Fertility Rituals and The 1 SM 6

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Vol 31.1 (2006): 63-80

© 2006 Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi)
DOI: 10.1177/0309089206068843
http://JSOT.sagepub.com
David’s Play: Fertility Rituals and the

Glory of God in 2 Samuel 6
BRUCE ROSENSTOCK
Program for the Study of Religion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 3080,
Foreign Language Building, MC-160, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 60801, USA
Abstract
This article proposes that in 2 Samuel 6 we find a utopian representation of David as a
king who debases his own glory and rejects Michal’s perspective in which royal glory
mirrors divine glory and where both are supposed to remain invisible. The narrative of
David’s dance and self-display can be illuminated against the background of pan-Medi-
terranean rituals, widely attested in the Greek cultural sphere, involving dance, genital
self-display, and mocking speech designed to elicit laughter. David is represented as
‘carnivalizing’, to use Bakhtin’s term, the religious ideology of royal phallic power as
the embodiment of divine glory that these rituals supported. Constructing an ideal image
of David entering Jerusalem, the narrative is ironically reversed with the cursing of David
as he leaves Jerusalem by Shimi in 2 Samuel 16.
Keywords: Bakhtin; Israelite monotheism; genital display; Greek religion; patriarchy
The narrative in 2 Samuel 6 describes the rituals and events surrounding

David’s return of the ark to Jerusalem. In this study, I will argue that the
narrative is, in Bakhtin’s terms, ‘carnivalesque’, staging a parodic cri-
tique, through its playful inversion of ‘high’ and ‘low’, of fertility rites
known throughout the ancient Mediterranean basin, focused on royal
Downloaded from jot.sagepub.com at PURDUE UNIV LIBRARY TSS on April 12, 2015
64 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31.1 (2006)
phallic power.1 I am not concerned to demonstrate the historical accuracy

of the narrative, but only to analyze the literary strategies by which the
biblical author seeks to contrast David’s veneration of the glory of
YHWH with a religious ideology—focalized through Michal—that identi-
fies YHWH’s glory with royal phallic potency, the source of fertility for
both the land and its people. This religious ideology is the target of attack
in many prophetic texts, from Hosea to Ezekiel, where it is identified as
in competition with the veneration of YHWH alone. In the narrative of
2 Samuel 6, we are not presented with a description of a conflict between
the worship of YHWH and, for example, the worship of Baal, but rather a
conflict between different views of how to venerate YHWH. David Biale
in Eros and the Jews argues that the Hebrew Bible offers a ‘remarkable
theology of sexual subversion’ (1997: 12). For Biale, one of the central
figures around whom this subversion is played is King David. I will
argue that 2 Samuel 6 stages a complicated ‘theology of sexual subver-
sion’ that opens out to some of the most important themes of the David
narrative and of biblical theology more generally.2
The narrative in 2 Samuel 6 begins with a description of David’s mus-
tering of thirty thousand troops in order to bring the ark of the covenant
from the house of Abinadab to Jerusalem. David and the ‘all the house of
Israel’ are described as )JBI>, usually translated here as ‘playing’,
before YHWH. The procession is accompanied by a variety of musical
instruments.3 The journey ends prematurely when Uzzah, one of Abi-
nadab’s sons, dies after touching the ark in order to steady it when the
team of oxen stumbles. The ark is left in the care of Obed-Edom in order
to forestall any further misadventures.
1. See Bakhtin 1984; for a discussion of Bakhtin’s Rabelais book, see Clark and
Holquist 1984.
2. There have been numerous attempts to identify the Sitz im Lebem of 2 Sam. 6:
Mowinckel (1962: I, 175) argues for a Near Eastern temple consecration background;
Miller and Roberts (1977) put the narrative in the context of other narratives of the
capture and return of divine images; Seow (1989) identifies a Canaanite mythic back-
ground. Petersen (1998) offers an extended discussion of Mowinckel’s theory. I will
argue that Seow’s reconstruction of a ‘dance of a divine warrior’ motif seems most likely
as the mythic background to the text. I have no problem accepting Petersen’s arguments
against a cultic Sitz im Leben for this mythic background, although I would caution
against concluding that certain narrative elements—dance and self-exposure, for example
—are not intended to at least allude to ritual behaviors, even if not from a single cultic
performance.
