King David : A Biography

Rating:
Summary: A hellion after my own heart!
Review: Arguably, the three great stories of the Bible are the stories of Moses, King David, and Jesus. While some of the stories in Genesis may be easier for the average person to recount (loosely) from memory, the story of King David gets more ink from the biblical authors. With the publication of KING DAVID: A BIOGRAPHY by Steven McKenzie and THE DAVID STORY by Robert Alter, it looks like Israel's great king might finally be getting his due recognition (vis-a-vis Moses and Jesus, anyway). "Part of the appeal of the David story," says McKenzie, "has been the earthiness of its plot. It reads like a modern soap opera with plenty of sex, violence, and struggles for power. The relationships are intricate." David's story (found primarily in 1 & 2 Samuel) reads like a season of "Dallas" and has inspired modern classics by the likes of William Faulkner and Joseph Heller. Anyone who works in an office, a government agency, or university is more likely to identify with David--or one of the secondary characters in his narrative--than they would with Jesus. David is as guileful as Jesus was guileless.

In spite of his modest claim to be offering nothing new, McKenzie has accomplished an amazing feat. He has organized, presented, evaluated, and summarized recent biblical scholarship on the David story. He also discusses the scant, but intriguing, archaeological evidence of David's reign. He is not dismissive of the biblical record, but he deftly helps the average reader to understand the kind of reasonable skepticism that scholars have had to adopt in order to extract a plausible portrait of David from all the spin-doctoring the biblical authors and editors have put on the events they describe. The economy and clarity of McKenzie's prose and the relentless rationality of his argumentation is gripping and persuasive. He explains why scholars find certain texts "apologetic" and others more likely to reflect events as they might actually have occurred. McKenzie takes each major phase of David's career and methodically creates a portrait of the man. Each chapter ends with a short summary, so the reader has a second chance to decide for him or herself if the emerging portrait is credible. I found McKenzie's discussion of David's confrontation with Goliath and his brief, revisionist portrait of Bathsheba especially fascinating. The extensive bibliography directs the ambitious reader to works of primary scholarship (mostly in English) and to other literary treatments of the David story. To get the most out of this book, take McKenzie's suggestion and read or re-read the biblical texts first.

Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: I read many books but there is only one book I can read again and again its the bible. So I have read the story of David many times. This book takes it from an different angle. What really was the historical David we will never know! What we have is the greatest piece of writings in the world but when, where and who wrote them we are not sure. In the bible its very hard to determine where fiction and history merge.

The story of David in this book is in a sense quite negative in that David is portrayed as a power hungry person. However to me it made him more real. I certainly have not my sense of grandeur in David. Some of his explanations somehow appear to be pretty weak. But he does present his evidence but that is not the writers fault as much as the lack of historical information.

He does leave us with a bad taste to the writer of the bible who he states "is trying to promote or excuse David". This may be true because we really do not know very much about who the writers were or there motives.

It well written and I would recommend this book to you.

Rating:
Summary: Long live the king!
Review: Magnificent book about historical facts. Mr. McKenzie knows very well the biblical character and try to do a complete study of the man, not the king, not the saint. It must be controversial for the people who believes every word of the Bible. But, McKenzie is not a destroyer of the Faith. He is a writer, a student of the biblical figures, and try to explain the history of a dark period in the humanity past. After read this book, king David grows up in our minds like a political leader. A great book for christians and jews. An excellent book for history students.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent blend of historical writing and historical method
Review: McKenzie has done a remarkable job of writing a biography of a man for whom the only substantial source, the Bible, was written long after the fact with a specific agenda. Through a careful, critical reading of the Biblical accounts of David's life, McKenzie is able to recover a surprising amount of historical information, and his arguments are generally quite sound. Although as he admits himself he is only able to create a "plausible tale," the tale is plausible indeed, and as a very pleasant bonus, the style of the book is very accessible and readable. I'm not familiar with Davidic scholarship, but McKenzie's biography seems to be squarely in the mainstream. It stands both as a splendid book in its own right, and also as an excellent exercise in historical method, when dealing with extremely difficult sources.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent blend of historical writing and historical method
Review: McKenzie has done a remarkable job of writing a biography of a man for whom the only substantial source, the Bible, was written long after the fact with a specific agenda. Through a careful, critical reading of the Biblical accounts of David's life, McKenzie is able to recover a surprising amount of historical information, and his arguments are generally quite sound. Although as he admits himself he is only able to create a "plausible tale," the tale is plausible indeed, and as a very pleasant bonus, the style of the book is very accessible and readable. I'm not familiar with Davidic scholarship, but McKenzie's biography seems to be squarely in the mainstream. It stands both as a splendid book in its own right, and also as an excellent exercise in historical method, when dealing with extremely difficult sources.

