More Than Enough Contempt

Part Six of Great Marriages of the Bible

David playing the harp before Saul (c.1852), by Silvestro Lega

We made really good progress yesterday setting up the parish hall and thinking through the Order of Events for Friday. Today I have to start cooking food in earnest. The rubric I have adopted for the next three days is 1. No one may get hurt and 2. No one should go hungry. Don’t lift anything in the wrong way, and if you feel like crying, drink a big glass of water and eat a biscuit and then see how you are.

With that crucial guiding principal out of the way, the Great Marriage I have for this morning is that of Michal, daughter of Saul and first wife of King David. I say First Wife not in the sense that he had his wives in order, first one, then, because of death, another. Even Henry VIII had the discretion to have only one one wife at a time. No, David, like so many of his contemporaries, didn’t stop to think about the sure and certain heartbreak that would characterize his life by assembling for himself a harem.

I trust you already know all about how this went, but I’ll just remind us both, since I can’t even remember where I put my Big List. Saul was the first king of Israel. He started out pretty well, but went rather quickly out of his lane and into anger and chaos. He wouldn’t kill Agag, that one time, and also became impatient and offered a sacrifice that was not his to do. He cultivated the gift of blaming other people for his problems.

Into the court, as Saul is becoming more and more erratic, trips David, the youngest of Jesse’s enormous number of sons. He is good at killing Philistines, and yet also quite brilliant on the harp. Saul, for however long, teeters between needing to listen to his music, and wanting to kill him. Their fraught relationship deteriorates until finally David runs away and begins his long wilderness sojourn.

Michal’s part in the unfolding drama is quite exciting. Jonathan, of course, takes up more of the narrative and helps to build the suspense and sense of pathos, but Michal, a person of beauty, brashness, and impetuosity, plays a key role, at least in the beginning. And isn’t it interesting that Saul’s own household—his children in particular—are so quickly persuaded that David is God’s chosen king and that they should help him in his trials and tribulations.

Which they are able to do because Saul is going mad, and starts making complicated plans that are rather easy to foil. The writer introduces the court intrigue this way:

Now Saul's daughter Michal loved David. And they told Saul, and the thing pleased him. Saul thought, “Let me give her to him, that she may be a snare for him and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him.” Therefore Saul said to David a second time, “You shall now be my son-in-law.”

For this great honor, David goes out and kills a hundred Philistines by—well, its not nice to speak of it in mixed company—and so Saul is forced to honor his promise, but he isn’t happy about it:

But when Saul saw and knew that the Lord was with David, and that Michal, Saul's daughter, loved him, Saul was even more afraid of David. So Saul was David's enemy continually.

There’s that tremendous word from yesterday—continually. Boy do I know what that word feels like….So, I was always cleaning my kitchen continually….wouldn’t you know it, I was driving around Binghamton continually…

Saul’s children, on the whole, seem clever and shrewd participants in the unfolding drama. While Jonathan is concocting complicated arrow scenarios to warn David that it is time to flee, Michal sends him straight out the window:

Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, “If you do not escape with your life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed.” So Michal let David down through the window, and he fled away and escaped. Michal took an image and laid it on the bed and put a pillow of goats' hair at its head and covered it with the clothes. And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, “He is sick.” Then Saul sent the messengers to see David, saying, “Bring him up to me in the bed, that I may kill him.” And when the messengers came in, behold, the image was in the bed, with the pillow of goats' hair at its head. Saul said to Michal, “Why have you deceived me thus and let my enemy go, so that he has escaped?” And Michal answered Saul, “He said to me, ‘Let me go. Why should I kill you?’”

Thus David flees into the wilderness and for many a long year wanders with his band of mighty men, trying to keep out of Saul’s way. David gets stronger and stronger, and Saul gets weaker and weaker, and there are all sorts of vignettes that I don’t have time to go into here. But in the long chapter about Abagail and her awful husband, Nabal, at the very end we are told that Michal, whom David left behind and never bothered to gather to his bosom, perhaps being too busy both with skirmishing with Philistines, and collecting into his complicated familial circle Abigail and the other wife whose name starts with A and always goes out of my head, has been given by Saul to someone named Palti who appeared to love her very much.

And this sticks in David’s craw, for he had killed all those Philistines to get her, and so the minute that Saul is dead and David is arranging his new kingdom, he demands that she be brought back to what, by that point, was a harem. And then there is that sad and terrible moment when Palti trails after her, weeping, until they tell him to pull himself together and go home.

And by that point, Michal is probably middle aged—though I’m terrible at math—and David isn’t that young either. He is a hardened warrior and now king and he’s got too many wives and an increasing number of children we know he will never train up in the way they should go. The dark trouble of Absalom, Tamar, Amnon, and Bathsheba is still ahead, and we all know how that goes. He is by no means an Ideal Husband, a man any college educated working woman today would put up with. If we had watched his life play out on the internet, none of us would have a good opinion of him, seeing, as we do, so much of the marred and hardened appearance.

And yet, he is still a man “after God’s own heart.” More than anything, he wants the ark of God to be brought to Jerusalem, his new capital. If only the dwelling place of God could be with him, he feels all will be well. And so, in the continual political swinging back and forth from good and godly impulse to complicated morally questionable kingly decision that marks out David’s whole career, we get the episode of Uzzah, touching the ark and dropping dead, until finally it is brought in the right way. And that is when the long years of accumulated unresolved relational conflict produces the fruit of misery and sadness. For the thing that David wanted the most, that portends rest for Israel forever, also reveals that Michal has had enough and has come to despise the husband she once loved:

As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal the daughter of Saul looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart. And they brought in the ark of the Lord and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it. And David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord. And when David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts and distributed among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins to each one. Then all the people departed, each to his house.

And David returned to bless his household. But Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David and said, “How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ female servants, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” And David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me above your father and above all his house, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the Lord—and I will celebrate before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor.” And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.

Some wise and insightful marriage studiers (it’s too early in the morning for me to remember what to call people or what their names are) put various married people through some studies and discovered that once contempt has come in and made itself comfortable in the bosom of the family, there is a high high likelihood the marriage will end in divorce. Or, if not divorce, at least lifelong misery.

Like rage, contempt is usually satisfying in the moment. It is the kind of emotional register that can carry a person through a lot of stressful times. It helps raise one out of the swirling, chaotic mire of what it means to be human when death and disappointment are always lurking around the next corner. Contempt works in the near term because it so sharply delineates between the goodness of one’s own character and way of viewing the world, and the badness of the other. But as the days go by, it is the ugliest and worst kind of relational poison because ultimately, the Person you really end up despising is God.

I feel the pathos and the heartbreak of Michal so often on full display in our chaotic world. You don’t know, when you are young, where you will end up when you are old. And most of us don’t get to control what happens next any more than she did. It seems like she made the best of it for a while, but in the end, she took her eyes off the Lord of Life and looked at the mere mortal held in his thrall, and, a little bit like Lot’s wife, she faltered and fell.

But seriously, imagine having Saul as your father and David as your husband. Oof. Ok, so, I’ve got to run! Those vegetables aren’t going to roast themselves!