3. See Wright 2002 for a discussion of the nature of the instruments.
ROSENSTOCK David’s Play 65
When David hears that the house of Obed-Edom has experienced

YHWH’s blessing, David brings up the ark to his city ‘in joy’ (2 Sam.
6.12). The blessing of the house, both the royal house and that of all the
inhabitants of Israel, is the aim of all the narrated action. The question
that the text raises is: How is the blessing of YHWH—and this blessing is
clearly here centered around procreative fecundity—to be mediated to
Israel? 4 Along the route to Jerusalem, David, dressed in a linen ephod,
‘dances (C<C<>) with all his might before the LORD’. Watching from a
window in the palace, Michal observes David’s dance and ‘she despised
him in her heart’ (6.16). We are not immediately informed about what
caused this reaction in Michal, but later we are given a dialogue between
Michal and David that makes the matter clear. She goes out to meet
David as he returns ‘to bless his house’ and says, ‘What glory the king of
Israel got for himself today when he was revealed today before the eyes
of the servant girls of his subjects just like the way one of those worth-
less men reveal themselves’ (6.20). David replies, ‘Before YHWH—he
chose me from my father and his house to appoint me as prince over the
people of the LORD, over Israel—I will dance (JEBIH) before YHWH.
And I will be even more diminished than this. I will be lowly in my own
eyes and with the servant girls you spoke of, with them I will get myself
glory’ (6.21-22). In this exchange we may note the significance of the
theme of ‘glory’ (5H3<), whose root appears in the first verb of Michal’s
taunt and the final verb of David’s reply, one opening and the other
closing the exchange. Clearly, David and Michal are represented as
possessing contrasting views of the nature of divine and royal glory and
how they are respectively celebrated and achieved. And the difference
between Michal and David, it is also clear, has something to do with the
way that one’s ‘house’ becomes ‘blessed’. The explication of the Bible’s
contrasting portrayal of David and Michal will be the task of the follow-
ing pages. I will begin with a discussion of the ritual context of David’s
dance before the ark.5
The permanent settling in ‘David’s city’ of the ark of the covenant, the
most important ritual object in Israel, identified in the earlier narrative of
the ark’s loss to the Philistines as the locus of the glory of YHWH (1 Sam.
4.21, 22) who ‘sits enthroned upon the cherubim’ (2 Sam. 6.2), marks the
4. Rosenberg (1986: 113-23) offers a nuanced discussion of the theme of the ‘house’
in 1 and 2 Samuel. My emphasis is on the ‘house’ as site of procreation and fecundity.
5. For a collection of essays dealing with the portrait of Michal in 2 Sam. 6 and other
texts, see Clines and Eskenazi (eds.) 1991.
ascendancy of David over all Israel. One can hardly imagine a more
powerful legitimation of his claim to the throne. The return of YHWH’s
glory and ‘throne’ to the city of David is at the same time an occasion for
David to ‘get himself glory’. It is hardly accidental that the next step
David contemplates is the transformation of the cult from one centered
on a moveable tent to one involving all the regalia of a state-controlled
temple.
The procession of David and the ark to Jerusalem is represented in the
text as a major ritual occasion. As David P. Wright (2002: 202 n. 5)
points out, despite the fact that we have in 2 Samuel 6 the narrative of
two processions, one leading to death and the other to the successful
installation of the ark in Jerusalem, there is likely a conflation of ele-
ments from various rituals in this chapter. However, this does not pre-
clude the search for some underlying pattern that might have motivated
the association of these elements into a single literary representation.
