“But when they / were sick / I wore / sackcloth,
- I afflicted myself / with fasting - but my prayers / returned / unanswered.” Now
we come to the ‘good’ that David performed that called forth the evil from his
enemies; this is gift he gave them that they are now going to ‘repay’ (vs. 12)
with evil. What we find is that David engaged in intercession for these men. It
is likely that what we find here is that David had entered into a treaty with
these men (as we indicated in our analysis of the curses). Often these treaties
would require intercession by one party on behalf of the other in the event
something befell them (sickness or tragedy). This is an important insight: as
we have seen in other psalms that recount David’s interior life, he was a man
of intense honor and fealty. For him, to ‘stand by his word’ would have been of
utmost importance. We see throughout David’s rise to power that the ‘lovingkindness’
that is supposed to stand at the heart of every covenantal bond was exhibited
by David over and over again even when it did not serve his interest (either with
Jonathan or with Saul or, later, with Saul’s descendants). It is surely this
aspect of David’s heart that made it “after Yhwh’s own heart”. A king must have
this sense of outward fealty at the center of his action precisely because he
is a public person (the more ‘public’ a person becomes, the more ‘honor’ becomes
paramount). This intercession therefore is an act of fealty and a covenantal
obligation owed these men. And David enacts it not only outwardly but inwardly.
The first verse, vs. 13, stresses the actions David undertook (sackcloth, fasting,
and prayer). All of these are typical acts that are associated either with
repentance or with tragedy. In a sense, David actually adopts the sickness of
these other men and makes them his own through these acts. The next verse
stresses the fact that these outward actions are perfect expressions of his
inward disposition: “As for a friend / as for one / like a brother to me, - as with
one / mourning a mother / I walked about – dressed in black / bowed in grief.” One
should no fail to be impressed by this display of this (almost typically Davidic)
display of emotion. These men, who he does not even know (vs. 15-16) have
become, to him, like his own family. He pushes further than the ‘treaty’ term
of ‘friend’ and enters into the familial. I do not think this is simply an
exaggeration. David took these men into his heart in an act of incredible
vulnerability. He gave himself, fully, over to these covenantal obligations—and
we see that one could not, in David, ask for a better covenantal partner. It is
this, this suffering for and with (both outwardly and inwardly), that is the ‘good’
that David gave these men. The use of the term ‘brother’ is probably not
referring to the Cain and Abel story but it works nonetheless: David has become
an Abel to the Cain of these men, and his ‘goodness’ will become the source of
their rage and attempts to “tear him apart”. Once again, we find that evil is
always ‘after the fact’ and purely responsive to the good. It has no source in
itself other than this ‘unaware’ attack on what is right and good.
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