2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27 and Psalm 130  • Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24 or Lamentations 3:22-33 and Psalm 30  • 2 Corinthians 8:7-15  • Mark 5:21-43

I wonder how long people knew what The Song of the Bow sounded like. Did they sing it on the banks of the rivers of Babylon? Might Jesus have heard it sung in Roman-occupied Galilee? How long before the reference to that song drew shrugs rather than conjuring sounds in the imaginations of those hearing these words read?

I’m not sure that I would even recognize it as music–what little I know about ancient music is that it’s a very different sound from the music I listen to. But I do wonder.

I wonder even more, though, about the warrior teaching the Song of the Bow to all of Israel. Everything I think about the performances of powerful men, and everything I think about David as a powerful man, shapes the ways I interpret this song.

I know plenty of people who can look at these verses–the exaltation of the reluctant Saul and the woman-surpassing love of young Jonathan–and take them simply as the overflow of powerful emotions recalled in the course of teaching the song of Israel.

I can’t get past my suspicion.

The questions that we readers bring to the Bible, I’m reminded, often stand just as important as the ways we answer those questions. A reader asking how David’s powerful grief teaches us to thank God for our friends and our forerunners is going to come up with different answers from someone asking how an aspiring king might use the demise of his predecessor (and would-be killer) to begin securing the loyalty of the tribes against whom David will wage civil war for the following two years. A reader asking what kind of relationship between David and Jonathan inspires that parallel couplet about Jonathan’s love will walk away with different answers–no matter how that reader interprets that relationship–than someone focused on the secret character of David and Jonathan’s friendship and the very public fact that most of Israel expected Jonathan, not David, to inherit kingship from Saul. Will singing Jonathan’s love link the promised heir to the throne of Saul with the upstart, the giant-killer, the Philistine mercenary?

All those questions are valid, of course. And readers asking very different questions, because we’re part of the same conversation with each other and part of the same community worshiping the God implicated in all of this, can be faithful together. And the best part of those two truths (they’re both true) is that they don’t end the conversation. They don’t mark boundaries beyond which one no longer abides or across which one transgresses mortally. The Bible, the narrative parts especially but other passages as well, comes to us faithful in texts that invite interpretation and difference and even dispute, and those disputes, in more cases than folks sometimes recognize, offer occasions for the faithful to become more aware and more involved and more faithful.

Just watch out for David. He’s a wily one.

Featured Image: Glover, John, 1767-1849. Ullswater, early morning, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55476 [retrieved June 2, 2024]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Glover_-_Ullswater,_early_morning_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *