God Knows

Our book today is Joseph Heller's 1984 novel about the Biblical King David, God Knows - and it serves as yet another illustration of one of literature's odd quirks: how often writers are best known and longest remembered for books other than their masterpieces. Examples multiply like toadstools, especially in the undiscriminating 20th century, where Anthony Burgess is linked instantly to A Clockwork Orange but not Earthly Powers, William Golding is known for Lord of the Flies and not The Spire, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is so well known its title is a term in dictionaries, while God Knows languishes in comparative obscurity. You can never tell what will catch the zeitgeist, but once it's caught, it sticks like fly paper.

And of course it's a shame in this case. God Knows is David's life story narrated by himself, and throughout Heller uses a historical novel trick that originated in the 20th century heyday of historical fiction: piercing the novel's equivalent of TV's 'fourth wall' - David knows he's writing a book for the 20th century, knows all about his enormous statue in Florence (and doesn't approve of it), knows the contents of the Bible and is cockily certain he has the best story in the Table of Contents - it's a story that has everything, including the bitter dispute at the heart of the book:

I've got a love story and a sex story, with the same woman no less, and both are great, and I've got this ongoing, open-ended Mexican standoff with God, even though He might now be dead.Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use Him no differently anyway. He owes me an apology, but God won't budge so I won't budge. I have my faults, God knows, and I may even be among the first to admit them,but to this very day I know in my bones that I'm a much better person than He is.

David isn't speaking to God (and vice versa) because as punishment for David's transgression with the wife of Uriah the Hittite, God kills the baby Bathsheba had just borne to David - and David can't reconcile the wanton, capricious, nonsensical cruelty of it. God Knows is a very funny book, fast-paced and firmly tongue-in-cheek most of the time; but it has a tragedy of stunning simplicity threading through its entire length, as David grapples with the weird nature of the God he used to consider a friend:

I know if I were God and possessed His powers, I would sooner obliterate the world I had created than allow any child of mine to be killed in it, for any reason whatsoever. I would have given my own life to save my baby's, or even to spare Absalom. But maybe that's because I am Jewish, and God is not.

All the familiar stories of King David are here, and all the familiar characters, from Goliath to Saul to Bathsheba to Jonathan to Solomon, all rendered with sharp sardonic humor and a depth of insight that exceeds anything else Heller ever wrote. There are wisecracks everywhere, of course - most of them deadpanning on Jewish culture:

Boy, did we have laws - laws governing everything. Before I gave up, I counted six hundred and thirteen commandments, which I found a remarkably large number for a society with a language that had no written vowels and a total vocabulary of only eighty-eight words, of which seventeen can be defined as synonyms for God.

And through David, we get fast-paced and delightfully demystified scenes from all over the Hebrew Bible, including several featuring the guy who really does have the best story in the book:

"I'll kill them all," He roared to Moses. "You think I'm joking? How much more do you think I'm going to be provoked by these people and do nothing? How many more signs do I have to show them before they begin to believe? I did it before, once with flood and once with fire and brimstone. Stand back, Moses."

"Can't we reason together?" Moses began trying earnestly to deter Him, emphasizing that God would become a laughingstock to the Egyptians for destroying His chosen people after taking them so far and promising them so much. "... they will say we were killed because You were unable to lead us in, not because we were unable to follow. They will believe You failed, not us."

"All right," relented God, who did not want to become a laughingstock in Egypt. But He aimed His thumb over His shoulder in a jerking motion and commanded, "Start walking. Hit the road."

This is a far more powerful, mature, and questing novel than the somewhat slight farces that make up so much of Heller's work, and at the heart of its many inquiries is an unflinching study of the many ways the father-son relationship can turn tragic. Of David's own father we hear almost nothing, but the book probes the depths of his bonds with his two great father-figures, King Saul and God, both of which present almost bewildering complexities (David's own sons fare no better - the book's characterization of Solomon is very funny and not very nice). And likewise Heller's facility with giving his novel's great endings (a skill that has all but vanished from practitioners of the craft in the 21st century) is at its strongest here - the final paragraph of God Knows will knock you flat, and the book's final sentence is quietly stunning.

