54

THE END OF KING DAVID

A LEGEND OF THE TALMUD

"Lord, let me know mine end, and of my days. The number, that I may be certified

How long I have to live!" So prayed, in heat,
The monarch after God's own heart, whose son
Was wiser than himself. The Voice Divine
Made answer: "I have set behind a veil
From man the knowledge of his time of death.
That he must die he knows, and knows enough."
But David wrestled with the Lord in prayer:
"Let me but know the measure of my days!"
And God said: "Of the measure of his days
May no man know." Yet David urged again
The Lord: "I do beseech Thee, let me know
When I shall cease to be." "Thy time," said God,
"Shall come upon a Sabbath; ask no more."
"Nay, not upon Thy Sabbath-day, O Lord,"
Cried David, "let Thy servant meet his end;
Upon the morrow following let me die!"

And God once more made answer: "I have said!
The reigns of kings are pre-ordained, nor may

By so much as the breadth of one thin hair

Be lengthened or diminished. Solomon,

Thy son, upon the Sabbath mounts thy throne;

I

may not take from him to add to thee."

"Nay, then," said David, "let me die, O Lord,
The day before; for, in Thy courts, one day
Is better than a thousand spent elsewhere!"

ΙΟ

And God made final answer: "Nor from thee
To add to him. But know thou this one day
Spent by thee in the study of My law
Shall find more favor in My sight than steam
And savor of burnt-offerings thousandfold
That Solomon, thy son, shall sacrifice."

And the Lord ceased; and David held his peace;
But ever after, when the Sabbath dawned,
Till sunset followed sunrise, sate the king-
The volume of the Book upon his knees—
Absorbed in meditation and in prayer,

So to be found what time his hour should come;
And many a week the Sabbath came and went.
About the rearward of the palace grew

An orchard trimly planted,-to the sense
Pleasant with sight and smell and grateful shade
In summer noons, and, beyond this again,
Such lodging as the king should give the steeds
That draw his royal chariot, and the hounds
That, for his pastime, in the forest rouse
The lion from his lair. And lo! it chanced
One Sabbath morn, the slave whose office 'twas
To tend King David's kennels, in his task
Had made default, and left the unfed hounds
Howling for hunger. So their cry disturbed
The king, who knew it not. And David rose,
And put aside the volume, and in haste

Passed through the postern to the orchard plot,
Seeking the uproar's cause. And as his foot
O'erstepped the threshold, there he fell down-dead!

Then straightway in hot haste the news was brought
To Solomon, who all the Rabbis called

To sudden council. "Tell me," said the king,
"Ye sages of the law; my father lies
Dead in his orchard, and the Sabbath yet
Lacks many hours of ending; were it well
To raise and bear the body now at once
To the corpse-chamber, or to let it lie
There until set of sun? And lo! his hounds
Howl for their food; may I cut meat for them
Upon the Sabbath-day?" And with one voice
The Rabbis answered: "Let the Sabbath close
Ere thou lift up the king thy father's corpse;
But thou mayʼst carve their portion for the hounds.”

So until sunset, in the orchard lay The king untended; but the hounds were fed;

And Solomon said only, "Yea! a dog

Alive is worthier than a lion dead!”

ANONYMOUS

55

DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL

There never was a specimen of manhood so rich and ennobled as David, the son of Jesse, whom others haply may have equalled in single features of his character; but such a combination of manly, heroic qualities, such a flush of generous, Godlike excellencies, hath never yet been seen embodied in a

single man. His Psalms, to speak as a man, do place him in the highest rank of lyrical poets, as they set him above all the inspired writers of the Old Testament, equalling in sublimity the flights of Isaiah himself, and revealing the cloudy mystery of Ezekiel; but in love of country, and glorying in its heavenly patronage, surpassing them all. And where are there such expressions of the varied conditions into which human nature is cast by the accidents of Providence, such delineations of deep affliction and inconsolable anguish, and anon such joy, such rapture, such revelry of emotion in the worship of the living God! such invocations to all nature, animate and inanimate, such summonings of the hidden power of harmony and of the breathing instruments of melody! Single hymns of this poet would have conferred immortality upon any mortal, and borne down his name as one of the most favored of the sons of men.

But it is not the writings of the man which strike us with such wonder, as the actions and events of his wonderful history. He was a hero without a peer, bold in battle and generous in victory; never overcome by distress or by triumph. Though hunted like a wild beast among the mountains, and forsaken like a pelican in the wilderness by the country whose army he had delivered from disgrace, and by the monarch whose daughter he had won, whose son he had bound to him with cords of brotherly love, and whose own soul he was wont to charm with the sacredness of his minstrelsy, he

never indulged malice or revenge against his unnatural enemies. Twice, at the peril of his life, he brought his blood-hunter within his power, and twice he spared him, and would not be persuaded to injure a hair upon his head,-who, when he fell in high places, was lamented over by David with the bitterness of a son, and his death avenged upon the sacrilegious man who had lifted his sword against the Lord's anointed. In friendship and love, and also in domestic affections, he was not less notable than in heroic endowments; and in piety to God he was most remarkable of all. He had to flee from his bedchamber in the dead of night; his friendly meetings had to be concerted upon the perilous edge of captivity and death; his food he had to seek at the risk of sacrilege; for a refuge from death, to cast himself upon the people of Gath, to counterfeit idiocy, and become the laughing-stock of his enemies. And who shall tell of his hidings in the cave of Adullam, and of his wanderings in the wilderness of Ziph,-in the weariness of which he had power to stand before his armed enemy with all his host, and, by the generosity of his deeds and the affectionate language which flowed from his lips, to melt into childlike weeping the obdurate spirit of King Saul? King David was a man extreme in all his excellencies, a man of the highest strain, whether for counsel, for expression, or for action,— in peace and in war, in exile and on the throne. That such a warm and ebullient spirit should have given way before the tide of its affections, we