The Secret Chord

Geraldine Brooks approaches David’s story by combining careful research with a focus on contemporary relevance. The Hebrew Bible (also called the Tanakh or the Old Testament) paints a detailed picture of David as a flawed individual. Some scholars believe this story is a collection of ahistorical folk tales written centuries later, while others argue that it is a mostly accurate history written down near David’s time. Much later, these scholars contend, rabbis told other stories (including that of David’s mother) to flesh out the original. While she acknowledges the uncertainty, Brooks adopts the biblical accounts and later stories as mostly true. She even reimagines them as the product of Natan engaging in historical research like her own, with the important difference that he could interview eyewitnesses to discover the human details that Brooks can only access through imagination.

Despite disagreement on details, scholarly consensus holds that a King David ruled in Jerusalem over Judah (or Yudah) and Israel around 1000 BCE. Outside of biblical sources, we have one early inscription mentioning him and a handful of buildings that might be evidence of prosperity during his time (301). The Hebrew people lived in the arid highlands near the rich trading cities on the Mediterranean coast between the great regional powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was a poor land surrounded by enemies. Our first record of Israel is the Egyptian Merneptah Stele from around 1210 BCE, in whose inscription the pharaoh claims to have slaughtered the Israelites for daring to attack Canaanite cities under his protection. That violence grew worse in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE, as old superpowers collapsed and new peoples moved into the Middle East, perhaps including the Plishtim (or Philistine) opponents of Israel. This political chaos, however, created opportunities for new kingdoms led by dynamic rulers to rise up and seize local power by force. In this context, the rise of Israel and Judah from a loose association of shepherd tribes to a prosperous regional power is plausible. Brooks’s story captures the violence of the time and the great change represented by the new kingdom. Some of the details that made that change possible—such as control of trade routes and access to iron weapons—appear in the background of her narrative.

Brooks includes other details about life in ancient Israel, ranging from the variety of dyes to medicinal plants. However, these details take a backseat to her exploration of human character and abuse of power. In service of those universal themes, she emphasizes the familiar over the unfamiliar. The relations between characters often have a modern feel as she tries to access what is universal about human nature. This does not come at the expense of historical fact, but wherever possible, she chooses interpretations of history that bring the past closer to our contemporary society.

This interpretative choice happens in small matters such as the biblical description of David as “reddish” (1 Samuel 16:12). This description is often understood to mean that he had a ruddy face, but Brooks takes it to mean instead that he had coppery hair—unusual for a Middle Eastern man, but not impossible. Similar decisions let the reader picture a physically diverse cast of characters that feels more like our present world. Brooks applies the same logic to religion. Characters are accepting of different religious beliefs. The Bible describes the priest Zadok as a descendant of Moses’s brother Aaron (1 Chronicles 6:12), but some scholars have speculated he may have been a non-Israelite priest. Brooks adopts this interpretation, which better fits with modern ideas about religious diversity. Most importantly for the story, she accepts the interpretation of David as bisexual. The Bible records that David and Yonatan deeply loved each other. In David’s “Song of the Bow,” a lament for the deaths of both Shaul and Yonatan, David says that Yonatan’s “love was wonderful to me, more than the love of women” (130). To a modern ear, this kind of love seems inconceivable outside of a sexual and romantic relationship. Some scholars have adopted that interpretation. Others, however, have pointed out that many premodern cultures frequently expressed deep love in the context of friendship. They also note how odd it would be for the biblical authors to celebrate a sexual relationship between men in one place while condemning it in others (Wolpe, David. David: The Divided Heart. Yale University Press, 2017). Brooks adopts the interpretation that places David closer to our culture’s attitudes to sexuality, even depicting the men around David as accepting of his sexuality.

In short, Brooks work carefully weighs history and the story she wants to tell. The result is a detailed world that can plausibly fit the historical evidence and capture the violence of the time while simultaneously creating easily relatable characters.