I'm pretty sure you can walk into your nearest Barnes & Noble and buy a new copy of God Knows (the high tide of Catch-22 floats almost all the rest of Heller's boats), and you should. And of course if you'd rather not, I'm happy to send you a copy, with my whole-hearted recommendation.

Bible Study: The Second Book of Samuel!

Our text today is from II Samuel, from the infamous lust-story of David and Bathsheba. One balmy spring evening, David is strolling on his palace roof when he spots a beautiful woman bathing. He asked around about who she was (we're not told how; either he described her address to the people he asked, or else he dragged them up to the roof and pointed) and learned that she was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers in David's own army, under the command of Joab.

David sent flunkies to fetch her, and (presumably after saying hello, although David was a randy little bugger and the Bible is silent on the point) they slept together. Bathsheba later sent word to him that she was pregnant and that she was certain the child was his. So David promptly sent for Uriah; they sat and chatted about things in general, about the conduct of the ongoing war (those pesky Ammonites again). The Bible is silent on whether or not Uriah found it strange that he should be summoned out of the blue to gossip with the king, and what David did next is even stranger: he told Uriah to go home and relax for a bit, and he sent him away with a generous portion from the royal banquet tables.

David's motivation is obvious - if Uriah wasted no time in sleeping with Bathsheba, David could then claim the child was Uriah's and nobody would be the wiser. As starstruck as he is by Bathsheba's beauty, at this point in the story he's still trying to duck having anything more to do with her or the baby.

Unfortunately, Uriah didn't go home. He slept in camp in the palace yard, and when David summoned him and asked him (his exasperation can be imagined) why he didn't go home and take it easy for a bit, Uriah's dignity was ruffled: how could he live with himself if he want home and relaxed while his commander and all their men were still in the field, under arms, waging a war?

Nothing if not persistent, David tried again the next day ... more food, more wine, more chit-chatting, followed once again by urging Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. And again Uriah refused, once more sleeping in camp at the palace. Commentators over the centuries have wondered if perhaps there wasn't more going on here than simple martial virtue. After all, David had hardly made a secret of the fact that he fancied the man's wife - if Uriah had heard of this, is it any wonder he didn't feel like cozying up to Bathsheba, drunk or sober?

Finally David had had enough:

Next morning, David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by Uriah. In the letter he wrote, "Station Uriah in the thick of the fight and then fall back behind him so that he may be struck down and die." Joab, then besieging the town, posted Uriah in a place where he knew there were fierce fighters. The men of the town sallied out and engaged Joab; the army suffered casualties, including some of David's bodyguard; and Uriah the Hittite was killed too.

When Joab got word of this, he sent a messenger to tell David what happened, and he prepared the messenger for a hostile reception (David by this point has something of an evil reputation for how he takes bad news), warning the man to make sure to tell David that Uriah the Hittite died in the day's fighting. And sure enough, when David hears news of the battle, the little hypocrite waxes wroth - until he's told about Uriah, at which point he almost comically calmed down and sent Joab a message saying, essentially, these things happen.

Either Bathsheba or David or both made a point of waiting out the bare minimum decent interval of mourning, and then they got married. Which might have been what they both wanted, but even so, the Bible tells us Yahweh wasn't happy about it.

It's hard to read into the story what might really have happened, although it's at least certain that at some point David changed his mind about what he wanted. At first, he made very pointed efforts to keep Uriah the Hittite alive and make him the baby's father. And when these attempts failed, David suddenly shifted his tactics and successfully got Uriah killed (and, in an especially cold little gesture worthy of King Claudius, had Uriah himself unknowingly carry the order for his own execution). What changed?

I think Bathsheba is the key. I think David was realizing two things during those days when he was trying to send Uriah home to his wife: first, that Uriah himself was a bit of a boob, and second, that David increasingly couldn't bear the thought of anybody being with Bathsheba but himself. I think the more he thought about her, the more he had to have her.

Still, he took an enormous risk. The people he asked about Bathsheba's identity, the flunkies he sent to fetch her, the palace servants he instructed to bear the royal banquet to this nobody's house, his army commander Joab, to whom he gave actual written instructions to connive at the murder of one of his own men ... right from the beginning, way too many people knew about this erotic fixation of David's, and that's surely our lesson for today: when pursuing another man's wife, discretion is everything. Without it, you run the risk of gossip, mutiny, and pissing off Yahweh.