Kavanot: Drowning Sorrow

We’ve completed שמואל ב פרק כד and David has built a מזבח on the site that ה׳ has designated for the בית המקדש.

And דברי הימים continues with the details of David’s plans for the בית המקדש.‎ (ספר שמואל ends here, and ספר מלכים continues with the political history of David). But before we get to that, I want to look at a fascinating aggadah:

We need to remember that אחיתופל was Bat Sheva’s grandfather, and Avshalom’s lead advisor in his rebellion. This aggadah connects our perek, about the location and intial building of the מזבח that would be the hub of the בית המקדש, to the story of David and Bat Sheva that makes up the last third of the main narrative of ספר שמואל. The middle third is all about David’s one desire to build the בית המקדש. Somehow that disappears in the later chapters.

This aggadah says that his efforts to build the בית המקדש were going on as a background to the Bat Sheva story. We talked about this aggadah when we discussed Achitophel. Rav Medan, in his מגילת בת-שבע sees the threat of the waters of the deep—the תהום—inundating the land as an echo of the original flood.

In Rav Medan’s reading, David is guilty of the same sin: ויקחו להם נשים מכל אשר בחרו. And ה׳ midrashically threatens the same fate: קפא תהומא ובעא למשטפיה לעלמא. And the solution found in the laws of סוטה:

Taking this story seriously but not literally, David is not threatened by a physical flood. He is threatened by the consequences of his actions with Bat Sheva and Uriah, and those consequences will overwhelm what he sees as his purpose. He cannot establish a ממלכה of משפט וצדקה (which will be represented by the בית המקדש) if he is seen as a tyrannical dictator.

Achitophel, as David’s chief advisor and the grandfather of Bat Sheva, is at the heart of the people’s response to David. He has to decide if he will forgive David for what happened to his granddaughter. He has the power to wipe out David’s kingdom, or allow it to continue. And he decides that this case is like the סוטה, and it is worth erasing ה׳'s name to restore the stability of the land. He will later change his mind and try to destroy David, for reasons that we have discussed that are connected to the birth of Shlomo.

So this aggadah helps establish a chronology for this perek. Rashi, who takes the entire ספר in chronological order, has a problem with this:

While I would hate to disagree with Rashi, we have a much simpler explanation: this perek is an appendix, telling a story that happened before the rebellion of Avshalom and the suicide of Achitophel. This aggadah establishes a kind of dialectic of David as villain of the Bat Sheva story and hero of דברי הימים as he prepares for the building of the בית המקדש. These are happening at the same time.

The end of this story as the waters return is in the 15 שירי המעלות. But before that there is a פרק תהילים that describes this dialectic.

Most מפרשים take this טבעתי ביון מצולה to be a metaphor for Israel in exile:

But that is not a common metaphor in תנ״ך; we see illness, famine, war, insults but not floods. The only other time it appears in תהילים is in David’s personal prayer:

The mention of יון makes the connection to the ארבע גלויות inevitable, but literally it means “muck, mire”:

There are two prototypes of drowning, of ה׳'s anger manifesting in a flood, in תנ״ך: the מבול, which the aggadah above connected directly to David’s life, and קריעת ים סוף, which is the connection that the gemara makes:

All three ways of reading the perek are valid. The psalms address past, present and future at the same time. David will face his metaphoric drowning as his ancestor did, bravely jumping into the sea, and כנסת ישראל will continue to do so.

The perek switches from drowning to public embarrassment (which goes with the way we are reading it):

This certainly fits with the description of David’s shame, אפילו בשעה שעוסקין בנגעים ואהלות, אומרים לי דוד: הבא על אשת איש מיתתו במה? This perek isn’t about phyical pain, it is about social humiliation: ואהי להם למשל and ישיחו בי ישבי שער. He can’t be a leader if no one respects him; all he can ask for is that his shame doesn’t destroy the whole concept of עבודת ה׳:‎ אל יבשו בי קויך…אל יכלמו בי מבקשיך.

And he acknowledges that he has sinned: ואשמותי ממך לא נכחדו, and it was because of his single-mindedness: כי קנאת ביתך אכלתני. This is parallel to Shaul’s (שמואל ב כא:ב)‎ ויבקש שאול להכתם בקנאתו לבני ישראל ויהודה.

His conclusion in this section is ואני תפלתי לך ה׳ עת רצון. All I have is my prayer. Philip Birnbaum says about this:

but he’s wrong (aside from the fact that I can only find three instances of ואני). David is very much saying “and as for me”; I don’t need to care about what others say about me; I only care about what I say to You. הרב ישעיהו הדרי says that the expression is not David talking about his prayer. It is an expression of הזדהות עם התפילה:‎ דוד הוא שליח ציבור של ישראל בכל הדורות. And that teaches us a fundamental lesson in the nature of תפילה: when I can identify fully with my תפילה, then it is an עת רצון and ה׳ will answer us.

David then repeats the theme: he is mired in the mud and drowning in the whirlpool and ה׳ will answer:

But now, the story changes: the humiliation comes last: he is not seeing this as an עת רצון:

Everyone is mocking me, giving me ראש—wormwood—and calling it בריאות—health food, giving me vinegar and calling it drink. That’s middle-school-cafeteria-level bullying. And so, in one of the most bitter passages in תהילים, he prays that they be destroyed.

כי אתה אשר הכית רדפו: they are literally adding insult to injury. ה׳, You have punished me, but now their gossip means I am being hurt over and over again. David invents the image of the ספר חיים just to have something to erase them from.

But he pulls himself out of this black anger, realizing that he is an עני וכואב, afflicted and in pain. The answer is not to attack but to sing to ה׳:

He, in the story of פרק כד, was so close to building the מזבח of the בית המקדש, and now it looks like it will fail. But he still has his שיר, and that will have to be good enough. ראו ענוים ישמחו…ויחי לבבכם. There is no reason to despair. Eventually יבנה ערי יהודה…ואהבי שמו ישכנו בה.