One of the most extensive discussions of the ritual nature of David’s
installation of the ark is that of C.L. Seow (1989) who convincingly
relates it to other Near Eastern rituals celebrating the victory of the
‘divine warrior’ and his human representative, the king. The victory that
is celebrated in these parallel rituals allows the divine warrior perma-
nently to establish his power and build his house. This mythic context,
the victorious entry of the divine warrior to his abode, is attested in
Israelite material, Seow claims, in Zechariah 8 where ‘the LORD of hosts’
returns to Mt Zion after battle amid revelry/dancing ()JBI>) in the
streets (v. 5) and also in certain Psalms that celebrate YHWH’s victory
over his enemies using the verbal root BI (Pss. 2 and 59). In Ugaritic
material, Anat is said to find joy at the sight of her triumph over her
enemies and ‘her liver swelled with laughter’ (KTU 1.3.II.25, quoted in
Seow 1989: 96). The root of ‘laughter’ is the same as that of Hebrew
BI4, a biform of BI. In another text, Anat laughs after hearing from El
that the victorious Ba!al was given permission to have a temple built for
himself. Seow refers also to the association of dancing with the return of
the divine warrior. When the divine warrior returns in glory, the natural
world dances and ‘writhes’ like a woman in birth pangs. This is attested
in Mesopotamian hymnic texts and also in Ps. 114.3-7 (‘the mountains
danced like rams’) and Psalm 29 (‘he caused the cedars of Lebanon to
dance like a ram’). These psalms suggest that the victorious return of the
divine warrior was celebrated ‘in anticipation of the deity’s fructification
of nature’ (Seow 1989: 113).
From Seow’s collection of evidence, it seems clear that the narrative

of the procession of the ark into Jerusalem draws significantly from ele-
ments of mythic narratives celebrating the return of a divine warrior and
the divine warrior’s enthronement and installation in his permanent
abode. These narratives further had to do with celebrating the divinity as
the source of the fertility of natural world. Seow points to presence of the
motif of divine sexuality in certain Ugaritic texts associated with the
divine warrior. When Athirat comes to ask El to permit Ba!al to have a
house built for himself after the defeat of his enemies, El ‘laughed’
(wyÑq) and ‘stomped his feet’ (KTU 1.4.IV.27-28, quoted in Seow 1989:
109). El then asks Athirat, ‘Does the virility of El excite you?’ (Seow
1989: 110). Seow points out that the narrative of Athirat’s entrance into
the tent of El in this text contains several verbal parallels to 2 Samuel 6
that suggest that unveiling (gly) of the deity’s tent and offering him
obeisance and and honor (kbd) are elements of a performance designed
to win approval from El for the building of a temple. If Seow is right,
then David’s self-exposure and loss of honor, at least in Michal’s eyes, is
somehow meant to signal the inversion of the expected pattern.
After the ark arrives in Jerusalem, David ‘installed it [the ark] in the
midst of the tent that David pitched for it’ and then offered whole burnt
and thanksgiving sacrifices. The ceremony is completed with the
distribution of special foodstuffs to the assembled throng of men and
women. Besides a loaf of bread, each person received an CA, whose
meaning is uncertain, and an 9J, which is a kind of cake that Hosea
identifies with the worship of foreign fertility divinities. Clearly, the food
is meant to carry the blessing back to the house. The blessing seems from
the context to have something to do with the economic prosperity and the
biological success of the house, understood as the site of the reproduction
of the family unit. We cannot ever know for certain what ritual sig-
nificance the food had, but it is not impossible that its use comes from
fertility cult practices.6
David blesses the assembly ‘in the name of YHWH of hosts’. Himself
a commander of troops, David assumes the role of an intermediary
between YHWH, the ultimate military commander of Israel, and the peo-
ple. He transfers YHWH’s blessing to the people and then returns to bless
his house. The repetition of the theme of blessing throughout the entire
narrative, from the blessing that the ark’s presence brought to the house
6. Dough cakes molded in the shape of genitalia were part of the rituals known as
Haloa and Skirophoria in Greece. See Fluck 1931: 14 n. 3, 18-19.
