulates it very neatly:

‘David was successful (lykcm) in all his undertakings, for Yahweh was with

him’. And there is no doubt that the story of David can be subsumed under

the rubric of success/failure—as Exum, for example, does over some pages

in her Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, pp. 122-26 (e.g. ‘One could hardly

imagine a more thoroughgoing success story’ [p. 126]). The point rather is

that our contemporary models of masculinity prompt us to foreground cer-

tain textual materials rather than others.

53. J.M. Myers, ‘David’, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (ed.

George Arthur Buttrick; Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), I, pp. 771-82 (781-82).

54. Howard, ‘David’, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, I, pp. 41-48 (48).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

sin’. That is to say, for the commentator the sin is swallowed up

in the repentance. David’s success in repentance becomes more

important than his failure in sin, so even his failure becomes an

arena of his success.

A final example, with a more pious turn of phrase, if that were

possible, comes from The Illustrated Bible Dictionary:

[David’s] accomplishments were many and varied; man of action,

poet, tender lover, generous foe, stern dispenser of justice, loyal

friend, he was all that men find wholesome and admirable in

man, and this by the will of God, who shaped him for his

destiny.55

In brief, for these commentators, everything questionable, dis-

tasteful and gross about David has been swallowed up by the

modern myth of masculinity: if he is a real man, he has to be

successful.

3. Warfare

We have seen how prominent in the construction of David’s

masculinity is his ability and desire for fighting and killing.

Modern masculinity approves of aggression, and it is striking

that our commentators never say a word against David on this

score. On the other hand, since being a biblical scholar and a

mafia boss at one and the same time would create an uncomfort-

able conflict in their own male identities, they are diffident at

positively approving of David’s perpetual taking of life. So they

have two strategies of containment for their anxiety on this score:

either they suppress the warrior David or they transform the

aggression of the man of blood into the assertiveness of the deci-

sive, problem-solving executive or tycoon.

Both strategies are evident (if you know to look for them) in

the article on David by Jan Fokkelman in Harper’s Bible Dictio-

nary.56 His concluding and summary paragraph begins: ‘David

was not only a very powerful leader and personality as both sol-

dier and statesman, he was also a first-class poet... The court

established by him...gave a tremendous spiritual and literary

55. Jones, ‘David’, in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, I, pp. 364-69 (369).

56. Jan P. Fokkelman, ‘David’, in Harper’s Bible Dictionary (ed. Paul

J. Achtemeier; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 208-11.

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impulse to the literature of biblical Israel.’ And so on, until it

concludes, ‘And the poems of David live on in the liturgy of Jew-

ish and Christian communities, sung to this very day’. David

then is what his significance is, and his significance is what

endures to this very day. Of course, he was a ‘soldier’—but not

in the sense of killing lots of men, but in the sense of being a

leader as a soldier, of being a statesman in much the same sense,

and certainly in the same breath, as being a soldier. Of course he

was aggressive, but only in the sense of being ‘a very powerful

leader and personality’—not in the sense of murdering messeng-

ers and killing Philistines for the fun of it. Elsewhere in the arti-

cle also there is the same squeamishness about actual killing.

There is indeed a reference to his ‘courage and leadership in

regular skirmishes with the Philistines’, but that phrase ‘regular

skirmishes’ makes it sound more like football fixtures than hit-

and-run slayings, like good clean fun in which no one gets hurt

rather than the bloody taking of human life. And there is a refer-

ence also to the fact that David ‘became a war lord with his own

army of outlaws and performed services of protection’, as if the

special function of a ‘war lord’ is the provision of security. The

profile of David’s masculinity in the text has been overlaid and

obscured by Fokkelman’s.

Another example is to be found in the International Standard

Bible Encyclopaedia, where the author, David F. Payne, concludes

that David was ‘supremely able in the military and political

spheres’ and that ‘[h]is successes were a tribute to his personal

courage, and to his ability as soldier and statesman’. ‘While his

adultery and murder [of Uriah] cannot be condoned, with this

glaring exception he was in every way the ideal ruler.’57 One

might be forgiven for thinking that the writer not only condones

but actually approves of David’s slaughters and indiscriminate

killings, for in every way, he says, with but one glaring excep-

tion, David is the ideal ruler.

4. Beauty

There is some discomfort in the commentators over male beauty.

57. David F. Payne, ‘David’, in The International Standard Bible Ency-

clopaedia (ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; fully revised edition, Grand Rapids:

Wm B. Eerdmans, 1979), I, pp. 870-76 (876).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

None of the English translations or the commentators will actu-

ally bring themselves to speaking of ‘beauty’ in a man.58 Their

culture enables them only to think of ‘good looks’ or

‘handsomeness’ in a man, for ‘beauty’ is, for them, a female

characteristic. To be a man is to be different in every respect from

a woman, even linguistically if possible.

