Opinion From Kashmir to Palestine, Goliath is now David

Today, in our political and social discourse, it is the stone-pelter who is the aggressor, whether Palestinian, Kashmiri or Kurd, and the great armies with their missiles and phosphorus gas, the great states with their rational courts and bureaucratic bulldozers, who are victims.

To dare to empathise with a modern-day David is to evoke accusations of anti-Semitism, ironically, or anti-nationalism — of silly naivete, at best, unable to grasp grown-up geopolitics. Only children, if at all, may still weep. (Reuters)

Parvati Sharma

January 2, 2024 04:21 PM IST First published on: Jan 2, 2024 at 07:00 AM IST

It is an odd thing about very famous works of art that the better they are known, the more they can surprise you with their brilliance. This is how it was for me when, a few months ago, I had the luck to see Michelangelo’s David. In the flesh, or so it seems, because this is marble that very nearly breathes. You can almost see the fine hair upon his legs, as David stands in intense concentration, a coiled spring, a cat about to leap, his sling slung nonchalant over his left shoulder but the muscles of his right hand taut, ready to fling the pebble that will fell Goliath.

Afterwards, realising that I knew nothing about David except that he flung that pebble, I thought I might look him up. I expected to find a few beautiful verses, some begats and begots; instead, I found, in the two Books of Samuel that tell David’s tale, a story of war and politics that sometimes had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief. In brief: God makes Saul king of the Israelites and, later, sends him on a mission to exterminate the Amalekites, one among many neighbouring tribes with whom the Israelites (and their God) are engaged in constant war. This Old Testament God is not a benign deity with a twinkle in His eye, disbursing mercy; his command is clear and bloodthirsty: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Saul falls afoul of God when he does, in fact, spare the Amalek king and some Amalek animals.

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The animals are meant for a sacrifice to God but He is not pleased and removes his favour from Saul, sending the prophet Samuel to find a new king. Enter David the shepherd boy from Bethlehem: First as a musician in Saul’s court, then as the hero of the battle against Goliath the Philistine giant, and, for many chapters thereafter, a fugitive hunted by an increasingly antsy Saul, bent on killing his rival for the throne. David finds refuge in a Philistine kingdom that he betrays – going out every day to massacre villages of Geshurites, Girzites and Amalekites, tribes with whom his people are at constant war — while pretending his sorties are against the Israelites. Later, as a king, having taken Jerusalem from its inhabitants, the Jebusites, David also takes another man’s wife — Bathsheba — and has her husband killed. He is not, in sum, a perfect man, nor is his story one of moral edification — though it is riveting.

And yet, much like famous works of art, the famous story of David and Goliath surprises you with its urgent moral clarity. The Israelite and Philistine armies are arrayed against each other. Every day, for forty days, the Philistine champion Goliath — nine feet tall, wearing a helmet of bronze and a 60-kg coat of mail, carrying a bronze javelin and an iron spearhead — challenges the Israelites to one-on-one combat.

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Every day, the Israelite soldiers are “dismayed, and greatly afraid” at his call. Among them are some of David’s older brothers and, on the forty-first day, David comes to them with bread from home. Hearing Goliath’s taunt, David declares to Saul that he will fight the giant.

Saul discourages him, “thou art but a youth”, he cries, but when David insists, Saul gives the boy his own armour, a helmet and a coat of mail. Clad in such unfamiliar gear, a sword strapped to his side, David can hardly walk, and he takes it all off. Instead, he picks five pebbles from a brook and, sling in hand, approaches Goliath. From his great height, Goliath looked upon his challenger with contempt, and says, “Come to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.”

David looks up at the giant — this is the moment Michelangelo captures in stone — a lithe young boy looking up at a great foe with such tense yet graceful concentration. “And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it” – and Goliath “fell upon his face to the earth.”

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In modern terms, Goliath is the world’s first tank and David the first stone-pelter. Over centuries, their names have become shorthand for the struggle of the weak against the strong. And yet, in modern times, a great perversion has infected and inverted the virtues of their tale.

Today, in our political and social discourse, it is the stone-pelter who is the aggressor, whether Palestinian, Kashmiri or Kurd, and the great armies with their missiles and phosphorus gas, the great states with their rational courts and bureaucratic bulldozers, who are victims. The story of David and Goliath evokes an empathy that any child will understand: We take the side of the weak, the poor, the dispossessed by instinct. But now, that instinct is quelled. To dare to empathise with a modern-day David is to evoke accusations of anti-Semitism, ironically, or anti-nationalism — of silly naivete, at best, unable to grasp grown-up geopolitics. Only children, if at all, may still weep.

Sharma is the author of Akbar of Hindustan and Jahangir