VII. DAVID AND MICHAL

Events roll on, and another incident in the life of David now offers itself, which also argues the truth of what we read concerning him. “And Michal, Saul’s daughter, loved David,” we are told [1 Sam. 18:20.] . On becoming his wife, she gave further proof of her affection for him, by risking the vengeance of Saul her father, when she let David through the window that he might escape, and made an image and put it in the bed, to deceive Saul’s messengers [1 Sam. 19:12.] After this, untoward circumstances produced a temporary separation of David and Michal. She remains in her father’s custody,—and Saul, who was the tyrant of his family, as well as of his people, gives her “unto Phaltiel, the son of Laish,” to wife. Meanwhile David, in his turn, takes Abigail the widow of Nabal, and Ahinoam of Jezreel, to be his wives; and continues the fugitive life he had been so long constrained to adopt for his safety. Years pass away, and with them a multitude of transactions foreign to the subject I have now before me. Saul, however, is slain; but a formidable faction of his friends, and the friends of his house, still survives. Abner, the late monarch’s captain, and Ishbosheth, his son and successor in the kingdom of Israel, put themselves at its head. But David waxing stronger every day, and a feud having sprung up between the prince and this his officer, overtures of submission are made and accepted, of which the following is the substance:—“And Abner sent messengers to David on his behalf, saying, Whose is the land? saying, also, Make thy league with me, and, behold, my hand shall be with thee to bring about all Israel unto thee. And he said, Well, I will make a league with thee; but one thing I require of thee—that is, Thou shalt not see my face, except thou first bring Michal, Saul’s daughter, when thou comest to see my face. And David sent messengers to Ish-bosheth, Saul’s son, saying, Deliver me my wife Michal, whom I espoused to me. And Ish-bosheth sent and took her from her husband, even from Phaltiel the son of Laish. And her husband went with her along, weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return; and he returned.” [2 Sam. 3:12–16.] It is probable, therefore, that Michal and Phaltiel parted very reluctantly. She had evidently gained his affections; he, most likely, had won hers: and in the meantime she had been supplanted (so at least she might think), in David’s house and heart, by Abigail and Ahinoam. These were not propitious circumstances, under which to return to the husband of her youth. The effect, indeed, they were likely to have upon her conduct is not even hinted at in the remotest degree in the narrative; but they supply us, however, incidentally with the link that couples Michal in her first character, with Michal in her second and later character; for the difference between them is marked, though it might escape us on a superficial glance; and if our attention did not happen to be arrested by the events of the interval, it would almost infallibly escape us. The last act then, in which we left Michal engaged, was one of loyal attachment to David—saving his life, probably at great risk of her own; for Saul had actually attempted to put Jonathan his son to death for David’s sake, and why should he spare Michal his daughter [1 Sam. 20:33.] ? Her subsequent marriage with Phaltiel was Saul’s business; it might, or might not, be with her consent: an act of conjugal devotion to David was the last scene in which she was, to our knowledge, a voluntary actor. Now let us mark the next—not the next event recorded in order, for we lose sight of Michal for a season,—but the next in which she is a party concerned; at the same time remembering that the Books of Samuel do not offer the slightest explanation of the contrast which her former and latter self present, or the least allusion to the change. David brings the Ark from Kirjath-jearim, where it had been abiding since it was recovered from the Philistines, to his own city. He dances before it, girded with the priestly or prophetical vest, the linen ephod, and probably chanting his own noble hymn, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates! and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!” [Psalm 24:7.] Michal, in that hour, no doubt felt and reflected the joy of her husband! She had shared with him the day of adversity—she was now called to be partaker of his triumph! How read we? The reverse of all this. “Then did Michal, Saul’s daughter, look through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart.” [2 Sam. 6:16.] Nor did she confine herself to contemptuous silence: for when he had now set up the Ark in the midst of the tabernacle, and had blessed the people, he came unto his own household, prepared, in the joy and devotion of the moment, to bless that also. How then is he received by the wife whom he had twice won at the hazard of his own life, and who had in return shown herself heretofore ready to sacrifice her own safety for his preservation? Thus it was. “Michal came out to meet him, and said, How glorious is the king of Israel to-day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants!—as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” Here was a burst of ill temper, which rather made an occasion for showing itself, than sought one. Accordingly, David replies with spirit, and with a righteous zeal for the honour of God—not without an allusion (as I think) to the secret, but true cause of this splenetic attack,—“It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord. And I will yet be more vile than this, and will be base in mine own sight; and of the maid-servants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.” [2 Sam. 6:21, 22.] In these handmaids or maid-servants, which are so prominently set forth, I recognise, if I mistake not, Abigail and Ahinoam, the rivals of Michal; and the very pointed rebuke which the insinuation provokes from David, appears to me to indicate, that (whatever she might affect) he felt that the gravamen of her pretended concern for his debasement did, in truth, rest here. And may I not add, that the winding up of this singular incident, “Therefore Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of her death,” well accords with my suspicions; and that whether it be hereby meant that God judged her, or that David divorced her, there is still something in the nature of her punishment appropriate to the nature of her transgression?