And there are other ways of expressing this discomfort as well.

McCarter says curtly: ‘The quality [of ‘good looks’, as he calls it]

is to be interpreted as a physical symptom of divine favor’59—as

if he can accept male beauty only as a feature of the text that

stands in need of ‘interpretation’, only if it is a symbol for some-

thing else. It is strange too that he calls it a ‘symptom’, as if it

were a medical condition. Ackroyd too wants to stress that ‘good

appearance’ is seen as a divine gift60—as if its real significance

were theological.

Another way of handling the discomfort is to make no com-

ment on the texts that speak of male beauty. A.R.S. Kennedy, for

example, says nothing about any of the texts except to suggest

that David’s ‘ruddiness’ may refer to his hair colour61 and to curl

his lip at 2 Sam. 14.25-27 as ‘[a] paragraph of later date eulogiz-

ing Absalom’s personal beauty’.62

Yet another mode of commenting is to naturalize the Hebrew

terminology to an acceptable code of the commentator’s time.

Thus Ackroyd, for example, reckons that ‘handsome’ (NEB) at

1 Sam. 16.1, used of David, is better translated ‘a man of pres-

ence’.63 The NEB itself actually says of Saul at 1 Sam. 9.2 that

‘there was no better man among the Israelites than he’, and

Ackroyd remarks that ‘better’ ‘may indicate moral quality, but

the phrases following suggest superiority of physical appear-

ance’.64

58. Kennedy, Samuel, p. 261, gives the lie to that generalization, but since

his book is almost a hundred years old, perhaps it is not representative of

the ‘modern’ West.

59. McCarter, I Samuel, p. 173.

60. Ackroyd, 1 Samuel, p. 75. David’s beauty is ‘good appearance’ also

on p. 133.

61. Kennedy, Samuel, p. 118.

62. Kennedy, Samuel, p. 261.

63. Ackroyd, 1 Samuel, p. 135.

64. Ackroyd, 1 Samuel, p. 75.

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McKane is something of an exception among commentators in

not only noting but also urging his readers to note ‘the emphasis

[in 1 Sam. 9.2] on Saul’s physical attractiveness and superb

physique’,65 but that is only place in his brief commentary where

the subject of male beauty is allowed to raise its head. On the

whole, David’s beauty, and therewith the very idea of male

beauty in general, is suppressed in the commentaries by the

modern ideology of masculinity.

5. Sex

Here is the site of another set of conflicts. David has intercourse

with twenty women, at least, but he is not very interested in sex.

The only appreciative thing he says about love sounds homo-

erotic, especially because it explicitly displaces women as the

object of male affection: ‘I am desolate for you, Jonathan my

brother. Very dear you were to me, your love more wonderful to

me than the love of a woman’ (NJB); ‘Your love for me was won-

derful, surpassing the love of women’ (2 Sam. 1.26 REB); ‘[M]ost

dear have you been to me; [m]ore precious have I held love for

you than love for women’ (NAB). Faced with David’s sexual

practice and his sexual interests, commentators find themselves

in a fix. Writing for church presses and Christian sensibilities (for

the most part), they feel obliged to uphold monogamous hetero-

sexuality as the norm, while their own culture scripts them to

regard sex as critical and foundational for masculinity. Given the

textual evidence, how are they to construct and represent David

on sex? What sort of a man is he, and how does his masculinity

implictly trouble the commentators’ own masculinity?

Take Kyle McCarter, and let him speak for commentators

everywhere. Wherever the language of love between Jonathan

and David crops up in the narrative,66 McCarter hastens to

65. William McKane, I and II Samuel: Introduction and Commentary (Torch

Bible Commentaries; London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 69.

66. I refer to 1 Sam. 18.1; 20.17; 2 Sam. 1.26 (though not 1 Sam. 19.1,

where the Hebrew is ≈pj, which means no more than ‘deeply fond’ in

McCarter’s translation [I Samuel, p. 320]; most of the rest of us think that it

means ‘delight in’, ‘take pleasure in’, but it’s a bit ripe having men ‘delight

in’ other men, isn’t it?).

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

assure us that it has a political connotation.67 To be sure, it

‘describes personal affection’,68 and Jonathan ‘is so taken with

David that he becomes vitally devoted to him in affection and

loyalty’,69 and ‘Jonathan’s deep affection for David is a part of

the close relationship that has developed between the two young

men; also it is surely a sign of the irresistible charm of the man

who has Yahweh’s favor’.70 Oh yes, and there was ‘also’ ‘warm

personal intimacy in the relationship between the two

men’—that ‘also’ signifying: as well as the political implications,

which were more important. What we should not forget, says

McCarter, is that ‘In the ancient Near East “love” terminology

belonged to the language of political discourse, and many of the

statements made about Jonathan’s love for David are charged

with political overtones’.71 In a word, says McCarter, banish

from your mind any thought of sex when you read of Jonathan’s

love: it is essentially political, and though there was also a warm

personal ‘affection’, there was absolutely nothing more, honest.

