King David : A Biography (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: royal propaganda, apologetic nature, outlaw band, King David, Middle East, Second Samuel (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

King David: A Biography is a revisionist account of a life that has been viewed as heroic throughout history. Taking a stance against this traditional view, Hebrew scholar Steven L. McKenzie maintains that David was in fact tyrannical to the bone. Thus, McKenzie's version of the David story "reads like a modern soap opera, with plenty of sex, violence, and struggles for power." McKenzie's arguments are based on ancient inscriptions and archaeological artifacts that shed light on the biblical stories of David's reign--and on the Bible stories themselves. (Throughout the book, McKenzie also refers to the many poems, plays, novels, paintings, and sculptures that have helped shape David's reputation.) The key to McKenzie's argument is the apologetic tone of the biblical David stories, which he traces with enthusiastic rigor. McKenzie explains: "The fact that the author felt the need to try to explain the motives behind David's deeds indicates that those deeds were widely believed to have occurred. An author would not invent accusations against David--such as that he once served as a mercenary to the Philistines--just to try to explain them away." In other words, McKenzie believes that the Bible's misrepresentation of King David's despotic reign is the best evidence that the Bible is historically reliable. It's a somewhat contorted argument, but it has been the consensus among Hebrew scholars for some time. McKenzie has done readers a great service by writing an accessible version of this important academic theory so that lay readers will be better equipped to judge David's reputation for themselves. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

The conventional, laudatory image of David as a simple shepherd boy who courageously slew Goliath and rose to become Israel's greatest king despite some human failings is disputed by McKenzie, an associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Rhodes College in Memphis. His biography emphasizes the negative aspects of David's character and minimizes his achievements. McKenzie begins by identifying the sparse contributions of archeology to the story of David and then describes the sections of the Bible that deal with the enigmatic shepherd-king. McKenzie's suggestion that it would be helpful to have a copy of the Bible at hand while reading his book should be strongly emphasized. Fortunately, readers can turn to Robert Alter's 1999 volume, The David Story, for a translation and insightful commentary on 1 and 2 Samuel and the first two chapters of 1 Kings, in which David's life is recounted. Alter's sober presentation balances McKenzie's strident depiction of David as a "Middle Eastern tyrant" who was "senile and flaccid" in his dying days. Early in his life, according to McKenzie, David was a "ruthless... mercenary" who tried to "usurp" King Saul's throne. McKenzie claims that his portrait of David as a brazen adulterer, power-hungry politician, grim assassin and wanton murderer is "a realistic likeness." (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1st edition (April 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195132734
• ISBN-13: 978-0195132731
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #702,134 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hellion after my own heart!, July 16, 2000

By	Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brief for the Prosecution, December 3, 2000

By	David Richter (New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, January 23, 2001

By A Customer

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.