July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Jack’s last post. They have been writing with us since August 2022.

If you want to know about Michal, daughter of Saul, royal wife of David,  you’ll have to go beyond the cursory (and frankly odd) mention she gets in the lectionary.

You might be interested to know that this is the last time Michal shows up in the biblical narrative, besides a retelling of this scene that appears in I Chronicles. You might be interested to know that Michal as a character shows up around six times in the Samuel text, and that her name is mentioned sixteen times. The first occasion is in I Samuel 14, where we find out she is the youngest daughter among Saul’s five children. The second and fourth instances of her name are four chapters later, to say that she loved David. David, the dashing hero who slayed Goliath and has captured the hearts and imaginations of the people. Saul finds his daughter’s love for David at first useful to him and later a threat to his plans to have David killed. In being given to David in marriage, Michal is unfairly placed between the man she loves and the man trying to kill him. The former wants her for her connection to the reigning monarch, and the latter wants her for her access to the handsome young warrior who is looking inconveniently popular in the polls of late.

You might be interested to know that in the entirety of Scripture, Michal is the only woman of whom it is said that she loves a man who is not her child. And so it is especially tragic to me and to others who have read this text that David doesn’t love her back, neither in his words nor in his deeds.  At best, he seems indifferent to her well-being and interested in her as a wife because she is the daughter of Israel’s first and former king. Having her in his possession gives David’s rule more legitimacy. This is why, after an unknown amount of time apart, David, in negotiations with Saul’s nephew Abner, demands that she be returned to him.

Soon after their marriage, Michal hears that her father plans to kill her husband  and urges him to save himself, lowering him out the window and covering for him after he escapes. She won’t see him for another fifteen chapters. Before that, however, we do hear from Michal a single time. In punishment for her disobedience, Saul does something highly unusual: he marries her to another man. When David finally has the throne in his sight nine chapters later, he negotiates with Saul’s successors for her return, and her husband Paltiel follows her the whole way, weeping.

Reading I and II Samuel and I and II Kings, I feel similarly to how I’ve felt the times I’ve tried and failed to make it through stories like the Game of Thrones franchise: exhausted, upset, and deeply annoyed with the author. The story is too long, with too many characters that disappear just long enough to be confusing when they finally surface again.  Everybody dies, or has horrible things done to them. Nobody is happy, and nobody comes out looking good. (Certainly, the story has its moments. For me, it’s usually when Jonathan—my sweet summer child of a himbo—is onscreen, oblivious to the growing tension between his boyfriend and his dad, always down for a romp or a scheme even when he has absolutely no guile whatsoever, somehow able to avoid even a fate that Jephthah’s daughter and Iphigeneia couldn’t. I would watch the heck out of a prestige television show that focused on Jonathan and his inability to remember arrow codes.)

Now I do understand that plenty of people enjoy these kinds of stories. It’s just that I… don’t. I can’t bring myself to find any delight or pleasure in stories where the desire for the power of a throne brings about so much waste. If only people hadn’t cared so much about that one thing, if only the throne didn’t exist in the first place, maybe people could have been happy and well. It brings me back to I Samuel chapter 8, where the confederation of tribes that is the people of Israel asks Samuel for a king. ‘We want someone to govern us, who can ride out ahead of us in battle,’ they say. Unhappy with the continually broken succession of judges, dissatisfied with the wayward children of Samuel and his predecessor, the people (somewhat ironically) request a political structure where hereditary succession is locked in.

And Samuel, to his benefit, tries to tell them that this is a fabulously bad idea. But God—perhaps taking pity on Samuel—says, ‘Listen to their request—only: solemnly warn them, and tell them what a king is like, what he will do to them.’ To Samuel’s credit, he tries. But it seems, as with our own popular narratives involving monarchies here and now, that the people are so caught up with their romantic notions of what a king will be, that they can’t hear the warning. It’s as if, as soon as the mere idea of a king entered the chat, the people were doomed.

The people—including Saul, David, and Michal.

Michal loves David, but David loves her brother Jonathan. David and Jonathan love one another, but their positions as opposing heirs apparent means that one of them will have to die for the other to ascend the throne. Michal loves David, and her father Saul thinks, ‘I will use her as a trap for him.’ Michal loves David, and so she saves him. Michal loves David, and she is punished, over and over and over for it.

We forget about Michal’s love when we hear this text. We forget because, according to the lectionary, this is her only appearance in David’s story. According to the lectionary, this is about David’s triumph, about his recovering the ark of the covenant and bringing it into his new capital. Michal’s love and suffering are excised, just like the death of Uzzah, and David’s ambivalence about keeping the ark are excised.

We forget about Michal and her love for David, because what we have been told about her is that she despised David’s dancing before the Lord.

I’m not going to say that the fight between the two of them isn’t about David’s display in the procession. It’s not not about that, but it’s also about more than that. It’s about everything that has happened to Michal and between her and David up until this point. This point where she finally comes to terms with how she has been treated because of the existence of the throne, and because of her own position caught between the men in her life who are fighting over it. And she despises David for his part in her suffering. She has given him everything, and he takes and takes and gives her nothing in return—not even a child.

Following the painful exchange that follows this lectionary excerpt, we are told in a roundabout fashion that David pushes Michal away, in favour of the unnumbered other women whom he marries and with whom he fathers children. The biblical texts are not shy about telling us when women are unable to conceive. And so, when it says that Michal had no children to the day of her death, it is glaringly obvious what has happened. In defiance of the Torah, where it says that a husband’s duty is to give his wife children, David withholds himself from Michal. He forces her to live as a living widow, without even children to give her love to.

I can imagine that the women who knew Michal personally or heard her story in the years and centuries after this take a lesson to heart: better not to love a powerful man, better not to let him have that leverage over you, because he will use that love for his own benefit, but never for yours.

I can imagine that the people listening to Samuel all those chapters ago thought it would be worth it, to have a king. They would have the semblance of stability that they wanted, and the satisfaction of a structure the nations around them could understand. They want a king they can love, but as Samuel tries to tell them, the point of a king is to rule over them.

Jack Kamps

Jack Kamps (’16) has been paid to do many things, such as teach preschoolers, pastor youths, schlep things in warehouses, bake pastries, design curriculum, serve coffee, maintain gardens, and fix computers. Jack is currently a student at Princeton Theological Seminary—though they tend to spend more time working at a few local farms, plotting a future cheesecake business with their spouse, and listening to/talking about the latest Material Girls episode than doing their homework.