King David

Last night, in my TV, was a show on that David guy from the bible. I started watching it because there was a scene where this littler dude hit a bigger dude with a rock and knocked his head off. I was wondering what was up with that so I kept watching.

David means beloved. And that's a pretty good description of the way people in Judah and the Kingdom of Israel felt about him, even though he fucked some stuff up.

He was married to a woman Michal, Saul's daughter, who protected him when Saul was trying to kill him. For her sacrifice she got married off to someone else. David, meanwhile, kept marrying other women, and then demanded that Michal be returned to him because they had never officially gotten a divorce. She died childless which people in the bible saw as punishment because she yelled at David for dancing around naked while he was bringing in the ark of the covenant (I think that's the box kind of ark that had something to do with Moses and ripping off people's faces) into Jeruselem after he captured it. Which would be so typical, a woman says one little thing to her spouse and she's punished, but I bet all the time David was like "you're fat" and "I don't like that dress" and "I like my other wives better".

Meanwhile, David also had a relationship with Saul's son Jonathan, suspected to be sexual by some scholars. Or maybe they were just platonically in love with each other. Or likely David was just pretending to be in love to get Jonathan to tell him secrets about what Saul was up to. Also, Jonathan was supposed to be king, as Saul's son, but recognized David as the king (give a guy a blow job back then, and get a kingdom...those were the days).

David went off to fight a bunch of battles and stuff after he became king. When he gets home he falls in love with this woman named Bathsheba and he has sex with her. She gets knocked up, which is bad news because she's actually married to someone else, a guy named Uriah who fights for David in David's army. I think they were kind of friends, but that wasn't really clear. So David, in typical simpleton male logic, lets Uriah come home for a day to sleep with his wife so he won't figure out David's the one who knocked her up. But Uriah is a total idiot and comes home but doesn't sleep with her because none of the men he fights with are getting to sleep with their women. So David kills him, and God gets mad, so God kills David's kid. Which seems to make no sense. Why would you kill someone just because someone killed someone else. A baby no less. You don't hear those right wing Christians all upset about abortion talking about that, do you.

Then one of David's other sons, Absalom, rebels against David. But the dumb ass gets himself somehow caught in a tree by his hair and so this guy Joab, who was a general in David's army, kills him while he's trying to get out of the tree. David was really sad that his son died.

The Jews believed that David was so holy he could "bring down things from Heaven". Like maybe lemon cookies if he was out riding his horse and was hungry. Muslims believe that David was so good at reciting the psalms that "fish would leave the sea to listen to him".

I bring this all up for the purposes of wondering how people can take the bible literally.