There is no recognition in this commentator that the David and

Jonathan of 1 Samuel cannot be described as ‘just good friends’;

even if they are not lovers in our sense, they are certainly one

another’s ‘significant other’—in the early days, at least. In that

context, the question of sex has to be raised, one would have

67. McCarter depends for this point upon J.A. Thompson’s article, ‘The

Significance of the Verb Love in the Jonathan–David Narratives in

1 Samuel’, Vetus Testamentum 24 (1974), pp. 34-38. But of course the mean-

ing of ‘love’ in a formal treaty context (cf. also W.L. Moran, ‘The Ancient

Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy’, Catholic

Biblical Quarterly 25 [1963], pp. 77-87 [78-79]) will hardly be relevant for the

term in this narrative of personal relationships.

68. They are ‘close friends’, says Peter D. Miscall, charmingly (1 Samuel:

A Literary Reading [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986], p. 130).

69. McCarter, I Samuel, p. 305.

70. McCarter, I Samuel, p. 342.

71. P. Kyle McCarter, Jr, II Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction,

Notes and Commentary (Anchor Bible, 9; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984),

p. 77. If love ‘belonged’ to the language of political discourse, readers may

note, presumably wives, husbands, parents, children, courting couples and

the like only ever ‘borrowed’ (perhaps ‘stole’?) it.

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thought, even if it is to be laid to rest.72 But it is not, because the

commentator’s construction of masculinity has no room for the

homoerotic, and David is nothing if he is not a ‘real man’.73

How does David’s polygamy fare then? Not a word from

McCarter on the ten ‘concubines’ who are left to guard the house

when David flees before Absalom (2 Sam. 15.16; 16.21) except to

say that ‘By claiming the royal harem Abishalom publicizes his

claim to the throne’74—as if Absalom had put an advertisement

in The Times announcing his royal pretensions, rather than

undertaking, in a bizarre act of sexual athleticism and exhibition-

ism, to have sex with one after another of David’s ten secondary

wives in a tent pitched on the roof ‘in the sight of all Israel’

(2 Sam. 16.22). Polygamy and multiple rape are the unacceptable

faces of heterosexuality in the modern West, so the least said

about ancient males’ deviation from modern norms the better.

The commentator, who is no doubt a liberal intellectual, if not

even a ‘new man’ as well, displays a quite uncanny reticence

about the grotesque and the gross in this narrative, and in so

doing naturalizes the biblical text. In passing no remark upon the

harem system or the ethics of multiple rape the commentator

affects not to have noticed something nasty in the text; or, having

noticed it, judges that there is nothing to be said about it. The

72. The distinction between male friendship and homosexuality, though

always problematic, has been clearly enough recognized in other ages than

our own; cf. for example Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male

Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop 29 (1990), pp. 1-19.

73. Perhaps the message that ‘real men’ read here is that male friendship

is dangerous; cf. Philip Culbertson, New Adam: The Future of Male

Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 90. Not everyone operates

with the distinction of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, between the homosocial,

which includes all same-sex relations, and the homosexual, which denotes

only that segment of the homosocial that is distinguished by genital

sexuality (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [New

York: Columbia University Press, 1985]). I mean that most people are not

aware how important such a distinction is; there are also those, of course,

who are aware of it but do not accept it (cf. Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain

and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea

Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1986), p. 13.

74. McCarter, II Samuel, p. 384.

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10. David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity

behaviour of a David or an Absalom is thereby naturalized and

normalized, and the representation of masculinity in the text is

harmonized to our modern consciousness.

In a word, and metacommentatingly, I conclude: Once again, we

see that the function of commentary on biblical texts has been to

familiarize the Bible, to normalize it to our own cultural stan-

dards, to render it as undisturbing as possible, to press it into the

service of a different worldview; eventually, the effect will be to

write the Bible out of existence. That is what has been happening

to the Bible in the church, in my opinion,75 and it is no doubt

what happens to the Bible in any culture. I suppose it is what

happens to old books anywhere, and it is the task of scholars,

taking a step of critical distance as best they can from their own

culture and their personal scripts, to bring back into the fore-

ground the otherness of the familiarized.76

75. See my forthcoming book, The Bible and the Modern World (The Dids-

bury Lectures; Carlisle: The Paternoster Press, 1995), Chapter 4 ‘The Bible

and the Church’, where I present some empirical evidence for this claim.

76. I should like to thank my colleague Cheryl Exum for advising me

that this was the next paper I should write, though I doubt that it has

turned out as she would have imagined it, and Francis Landy for a typically

generous and thought-provoking series of comments on a draft of the chap-

ter (I incorporated all I could, and tried to fend off the others).