{"id":60289,"date":"2019-07-30T12:05:59","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T09:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=60289"},"modified":"2023-02-21T14:19:55","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T12:19:55","slug":"david-as-halakhic-authority-rabbinic-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/david-as-halakhic-authority-rabbinic-satire\/","title":{"rendered":"David As Halakhic Authority: Rabbinic Satire"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rabbinic responses to David\u2019s corruption are far from unanimous, both whitewashing and condemning his behavior. What has often been overlooked in those normally understood as commending David is the use of literary conventions of irony and satire that can transform an apparent approbation into its very opposite. As such, they provide a deeper sense of the depths of David\u2019s spiraling decadence in the biblical narrative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One example is a view of David where he literally gets his hands dirty in his concern for the integrity of his subjects\u2019 marital relations. In his anachronistic role of rabbi as well as king, he engages in practical issues of family purity where he obsessively applies his halakhic expertise to reunite husband and wife. He surrenders all the imperial privilege due his office to the extent of becoming \u201cfilthy with the blood of the fetal sac and placenta in order to render a woman pure for [purposes of having sex with] her husband\u201d (<\/span>Berakhot<\/span><\/i> 4a).<\/span><\/p>\n

This opinion constitutes an ironic critique of David by its allusion to the Bible\u2019s single description of Bathsheba aside from her beauty, and the names of her father and husband, in what is at worst a rape by, or at best adulterous tryst with, David. The narrative divulges only one conspicuous detail in three words about Bathsheba\u2019s ritual condition- she had just purified herself after her period (11:4). The biblical David exploited an ideal moment when sexual relations could resume between husband and wife after a period of abstinence, to commit adultery. He pointedly fractured a marriage at a time normally signaling the height of spousal intimacy. Of all the rabbinic halakhic concerns, the choice of family purity as the issue to which David dedicated his expertise toward promoting marital harmony is strikingly at odds with David\u2019s offence. As a precise inversion of it, acerbic irony best appreciates its intention.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bearing in mind this single biblical observation regarding Bathsheba\u2019s menstrual status turns the Talmud\u2019s projection of David as a halakhic decisor (<\/span>poseq<\/span><\/em>) whose hands are dripping with menstrual blood into a scathing indictment of the real David. By depicting David as engaged in distinctly postbiblical rabbinic activity, the rabbis have drawn him into their world of values. Irony plays on the clash between the biblical report of David\u2019s immoral relationship with Bathsheba and of the moral and legal values of rabbinic culture. The success of the irony lies in the artful recasting of David in images that the rabbinic academy constructed as mockery by virtue of its precise incongruity with the biblical account. David\u2019s halakhic rulings of a woman\u2019s sexual cleanliness allowing the resumption of relations with her husband caustically underscore his own destabilizing of spousal harmony at that very same moment of sexual purity.<\/span><\/p>\n

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