Michal, Saul's Daughter

 

Each time I come across the story of David, I can't help but look at the story of Michal, daughter of Saul, first wife of David.   Here is a woman all too often maligned for her behavior towards David when he danced before the ark as it was brought home but can we just stop and look at her from a human level?  The Bible is a true accounting of humans and  human nature as much as it is of God's nature.  We can't slice off one without getting some of the other.   We are intertwined even though we might choose to think otherwise.  And while human emotions are often tangled and confusing to us, they do serve a purpose to show us God's nature in some form.   After all, it is God who created emotion within each of us.

So let us look closely at Michal for a little bit, shall we?  What made her as she was? 

When David was a youth (supposedly between 16 and 19 years of age), he was an experienced shepherd.  He was  the youngest of Jesse's sons, and it was his duty to carry sustenance to his brothers in whatever military station they were placed.  There came a day when David arrived at an army camp only to hear Goliath maligning God.   David was deeply offended, more so than any other man in the camp.  He offered to slay Goliath.  The 'prize' for killing Goliath was to be Saul's oldest daughter, Merab, given to any man who dared face that giant.    But when David slay Goliath, he turned down the opportunity to be wed to Saul's daughter.  He felt what he had done was for God's gain not his own personal gain.    And this suited Saul quite well. 

Saul saw a chance to politically align himself with a more powerful and possibly wealthier king, something David was not.   So his daughter Merab was given to another.   Later when Saul discovered that his younger daughter Michal was in love with David, Saul offered her as a bride to David.   By this point in history, Saul had come to realize that even though he had not taken advantage of it, David had received God's favor.   That old saying "Hold your friend close but your enemies closer," might well have been written just due to Saul's position at this point in history.   

Saul then offered Michal, his younger daughter to David.   Saul's bride price for Michal was 100 foreskins from slain Philistines.  This highly unusual bride price was requested for two reasons: number one, as the youngest son of Jesse, David's portion of Jesse's inheritance would have been too small to allow him to pay a suitable bride price for a King's daughter.  Number two, Saul had an ulterior motive.  He thought surely if David were to attempt to take the foreskins of 100 fierce fighting men, he'd die in the process!    What a shock it must have been when David returned and gave Saul 200 foreskins and was unscathed.

Michal became David's wife.  By this time, David was well aware that God's favor had been removed from Saul and given to himself.   He knew that in gaining Michal he was gaining a political advantage.  He was no longer a youth but a man and could calculate the benefits to himself.    Michal was in love.  The scriptures never mention David's love.  It was seemingly a mercenary move on his part, and perhaps just a passage of adulthood to him.  But he was positioning himself for the future when he would become the true king of Israel and a princess of the prior King as a bride was not an inconsiderable bonus.

Shortly after their marriage, David learns Saul has planned to kill him.  He escapes with Michal's help.  She lowers him from an upper window and places a statue in their marital bed, covering it with blankets and states that he is ill when Saul's guardsmen arrive to arrest him.  

When it is discovered that Michal has helped David escape, she tells her angry father that he himself had placed her in danger by giving her hand in marriage to David.  She hints that David has abused her and blames her father for placing her in danger with a man he knew to be lesser in his class status than the bride he was given as well as his own personal enemy.  Of equal truth here is that David himself has placed Michal's life in jeopardy.   Her love for him and her willingness to betray the King, regardless of his status as her father, meant that she herself could well lose her life.   As fortune has it, her reply to her father is sincere enough to warrant that her life is spared. 

Saul, on the advice of his counsel, reportedly chose to see David as dead already, though he was very much alive.  And so, he considered his daughter a widow and passed her on to another man, likely one with whom he also might have some political alliance.   Poor Michal!  And I do mean that in sympathy! She is very much in love with David, has risked her life for him in facing the wrath of her father and yet she has become the wife of another man whom she does not love.  Her father has used her as a pawn a second time.  

There is no accounting of her marriage to Paltiel beyond the Biblical mention. Jewish oral tradition holds that she never had children by Paltiel because of his own desire to honor God.  He would not have sexual relations with her until he was sure that she was a widow.   Perhaps so.  But that makes for a very frustrated woman, pining for one man in her heart and living with another who is too honorable to give her true status as a wife and mother of his children.  

Some scholars say that David was gone 14 years as the feud between himself and Saul raged on.   We know that he took other wives during this period.  We know that he often was close enough to Saul to kill him.  Surely at some point he might have attempted to rescue Michal.  David was a man of legend in his battles and his ability to escape Saul and his armies.  Michal must have heard of his later marriages and of his rescuing his two wives from the Amalekites (1Samuel 30).  She must have wondered when he would attempt to rescue her, too?  I would think that hope grew less and less as the years passed by. 