of Obed-Edom to the blessing of the people and the blessing of the

house, is quite telling. The ark and David are sources of blessing for cor-
porate Israel and for each ‘house’ within Israel. The narrative makes a
point of stating how each person, after receiving the foodstuffs, went
back to ‘his house’. David, too, ‘returned to bless his house’ and encoun-
ters Michal who comes out to greet him with abusive speech. Given the
ritual nature of the events thus far depicted, it is not implausible to believe
that the blessing of the house was also of a ritual nature, involving the
participation of the wife. What we have in the case of David and Michal
is an upsetting of ritual expectations, ending not in reproduction but in
the report that ‘Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her
death’. The reproductive failure of Michal ‘until the day of her death’
parallels the death of Uzzah when YHWH’s anger ‘broke out’ (#CA)
against him. The site of his death was named Peratzim-Uzzah ‘until this
day’ (2 Sam. 6.8). Since the verb #CA can be used to describe the infant’s
‘breech’ of the womb at birth (cf. Gen. 38.29), the connection between
reproductive failure and Uzzah’s ritual death is lent further support.
We can go further in explicating a ritual connotation lying behind the
events of this narrative.7 The abusive language that Michal uses when
David returns may also be ritual in nature. We know from fertility rituals
in Greece like the Haloa and the Thesmophoria that women engaged in
abusive language, frequently deriding their husbands, although not to
their faces as we have it in this narrative.8 The abusive language was, to
be sure, also meant to elicit laughter, and the narrative in 2 Samuel 6
seems to represent Michal’s greeting as only a reprimanding accusation.9
7. I am not claiming that the reader is meant to view David and Michal as enacting
pre-defined ritual roles, but only that a culturally competent contemporary of the narrator
would be able to appreciate an allusion to ritual behavior, whether as currently performed
or as represented artistically somewhere in the wider Kulturbereich.
8. On rituals involving abusive speech to elicit laughter, and on ritual laughter more
generally, see Reinach 1912 and Di Nola 1974: 15-90. Fluck (1931) remains the best
source for ancient testimonia regarding aischrologia—ritually abusive speech—
associated with the Haloa and Thesmophoria. See, for example, Testimonium II (13-14)
on the Haloa, and Testimonium IV (18-19) on the Thesmophoria. See also Halliwell 1991
and 2002 for more recent treatments of laughter in Greek culture.
9. Crüsemann (1980) details the various word-plays and inversions of meaning in the
exchange between Michal and David, especially around the use of the verb 53<. He
argues that the original setting of the dialogue was a humorous portrait of David’s sexual
exploits that circulated among his courtiers. While this reconstruction is somewhat
fanciful, Crüsemann shows convincingly that we cannot read this dialogue as merely a
wife’s jealous taunt and a husband’s angry rebuke. The narrator surely intends us to find
But this does not prevent us from interpreting the narrative as a case
of abusive speech that escapes its ritual bounds and becomes serious.
This is another aspect of the upsetting of ritual expectations that the
narrative stages. We may, however, detect the traces of the ritual nature
of Michal’s taunt in her use of the term ‘get oneself glory’. She sarcasti-
cally refers to David’s self-revelation as a way of getting glory for
himself. In order to appreciate the ritual jest behind the use of the verb in
this context we need to look more closely at the association between the
ark of the covenant and YHWH’s glory.10
We know, as I have already mentioned, that the ark was understood to
be the site of YHWH’s glory. In the narrative of its capture by the Philis-
tines in 1 Samuel 4 the loss of the ark means ‘the glory has departed
(9=8) from Israel’ (1 Sam. 4.22).11 The glory of YHWH was imagined to
be invisibly enthroned above the ark, ‘sitting enthroned over the cheru-
bim’ (2 Sam. 6.2).12 The invisibility of the glory was not tangential to it.13
these motivations behind the words, but we should not ignore the playfulness of the
words themselves. In what follows, I will offer my own reconstruction of the setting in
which both the playfulness and the anger of the words can be understood.
10. Offering a fascinating parallel to Michal’s taunting David about his self-exposure
as a violation of his own and the divinity’s honor, the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld
(1979) speaks about a particular modern Greek pismatiko, or teasing song, recited about a
man who used to expose himself at festivals when he was drunk: ‘how he had his
Epitafios out’. The Epitafios is a solemn icon of Christ Entombed, brought out in Greek
villages during Good Friday processions, usually kept in the inner sanctum of the Church.
