The King Who Danced

After Saul died, all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said, “Look — we are your own bone and your own flesh. Even when Saul was king, you were the one who led us out and brought us home. And the Lord said to you: you will shepherd my people Israel.” And they poured the oil on his head there in front of everybody, and made him king over the whole country. He was thirty years old, and he was king for forty years. The boy from the sheepfold had waited a long time for this — years of caves and running — and now it had come.

There was a city in the hills that nobody had ever managed to take: Jerusalem, up on its rock, with the Jebusites living in it. They were so sure of their walls that they shouted down at David that even their blind and lame could keep him out. David took it. And he made that city his own, and built it up all around, and it was called the city of David from that day on. The king of Tyre sent him cedar wood and carpenters and stonemasons, and they built him a palace there. And David grew greater and greater — and he knew perfectly well why. It was not because he was clever. The Lord was with him, and the Lord had made him king for the sake of the people. The Philistines heard that David was king now, and came up to finish him while he was new. And David did what Saul had stopped doing: before he moved, he asked God. ‘Shall I go up? Will you give them into my hand?’ And God said go — and he went, and beat them. And when they came a second time, David asked again — and this time God said something different: do not go straight at them. Go around behind them, and wait by the balsam trees; and when you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the trees, then go, because the Lord will have gone out ahead of you. And David waited, and listened — and heard it — and went.

But there was one thing David wanted more than a palace. All this time the golden chest of God had been sitting in a house on a hill in the country, where it had been left twenty years before. David wanted it in the city, in the middle of his people, where it belonged. So he gathered thirty thousand people and went to fetch it. They set the ark on a new wagon and started for Jerusalem, and the whole crowd went along singing and playing — harps and lyres and drums and cymbals and pipes, all the way down the road. And then something happened that stopped the singing dead. At a threshing floor along the way the oxen stumbled and the wagon tilted; and a man named Uzzah, who was walking beside it, put out his hand and caught hold of the ark to steady it — and he died there, beside it. The music stopped. David was shaken, and then angry, and then frightened, and he said, “How can the ark of the Lord ever come to me?” And he would not take it another step. They turned aside and left it at the house of a man called Obed-edom, and everybody went home. God was not a thing to be carted about however you liked, the way the Philistines had carted him about, or the way Israel had once carried him into battle like a lucky charm. Holy meant holy. And the ark stayed at that man’s house three months. And in those three months the Lord blessed Obed-edom and his whole household and everything he had — so plainly that the neighbors talked about it, and word got back to the king.

So David came back for it — and this time they did it the way God had said it should be done long ago in the wilderness: no wagon, but poles on the shoulders of the men whose work it was. And they came up to Jerusalem with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet, and every few steps they stopped to worship, and there were dancers, and the whole city came out. And the king danced. He took off his royal robes and put on a plain linen coat like any priest or servant, and he danced in front of the ark of the Lord with everything he had, all the way up the hill, in front of the whole nation. And when the ark was set in its place, in the tent David had pitched for it, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord — and then he gave every single person there, man and woman, a loaf of bread and a cake of raisins and a cake baked on the hearth, and sent them home happy.

But somebody had been watching out of a window: Michal, Saul’s daughter, David’s wife. She had seen the king of Israel skipping about in a linen coat in front of the servant girls, and she thought it was disgraceful. And when he came home to bless his own household, she met him at the door and said, “How very grand the king of Israel looked today — carrying on in front of the servant girls like some cheap dancer.” And David said, “It was before the Lord that I danced — the Lord, who chose me instead of your father and all his house, and made me leader over his people Israel. I will dance before the Lord, and I will make myself smaller than this, and be worthless in your eyes if you like. But the servant girls you talk about will think none the worse of me.” And that was David at his best: a king who did not mind at all how small he looked, so long as God was made much of.