2 Samuel 4-7

The Facts (Chapter number: Verse)

2 Samuel 4 - No mention of any women.

5:13 - In Jerusalem, after David came from Hebron, he took more concubines and wives, and more sons and daughters were born to him.

6:16 - As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; she despised him in her heart.
6:19-23 - David distributed food among the people of Israel, both men and women, giving them each a cake of bread, a portion of meat and a cake of raisins. David returned to bless his household. But Michal came out to meat David saying, "How the King of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself before today before the eyes of his servants' maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!" David told her it was before the Lord that he danced for the Lord had made him prince over Israel in place of her father and all his household. David said, "I will make myself more contemptible than this and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor." And Michal had no child to the day of her death.

2 Samuel 7 - No mention of any women.

My Comments

The Bible should be banished by the grammar police. It's rampant abuse of pronouns is simply obscene. The scene in 2 Samuel 4 where the two guys killed Ishbaal was so hard to follow when everyone was just "they" or "he." I read it three times and had no clue what was really going on until about two paragraphs later when that scene was referenced again. And the Bible does this often. And when pretty much everyone is a he/He or a lord/Lord it gets ridiculously impossible to follow with diagramming each sentence. Maybe this was easier to follow in Latin or Greek, where the grammar allows for word order to be messed with.

And then we get poor Michal again, taken from her husband and forced to marry David, a man who hates her father with a passion. Here we get a story where she is displeased with David's dancing. I'm not sure why she is displeased. When she talks to David she makes it sound like he was dancing naked or with less clothes than usual. It says David was wearing an Ephod which seems to be a ceremonial piece of cloth. Perhaps this does not cover much of the body and I guess we can assume from this passage that David wasn't wearing anything else with the Ephod. So Michal is unhappy that David was dancing for all to see while basically naked except for a ceremonial garment. She confronts David about this, accusing him of dancing for some women. Which, gotta say, is fair enough. She didn't know he was dancing for God (and would you first assume someone who was dancing half naked was doing it for God?) and on top of that she was already angry at him for displacing her. And we know from previous passages that rivalry and jealousy between wives was common and pretty strong, so of course Michal was angry that David was exposing himself to women that weren't his wives/concubines. And yet David gets pissed at her for her accusations, flaunts the fact that God has favored him over her father and her household, and then she is punished by being barren for the rest of her life.

Really doesn't seem very fair to me. But then again, Michal was turning into a pretty uppity woman and had to be put in her place. So if David was just going to get pissed with her for being angry at him (and then God was going to punish her on behalf of David) what was the use of David taking Michal in the first place? As a insult to Saul's sons and Saul's kin? Michal was in a place where she could have never thrived or been content by David who I'm pretty sure meant for it to be that way, and was made barren for her understandable unhappiness with it all.

What a loving God, who places the glory of a man above that of a suffering woman and will gladly punish a woman with no children when she happens to slight his favored man even the tiniest bit. Why don't I go to church every Sunday to worship this jackass, again?

Tomorrow: 2 Samuel 8-12