DAVID
ALSO BY ALLAN WARGON
I Am Come Into My Garden, My Sister, My Bride
A poetic novel in appreciation of the Song of Songs
Nia
A love story
Showbiz, and More
A novella, sonnets and three stories
DAVID
ALLAN
WARGON
PIED PIPER
BOOKS
Copyright © 2012 Allan Wargon
Excerpts from this publication may be reproduced under licence from Access Copyright, or with the express permission of Pied Piper Books, or as permitted by law. A reviewer may quote brief passages in a review. Otherwise all rights are reserved and no part or all of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, except as specifically authorized.
Copyright is registered with the Library of Congress and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.
Quotes from Duff Cooper are with the kind permission of his literary executor, John Julius Norwich, The Viscount Norwich. Robert Alter is named with his gracious consent.
The excerpt from The Gifts Of The Jews by Tom Cahill, © 1998 by Tom Cahill, is used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
The remark of Izak Freilich, of blessed memory, was made to the author in person.
This biography, which closely follows the biblical story, is nonetheless a work of fiction, as it contains scenes that are not in the Bible and omits some that are. It also provides motivations that are only hinted at in the Bible. It is the author’s imaginative understanding of the life of King David. As such, any resemblance to other persons, living or dead, is of course entirely coincidental.
David / Allan Wargon.
ISBN-13 978-0-9865-6714-8
David (King of Israel) — Fiction.
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
Typeset by Gordon Robertson Design, Toronto, Canada.
Cover: Part of ‘Bathsheba bathing’ by Rembrandt Van Rijn
Cover design by Sholom Wargon
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Published in eBook format by Pied Piper Books
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History has no other instance
of a man who has fought the wars,
made the laws, and written the songs of his people.
DUFF COOPER
TRIBUTE
During the Second World War, Duff Cooper was a member of Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet. He was in charge of secret work, and to relax from the rigours of the job and anxieties of the war he wrote on weekends a book called David. It’s a brilliant little book. He brought to the biblical story not only a profound understanding of people, but a knowledge of government and the perspective of a man engaged in the affairs of an empire. It moved me to write the present work, and once I even used his very words, because I could think of no better way of putting it.
ALLAN WARGON, 2012
I would also like to reprint Duff Cooper’s dedication to that book, and make it my own:
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE
TO WHOM THE WORLD OWES
THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENTS
AND MUCH ELSE
IN THE REALMS OF BEAUTY AND KNOWLEDGE
A DEBT
THAT HAS BEEN ILL REPAID
AND FROM THOMAS CAHILL:
The Jews started it all—and by “it” I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. And not only would our sensorium, the screen through which we receive the world, be different: we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.
By “we” I mean the usual “we” of late-twentieth-century writing: the people of the Western world, whose peculiar but vital mentality has come to infect every culture on earth, so that, in a startlingly precise sense, all humanity is now willy-nilly caught up in this “we”. For better or worse the role of the West in humanity’s history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the inventors of Western culture, is also singular: there is simply no one else remotely like them; theirs is a unique vocation. Indeed, as we shall see, the very idea of vocation, of a personal destiny, is a Jewish idea.
Our history is replete with examples of those who have refused to see what the Jews are really about, who —through intellectual blindness, racial chauvinism, xenophobia, or just plain evil — have been unable to give this oddball tribe, this raggle-taggle band, this race of wanderers who are the progenitors of the Western world, their due. Indeed, at the end of this bloodiest of centuries, we can all too easily look back on scenes of unthinkable horror perpetrated by those who would do anything rather than give the Jews their due.
from the Introduction to The Gifts of the Jews
by THOMAS CAHILL, 1998
Allan, if all religious Jews had to believe in God, there wouldn’t be very many.
ISAK FREILICH
a very religious Jew
1922–2002
NAMES
The names used in the King James version of the Bible are but a crude translation from the original
