When it gets to Kings, the story of the Israelites is the story of a whole nation, or a major corporation and we can see all the politics of multi nation companies at work. Nevertheless, let’s look at David. David is a hero king yet he is humble; his real concern is for the wellbeing of the nation. The nation is bigger than David, not the other way round as some politicians come to imagine. Yet the story tells of David lusting after another man’s wife, not only lusting but engineering the man’s death so that he can have her for himself. If this is true, why not just ignore it and keep the hero king’s moral reputation clean? Because it shows David as a human being. We have so many heroes from history who have no faults or defects, Arthur, Robert Bruce, yet David is not one of them. This is one of the non- religious lessons the Bible teaches – honour people for what they do, but remember they are humans and have human motivations: Robert Burns poetry is a gift to the world and should not be tainted with his human failings; Turner’s landscapes are magnificent and his treatment of women should not detract from that. The wonder of it is that humans could create such things and that should be a motivation for each of us to try.