Rating:
Summary: Brief for the Prosecution
Review: Steven McKenzie's biography of David is based on the theory that the account in Samuel is an "apologia"--a brief for the defense, and that if you look hard at what the text seems to be defending David against, you can figure out what David actually did.

This is a smart assumption but the suspicious reading it generates results in a biography of David that would make Ken Starr's portrait of Bill Clinton look like a panegyric. The only virtue McKenzie can allow David is that of being an effective guerrilla warrior because, if he hadn't been, he couldn't have reached the throne in the first place. The rest of the story is viewed as pro-David propaganda. If the story tells us that David spared the life of the worthless Nabal and that Nabal subsequently died of natural causes, it means that this is the cover story and that David must have killed him or had him killed.

The problem for the reader comes when you ask if there is any way David could have had any attractive qualities. Given the way McKenzie reads Samuel, the nice things that are said about David must be spin, and the nasty facts reported about David (and there are plenty of them, including his adultery with Bathsheba, his inability to control his sensual and ambitious children, his vindictiveness against political enemies) are facts too well known to be denied. Given McKenzie's method, David simply cannot have done anything right.

The fact is that, like almost every figure in the Bible, David's life exists in the text and only there. There aren't any alternative witnesses to who he was and what he did. The story in the book of Samuel contains all we are ever likely to know about David, and any method that insists on reading past the story to the REAL David is going to come up either with a panegyric or a lampoon, depending on how suspicious a method of reading it adopts.

But the book of Samuel itself is far more complex than any of these simplifying readings. It presents a warrior and a king who was decidedly human--sometimes all too human--and depicts his world with a richness of texture that lawyer's briefs, like McKenzie's, are necessarily going to flatten out. McKenzie's book will be useful if it makes readers turn back to Samuel and read it closely and attentively, but the story it tells is a prosecutorial brief that, seen against its source, seems thin and unconvincing.

Rating:
Summary: Brief for the Prosecution
Review: Steven McKenzie's biography of David is based on the theory that the account in Samuel is an "apologia"--a brief for the defense, and that if you look hard at what the text seems to be defending David against, you can figure out what David actually did.

This is a smart assumption but the suspicious reading it generates results in a biography of David that would make Ken Starr's portrait of Bill Clinton look like a panegyric. The only virtue McKenzie can allow David is that of being an effective guerrilla warrior because, if he hadn't been, he couldn't have reached the throne in the first place. The rest of the story is viewed as pro-David propaganda. If the story tells us that David spared the life of the worthless Nabal and that Nabal subsequently died of natural causes, it means that this is the cover story and that David must have killed him or had him killed.

The problem for the reader comes when you ask if there is any way David could have had any attractive qualities. Given the way McKenzie reads Samuel, the nice things that are said about David must be spin, and the nasty facts reported about David (and there are plenty of them, including his adultery with Bathsheba, his inability to control his sensual and ambitious children, his vindictiveness against political enemies) are facts too well known to be denied. Given McKenzie's method, David simply cannot have done anything right.

The fact is that, like almost every figure in the Bible, David's life exists in the text and only there. There aren't any alternative witnesses to who he was and what he did. The story in the book of Samuel contains all we are ever likely to know about David, and any method that insists on reading past the story to the REAL David is going to come up either with a panegyric or a lampoon, depending on how suspicious a method of reading it adopts.

But the book of Samuel itself is far more complex than any of these simplifying readings. It presents a warrior and a king who was decidedly human--sometimes all too human--and depicts his world with a richness of texture that lawyer's briefs, like McKenzie's, are necessarily going to flatten out. McKenzie's book will be useful if it makes readers turn back to Samuel and read it closely and attentively, but the story it tells is a prosecutorial brief that, seen against its source, seems thin and unconvincing.