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The Book of David

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What a revelation! It's hard to read a novel or poem again in the same way after the illuminations in The Book of David. I suppose this must be infuriating to some who want things to stay just as they are, but I was glad to see that the Publishers Weekly review had an intelligent response: (Oct.13, 1997) "In this imaginative and provocative work...Rosenberg's interest is in evoking the characters who inhabit the biblical narratives, and his translations and transformations of the text are powerful and moving...It tells David's story in a way that reveals the characters of David, Rosenberg and "S"." What Publishers Weekly leaves out is that this will not only change the way a reader thinks about the Bible but also how we view contemporary writers as well. I always thought there was an element of creative fiction and poetry in the Bible, yet now I can see just how it was transformed by great writers.

Remember David Rosenberg? The guy whose strange, awkward but inaccurate translation of parts of Genesis and Exodus led Harold Bloom to expose his ignorance of both the Hebrew language and the biblical world in THE BOOK OF J? Rosenberg is back and ready to make more trouble for anyone who trusts his view of ancient Israel. This time he plays both translator and literary critic, about equally well.

Here is Rosenberg's translation of the beginning of 2 Samuel 11:

"Here we are: a year was passing, and it is the season best for the wars of kings. David sends out Joab, his own retinue, and all of Israel's army; and they bring the Ammonites to their knees, beseiging Rabbah. Meanwhile David lingered in Jerusalem. It happens one late afternoon that David rises from his bed, takes a walk around the palace roof, and from there, his glance falls upon a woman in her bath. The woman appeared very beautiful in his eyes."

Breathlessly dramatic but the tenses are all wrong, and words like "lingered" and "glance" miss the simplicity of the Hebrew text. Rosenberg subsequently has David try to "uncover more" about the naked woman in her bath, and has his messengers "beseige" Bathsheba, just as Joab is beseiging Rabbah. These coy, leering figures are not in the Hebrew text, either, which presents the affair in eight blunt words: Vayishlach David malachim vayikachah vatavo eilav vayishchav imah (literally "And David sent messengers, and he got her, and she came to him, and he slept with her"). This story is filled with ironies. Why is it necessary to add ones that aren't in the text?

Rosenberg doesn't translate any of the poetry included in 2 Samuel -- David's lament over Saul and Jonathan or the two psalms in chapters 22 and 23--but his translations of other psalms suggest his need to compete with his text, to substitute his own poetic idea for that of his source:

you turn men into dust

and you ask them to return

children of men

for a thousand years

in your eyes

are a single day

yesterday

already passed

into today

a ship in the night

Rosenberg needs to import the cliche of ships that pass in the night. There are no ships in the Hebrew. This is Psalm 90:3-4, which literally runs: "You return mortals to dust and You say: Return, children of earth. For a thousand years are in Your eyes as a day, as yesterday when it has passed, or as a watch in the night." (Tashuv enosh ad-dakah / Vatomer: shuvu, b'nai adam. Ki elef shanim b'einecha ka'yom ethmol ki ya'avor / v'eshmorah ba'laylah.)

(The blurb to Rosenberg's book calls him "the leading translator of biblical poetry... of our time." I hope he isn't starting to believe his own publicity!)

Rosenberg provided the translation for The Book of J, in which the Yale critic Harold Bloom had fantasized that "J" -- the author of those parts of Genesis in which God is called YHWH -- was a princess in Solomon's court or that of his son Rehoboam. For Bloom, "J" and "S" were husband and wife, sharing ideas and developing similar turns of phrase during their pillow talk. Rosenberg evolves a slightly different version of this fantasy. Rosenberg's "S" is a royal prince operating as a scribe and translator in the court of Rehoboam, a son of Solomon or perhaps a cousin. His mother had been a princess of one of the indigenous nations (Moabites, Amorites, Ammonites) whose struggle for autonomy had been quashed by the Israelite monarchy. This for Rosenberg is the key link between David and "S," for he guesses that David too was the son of "a Canaanite princess" who became "Jesse's last and youngest wife." For Rosenberg "J" is an older woman who becomes the companion rather than the wife of "S," and commissions him to write the Succession Narrative because of his similarities to David and their common sympathy for the indigenous nations Israel has displaced. How Rosenberg knows all these things is not clear, unless he too is the son of a Canaanite princess, and consequently has a privileged understanding of his subjects. For the Bible contains not one word about how many wives Jesse had or who David's mother was -- not altogether surprising given how seldom the Hebrew Bible mentions any individual's maternal descent.