On the whole, Michal is now no longer what Michal was—but she is precisely what, from the new position in which she stands, we might expect her to be. Yet it is by the merest glimpses of the history of David and her own, that we are enabled to account for the change. The fact is not formally explained; it is not even formally asserted. All that appears is a marked inconsistency in the conduct of Michal, at two different points of time; and when we look about for an explanation, we perceive in the corresponding fortunes of David, as compared with her own during the interval, a very natural, though, after all, only a conjectural, explanation.

Herein, I again repeat, are the characters of truth—incidents dropping into their places without care or contrivance—the fragments of an imperfect figure recovered out of a mass of material, and found to be still its component parts, however they might not seem such when individually examined.

And here let me remark, (for I have been unwilling to interrupt my argument for the purpose of collateral explanation, and yet without it I may be thought to have purchased the evidence at some expense of the moral,) that the practice of polygamy, which was not from the beginning [Matt. 19:8. On this subject, see Origen, Ep. ad African. § 8.] , but which Lamech first adopted, probably in the hope of multiplying his issue, and so possessing himself of that “seed,” which was now the “desire of the nations”—a desire which serves as a key (the only satisfactory one, I think) to much of the conduct of the Patriarchs,—the practice of polygamy, I say, thus introduced, continued, in David’s time, not positively condemned; Moses having been only commissioned to regulate some of the abuses to which it led; and though his writing of divorcement must be considered as making allowance for the hardness of heart of those for whom he was legislating (our Lord himself so considers it)—a hardness of heart confirmed by a long and slavish residence in a most polluted land; still that writing, lax as it might be, was, no doubt, in itself a restrictive law, as matters then stood. The provisions of the Levitical code in general, and the extremely gross state of society they argue, prove that it must have been a restrictive law, an improvement upon past practices at least. And when the times of the Gospel approached, and a better dispensation began to dawn, the Almighty prepared the world, by the mouth of a Prophet, to expect those restrictions to be drawn closer—Malachi being commanded to proclaim, what had not been proclaimed before, that God “hated putting away.” [Mal. 2:16.] And when at length mankind were ripe for a more wholesome decree, Christ himself pronounced it, and thenceforward “A man was to cleave unto his wife,” and “they twain were to be one flesh,” and by none were they “to be put asunder, God having joined them together.” [Mark 10:7; 2 Cor. 11:2.] A progressive scheme this—agreeable to that general plan by which the Almighty seems to be almost always guided in his government—the development of that same principle by which the law against murder was passed for an age that was full of violence; and was afterwards sublimed into a law against malice: by which the law against adultery was provided for a carnal and grovelling generation; and was afterwards refined into a law against concupiscence: by which the law of strict retaliation, and no more, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth—a law, low and ungenerous as it may now be thought, nevertheless in advance of the people for whom it was enacted, and better than the law of the strongest—afterwards gave place to that other and nobler law, “resist not evil.” And it may be observed, that the very case of divorce (and polygamy is closely connected with it) is actually in the contemplation of our Lord, when He is thus exhibiting to the Jews the more elevated standard of Christian morals, and is ever contrasting, as He proceeds,—“It was said by them of old time,” with his own more excellent way, “but I say unto you;” as if in times past, according to the words of the Apostle, “God suffered nations to walk in their own ways,” [Acts 14:16.] for some wise purpose, and for a while “winked at that ignorance.” [Acts 17:30.]