Somebody Else’s Mail (13)

Not all long-term friendships get off on the right foot.

The relationship between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin is a fascinating historical study. Israel’s second king, our beloved psalmist, was from the more dominant, numerous and historically significant tribe of Judah, while its first king, Saul, hailed from the comparatively tiny tribe of Benjamin.

What Benjamin lacked in size it made up in pugnacity. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf”, prophesied the original Benjamin’s dad, and so it came to be.

The tribe was also inordinately insular and clannish, willing to defend its own even when its own were dead wrong. In the time of the judges all Israel went to war against Benjamin to the point of near-annihilation, a tragedy Benjamin could easily have prevented with a few concessions, a show of repentance or some judicious politicking. That wasn’t about to happen. Good fighters, but a truculent bunch.

Today, let’s look at history of the relationship between David and the tribe of Benjamin to set the table for our study of Psalm 7, a song written in response to Benjaminite slander. I think you’ll find the story’s ending has an ironic twist.

David and Benjamin

Grudge-Bearing and Rebellion

Benjamin had a near-insatiable capacity for grudge bearing and rebellion. Having once had the headship of the nation, the tribe was entirely unable to concede that it was God’s righteous judgment that had stripped not just Saul but Benjamin of the kingdom and all the perks that went with it. And there were perks for the entire tribe: when Saul needed an army commander, he naturally chose a Benjaminite and a family member. He probably did the same sort of thing for other relatives.

But it was God who had passed final judgment on the original Benjaminite leadership of Israel, not David. It was not David but the Philistines who killed Saul and most of his sons. David did everything he could to preserve Saul’s family — quite the counterintuitive move in a day when it was de rigueur to consolidate one’s grip on the throne by wiping out the bloodline of every conceivable challenger.

He got no thanks for that. For the tribe of Benjamin, it was a whole lot easier to blame David and to look for every opportunity to undermine him.

Bloodshed and Division

So then, while David was being anointed king in Judah, the Benjaminite commander of Saul’s army was proclaiming Saul’s remaining son king over the rest of Israel. Division and bloodshed resulted. Interestingly, though Abner made Ish-bosheth king over “all Israel”, it was primarily Benjaminites who fought to establish Ish-bosheth’s kingdom.

This unjustified sense of Benjaminite entitlement persisted throughout David’s reign, even after he was finally able to consolidate the kingdom. When opening the unification negotiations with David, Abner boldly asked him, “To whom does the land belong?” He thought it still belonged to him and to his tribe.

Much later, when David fled Jerusalem in Absalom’s insurrection, who was the first to heap fuel on the fire? Of course it was a Benjaminite, a fellow named Shimei, the son of Gera. He threw stones at David and cursed, “Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless man!” Years of wise and effective leadership from David had not sated Benjamin’s misplaced hatred. At the first opportunity, the Benjaminite grudge reared its ugly head.

Rebellion and Recriminations

Immediately Absalom’s rebellion was put down, yet another rebellion arose. Guess who was behind that? Right. That would be “a worthless man, whose name was Sheba, the son of Bichri, a Benjaminite”. His rebellion ended near-bloodlessly, but only because a wise woman from the tribe of Naphtali brokered a peace arrangement in which only rebellious Sheba lost his life.

Finally, today’s psalm records David going through what looks like an agony of self-examination before God. At this point, it should hardly surprise us to find that verbal abuse from “Cush, a Benjaminite” prompted this internal conflict. Cush was a relative of Saul’s, perhaps a rival of David’s who slandered him to Saul in his absence, as some speculate, fanning the flames of Saul’s hatred for his son-in-law when he could not defend himself. In the psalm, we’ll find David accused of repaying his friends with evil and plundering his enemy without cause, something of which he believes he is not guilty.

The Superscription

“A Shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning the words of Cush, a Benjaminite.”

Psalm 7 is one of eight psalms traditionally associated with David’s time on the run from King Saul, who was determined to end his life and the threat to his kingdom he believed David posed. The others are Psalms 34, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59 and 142. Other than the superscription over this psalm, there’s little evidence in the psalm itself to suggest this. As I’ve pointed out, whenever David’s kingdom struggled internally and when David struggled personally, it was almost always Benjaminites who were to blame. His troubles with the tribe were not limited to a specific period. Furthermore, there’s no reference in the historical books to anyone named Cush. We cannot fix the background to the psalm that way. It’s even possible the psalm was written well after Saul’s death and that Cush spread rumors that David was to blame for it. After all, when the Philistines killed Saul, David was nowhere to be found, and he had been consorting with Philistines for quite some time. It would have been very easy to scapegoat David for his master’s unfortunate demise. Perhaps verses 3 and 4 hint at something like this.

On the other hand, there is this statement in the psalm’s superscription that David sang it to the Lord about Cush, as if the writing of this particular piece of music took place while the conflict was going on. I’m reading between the lines here, but it doesn’t take much creativity to picture David in the dark by a fire, perhaps picking out notes on his lyre as he took his troubles to God. Where Psalm 6 felt like David was putting himself in the sandals of his people in another time and place, this one feels very personal, especially in its beginning and ending. The first five and last six verses concern the accusations of Cush and the consequences David anticipated the Lord would eventually mete out on his slanderer. The middle takes us to the judgment of God, where David hoped for vindication.

Missing the Point

The back-and-forth rivalry between Judah and Benjamin and the bloodshed to which it led are features of the books of Samuel entirely obvious to attentive readers. I was not among their number, having missed the major theme of tribal politics probably the first ten times I read through these great books of history. I was caught up in the more personal elements of the story, predisposed from years of exposure to Sunday school curriculum and “relevant” youth group studies to look for the application to my own life rather than at the broader themes in the Old Testament. It took repeated readings for some of the books’ more subtle lessons to drop.

All well and good, you say, but where’s the ironic ending?

Well, after eighty years or so under the house of David and the tribe of Judah, ten tribes saw fit to abandon the worthy project of a united Israelite kingdom and rejected the rule of David’s line. The people of Israel told David’s grandson, “What portion do we have in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. To your tents, O Israel! Look now to your own house, David.” And Israel went to their tents, says the writer of the book of Kings.

Here Comes the Irony

So now, here comes the irony. Of all the tribes in Israel, guess which one remained aligned with Judah? You’ve got it: Benjamin, the tribe that had been a thorn in Judah’s side for more than forty years out of that period. Parts of other tribes, and individuals discontented with Jeroboam’s abandonment of temple worship would later join them, but Benjamin was the only tribe to stick with Judah from the very start, the only tribe to remain loyal to the house of David. Benjamin would be part of the kingdom (and later the nation) of Judah right up until the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.

Isn’t that fascinating? The peculiarities of human nature and group dynamics are endlessly mysterious to me. I can only conclude that David’s repeated acts of generosity, forgiveness and fairness toward the tribe of Benjamin, and his steadfast refusal to return evil for evil eventually broke down their natural antipathy toward David and Judah, and produced in them an unconditional loyalty to the house of David. Solomon would learn this lesson from his father, writing “A soft tongue will break a bone” and “A soft answer turns away wrath”, both of which thoughts anticipate the teaching of the New Testament writers about personal relations, and that of the Lord himself.

With this background in mind, we will consider the content of Psalm 7 in detail beginning next week.