Perhaps it is interesting to read the book of Samuel in terms of the conflict between Israel and the Canaanite cultures it displaced, but Rosenberg's ideas about "S" and his vision are undermined by the question whether there ever was an "S" in the sense that there was a "J." "J" has a unique vocabulary, but stylistically, there isn't any real difference between Rosenberg's Book of S and most of the rest of the book of Samuel. And you get the same dramatic ironies from the outset, from the story of Hannah and Eli, in the first chapter.

In my opinion, this book is a full scale disaster, dreadfully misleading to those who trust Rosenberg's translations or ideas about tenth-century Israelite society. Avoid this book, or better, buy Robert Alter's The David Story, with a superb translation of all of Samuel, together with fascinating commentary that is generous to all the scholars that went before him.

David Rosenberg, co-author of The Book of J, offers his own translation of the parts of the Bible that he considers the original story of the rise and reign of David as the king of all of Israel. Because Rosenberg omits much of the biblical material, his story, told in easily readable and engaging English in only 28 pages long. For example, the death of David is told by Rosenberg in only eleven lines, while the Hebrew original relates a tale in 65 sentences. He also devotes a chapter to David's Psalms. He states that "a great Hebraic writer at the Solomonic court whom scholars call the Court Historian, or S," was the author of the David tales. The letter S was chosen since the David narrative begins in the biblical book Samuel. This writer was a friend of J. Rosenberg offers his readers an interesting speculation about the identity of S and many of his own and other scholars' ideas about what is considered the authentic David.

There are many reasons to by this book, but two come to mind most clearly...

First, the brilliant modern translations of portions of the story of David from 2 Samuel, and several of the most beautiful Psalms.

Second, the tale of the remarkable relationship between "S", the writer behind much of 2 Samuel, and "J", the writer of the Pentateuch. (The first five books of the bible - the books of the law.) According to Rosenberg, J, the brilliant woman writer and poet of Solomon's court, most likely acted as mentor and mother-figure to the young male prodigy S. Many of the Psalms and stories of David seem to reverberate with this close relationship.

As well, Rosenberg studies the indigenous or "Shamanistic" nature of S's relationship with the land, as reflected in his poetry, which provides new insight into the intense yearning for Israel experienced by Jews through the ages.

I highly recommend this book both for its scholarship and its artistic qualities. Anyone with any interest in David, the Jewish experience, Biblical studies, or poetry in general, will find this book a delight.

Recent Comments for The Book of David

"The Biblical David taught us what it is to be, as David Rosenberg puts it, 'a poet and thinker, a warrior and peacemaker, a leader and innovator.' We think we know David, but Mr. Rosenberg teaches us how to see this great figure with fresh eyes. No readers ideas of religion, politics or literature will go unchanged--or unimproved--by Mr. Rosenberg's profound, yet always lively work of scholarship and art. He has written a soulful, heartfelt, important book."

--James Carroll

"Rosenberg not only dusts off the traditional image of David, he restores to us one of the great visionaries of all time. The Book of David is one of those unexpected, exhilerating books that forces you to rethink the nature of the human condition, and that awakens a strange, rare sense of spiritual reality."
--Jay Parini

"Like his translation of The Book of J, Rosenberg's version of this biblical text is striking for its music, imagery, and human compassion. In an intriguing commentary, King David emerges clearly as a poet, and as the herald of a court of writers that blossomed under Solomon. Here Rosenberg unveils a portrait of the artist whose vision has no boundaries."

--Grace Schulman

"David Rosenberg has used his intelligent, poetic, and most genre-bending mind to reimagine King David, the turbulent world into which he was born, and to reassess the writers and religious figures who later appropriated his life. The Book of David provides us with first-rate intellectual excitement." --Barbara Probst Solomon