Kavanot: At Forty, Understanding

After the description of Avshalom’s plan to fracture the nation and alienate them from his father, the text tells us that the time came to act:

It starts with ויהי, so we know things are going to get worse (כל מקום שנאמר ”ויהי“ אינו אלא לשון צער: מגילה י,ב) but we don’t know when it takes place. How long has Avshalom been plotting? We know it’s מקץ ארבעים שנה, but 40 years from what? 40 years obviously means something; it’s the point of “understanding”:

Normally מקץ would tell us that 40 years had passed since the last story:

But the last story was the beginning of the plot:

So Avshalom has been very patient, slowly undermining his father for 40 years. But that’s impossible. David was only king in Jerusalem for 33 years, and the story of Batsheva and the story of Avshalom’s exile was at least 7 years.

So where does the מקץ ארבעים שנה start? Ibn Kaspi says not to worry about it:

But it’s hard to ignore such an obvious question. If the chronology doesn’t matter, why include it at all?

Interestingly, the Peshitta (an early Christian translation, in Aramaic) solves the problem by writing 4 years instead of 40:

And that’s the way Josephus tells the story:

But we take the Masoretic text seriously, and have to address the 40 year question. Abarbanel says that it was 40 years from the start of David’s reign, or in the last year of his life. It can’t mean that literally, since we have the description of David as a weak old man in ספר מלכים, but מקץ ארבעים שנה means “after about 40 years”:

The gemara takes a different approach: it’s well before the end of David’s life, but 40 years since בני ישראל asked for a king; 40 years since the start of Saul’s reign:

Avshalom’s rebellion has to take place late in David’s life; there’s too much that happens before this. So in order for the 40 years to start with Saul, Saul’s reign has to be very short:

The gemara, from סדר עולם, takes this שתי שנים literally. But that is very hard to read as the פשט:

So Ralbag (and many others) take this entire pasuk as metaphoric. We discussed this earlier, when looking at the chrolonogy of David’s time in Ziklag. Ralbag offers two possibilities for our ארבעים שנה:

Ralbag’s first answer, מעת המשח שאול, is basically the same as the gemara’s מקץ ארבעים שנה ששאלו להם מלך. He just assumes Saul was king for much longer than 2 years (which fits the פשט). But then Avshalom’s rebellion has to occur very early in David’s reign, which doesn’t seem to fit the פשט of all the wars of פרק ח. So I would prefer his second explanation, מעת המשח דוד. It’s been 40 years since Samuel told Saul that his kingdom was lost and (שמואל א טו:כח)‎ קרע ה׳ את ממלכות ישראל מעליך היום; ונתנה לרעך הטוב ממך.‎ 40 years is an intellectual generation, the time for entirely new leadership (think of Israel in the wilderness). From Avshalom’s point of view, David has failed as a king, and it was time to end his dynasty, just as 40 years earlier Saul had failed as king and his dynasty was over.

And Avshalom goes to Chevron to start his rebellion. It was the city where David started his reign, so the symbolism is perfect:

The difference, of course, is that וישאל דוד בה׳. The devil is in the details.

This tells us the meaning of the 40 years, but doesn’t give us a specific year for the rebellion. How long was it between David’s anointing and his ascension to the throne? It’s not clear. The baraita that the gemara quotes from רבי נהוראי is from the סדר עולם, which concludes that David was 67 when Avshalom rebelled, as above. But then it calculates the chronology differently, by looking at all the stories in ספר שמואל that happen after the rebellion:

And therefore, David must have been 65.

And I like that chronology. The image of David here is of a man in the last decade of his life, still able to act decisively but looking backwards in his life rather than forward, and looking to pass his legacy on to the next generation.

And Avshalom is going to destroy all of that. He is going to not just end but undo the מלכות, he is going to end the dynasty of (שמואל ב ז:יב-יג)‎ והקימתי את זרעך אחריך אשר יצא ממעיך; והכינתי את ממלכתו׃ הוא יבנה בית לשמי, and his is going to break the unified Israel into squabbling tribes again.

While I agree with the סדר עולם about David’s age, I would argue with the chronology of the remainder of ספר שמואל.‎ סדר עולם assumes that everything is in chronological order, but as we will see, the last 4 chapters seem more like appendices. The formal ending of David’s story in ספר שמואל is in פרק כ:

And the remaining narratives actually took place earlier.

This is my headcanon of the chronology of David’s reign:

But the gemara does say מקץ ארבעים שנה ששאלו להם מלך. I would take that seriously but not literally. The gemara is specifically linking the rebellion not to the start of Saul’s reign, but to the request for a king and Shmuel’s answer. They are 40 years—an intellectual generation—apart.

“ארבעים שנה” later, no one remembers why they were so desperate to have a king. All they see is the abuse of power that the monarchy has caused. And that comes together with the inevitable consequence of the Bat Sheva story: David’s reign and his dynasty are over.

But he doesn’t realize this yet. He takes Avshalom’s request of אלכה נא ואשלם את נדרי at face value, and bids him farewell: לך בשלום. That has an ominious sound:

לך לשלום has the sense of going on a mission, still having a purpose. לך בשלום implies you’re finished, there’s nothing more to do. In a sense, David is given a little רוח הקודש to be inspired to say לך בשלום. But that doesn’t have to be some kind of subconscious comment. לך בשלום really does have the sense of dismissal:

David may not know (or even suspect) that he and Avshalom will soon be locked in a kill-or-be-killed struggle, but he is still dismissing Avshalom. לך בשלום means “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”.