In the meantime, there is Michal with no real marriage from which to draw comfort.  Oral tradition states that she raised the five sons of Merab after her sister's death, but they were not her own children.  At some point they would have been returned to their own father, where their inheritance lay.  Surely raising those boys brought her some joy but also heartache when they were returned to their father.    I'll wager that Paltiel had other wives.  He was a Prince after all.  He would require male heirs.  But it was not Michal who would provide those.  It would appear that Michal was always going to be without the very things that might bring a woman fulfillment.

Eventually Saul dies in battle.  His son Ish-bosheth is named King.  Abner, an advisor to Saul takes over as counsel for Ish-bosheth.  Ish-bosheth however accuses Abner of a moral crime he has not committed.  Abner then aligns himself with David.  David agrees to enter Israel as King but tells Abner his price, "Return to me my wife Michal for whom I paid 200 foreskins." (2Samuel 3).  

Paltiel follows behind Michal weeping loudly all the way.  No word is made of Michal's feelings.  We know that she returned to her rightful place as the wife of David.  We can gain only a little inside information about her emotional state.   The Bible refers to her as 'Saul's daughter' from this point onward.  Her status is due only her relationship to her father.  No personal desire on David's part prompted him to demand her return.  It was merely one more political move.  Still, he would be king.  Michal too had learned to calculate position.  As a daughter of Saul, she was returning to Israel as Queen.

But the intervening years had done her damage.  She'd faced the reality that she would not be first in David's affections.  She faced his other wives.  She might have been the first wife, she might even have been queen, but she was not a beloved wife of anyone, but Paltiel who had denied her a wife's rights of affection.   Each of these other women had children by David.  She, Michal, had nothing but her status as Saul's daughter.  She leaned hard on that identity.

Michal faced these realities, and her heart was hardened within her by disappointments and rejections.  As so often happens when we are hurt, she focused her self-loathing and lack of status on the one person who remained in her life, David, the last person who caused her harm.   I am not letting David off from his part in this.  He was a grown man.  He'd learned what loss was.  He'd learned to love.  He'd learned what rejection felt like.  Any of these circumstances should have aroused compassion in him for Michal, but it did not.   She was a possession, a right that had been taken from him and he wanted her back for that fact alone.  And that, I'm afraid, was what sealed Michal's identity forever.

When Michal saw David, scantily clothed, acting as a shepherd boy might have acted before the ark of the Lord rather than the way she felt an earthly King should, 'she despised him in her heart' (I Chronicles 15:29).   She not only despised him but when he appeared in the household ready to give them the Lord's blessing, she greeted him with a scathing and accusing tone. Scripture tells us that she mentions how he has exposed himself before the maidservants (2 Samuel 6).  Jewish oral tradition says she went on remarking how she nor her father would have acted in such a way before all the public. She accused David of seeking the sexual admiration of both other women and of men.  She was harsh and ugly in her jealous criticism.

David is righteously angry.  He replies that his joy was in the Lord God.  What she saw as a humbling and humiliation of David the King he saw as high praise for the King of All and furthermore he would humble and humiliate himself willingly in future for the same.   

It is unknown if bitterness of heart prevented her having children or if David put her away from himself, never calling upon her to perform the duties of a wife.      What we do know is only what scripture shares in the final verse of 2 Samuel 6:23 "So Michal, the daughter of Saul, remained childless all the days of her life."

Michal might have been redeemed.  She might have been known as the wife of David, instead of the daughter of Saul.  She might have accepted this new role in life and seen it as an opportunity to step into an era of grace, but it was her past hurts and rejections which she allowed to rule her emotions and to become her identity.  And in so choosing her place in history is that of a bitter and angry woman.  But then she might be any of us, hadn't she?  

I think women tend to lose sight of who they are, to lose identity.  That's because we tend to identify with our circumstances.  I am a wife to John, a beloved wife.    I am a beloved mother by my children.  I am a writer and a homemaker and a frustrated gardener.  I am limited by physical abilities and artistic inabilities.   I might identify with negative things such as anxieties and insecurities and rejections.   But none of that is all of who I am.   We focus on our earthly identity which is often bound by circumstances or robbed from us by others.  Things over which we've no control dictate who we come to identify ourselves to be.   Often in our quest to discover who we are, we forget that we are always daughters of the most high King. We are always a child of God.  And in the end that is all we are truly called to be.