The man engaged in a repeated violation of sexual propriety that was the very reverse of
the solemn exposure of the icon, although they both shared similar symbolic valences:
among the villagers for whom the taunt was performed, the role of the male’s penis is ‘to
provide that ultimate good, the procreation of his line’, just as the Epitafios is thought to
be linked to the reproductive continuity of the village (p. 280).
11. Robert Polzin draws attention to the parallels between the narrative in 1 Sam. 4
and 2 Sam. 6, arguing that the loss of YHWH’s glory in the first text presages an ultimate
loss of the glory, and end to the Davidic monarchy, with the Babylonian exile. I am quite
sympathetic to this reading, but I will nonetheless claim, pace Polzin, that David in
2 Sam. 6 is portrayed as an ideal image of self-abasing royalty, with Michal his foil
who misidentifies the glory of YHWH with the glory of the king.
12. It is interesting that the ‘name’ of YHWH is associated with the glory of YHWH, if
we are permitted to connect the description of the ark in 1 Sam. 4 and 2 Sam. 6. There is
some evidence, adduced in Smith (2001: 75-76) that the name of the divinity ‘may have
been associated with a goddess’, so that the name-glory (referred to as ‘the glory of his
name’ in Ps. 29, for example) might have designated the deity appearing in radiance
before the gaze of the loving consort.
13. Mettinger (1995: 139 and passim) has aptly described this as ‘empty throne
aniconism’.
That the glory of YHWH was hidden because its vision would be fatal is
the point made in the narrative describing Moses’s request to see YHWH’s
glory in Exod. 33.18. The glory there is associated with YHWH’s face or
front. YHWH allows Moses only to see his retreating form, his ‘back
parts’. The concealment of the glory by a cloud of smoke within the
tabernacle prevented anyone from glimpsing it directly and dying (cf.
Lev. 16.13).
When Michal speaks of how the king of Israel ‘got himself glory’ that
day by revealing himself fully to all around him, she is contrasting
David’s glory with YHWH’s glory. In bringing the ark and, therefore, the
throne of YHWH into Jerusalem, David was enacting the divine analog of
his own enthronement, and Michal points to this with her address to him
as ‘king of Israel’. But unlike YHWH whose glory remains hidden, David
uncovered his nakedness. Thus, Michal’s taunt is precisely directed at
David’s pretension to bring the divine glory into Jerusalem by the very
reversal of YHWH’s self-concealment. Her words highlight what might
be called David’s play as a form of carnivalization. I use this term in the
sense proposed by Michael Bakhtin in his book on Rabelais (Bakhtin
1984). Bakhtin speaks of the way that medieval and early modern popular
festivals, such as the ‘feast of fools’, uncrown the king and in his stead
present a mocking and often grotesque parody of royal authority in the
figure of the jester. David, in effect, has staged his own carnivalesque
‘uncrowning’. Michal’s words make this self-carnivalization apparent by
comparing the king’s glory to that of ‘the worthless fellows’ who expose
themselves. This is perhaps a reference to other participants in the pro-
cession whose social status is lower than that of the king and his retinue.
An interesting parallel to self-exposure as a sign of inversion of social
status is found in Herodotus’s Histories 6.129.1. The text describes a
marriage feast at which the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon had decided
to announce the marriage of his daughter to Hippocleides, the suitor
who had best appointed himself over the course of a year’s competition
against the flower of the aristocratic youth gathered at Sicyon from all
Greece. As the evening proceeded and Hippocleides became somewhat
inebriated, he called upon the flute girl to play for him so that he could
dance. His prospective father-in-law ‘watched the whole thing in scorn’.
As a final gesture, Hippocleides calls for a table to dance upon. Support-
ing himself with his head on the table, Hippocleides threw his legs into
the air and created various poses with them. Cleisthenes had restrained
himself up to this point, but now, ‘because of the dance and its shame-
lessness’, he addresses Hippocleides with the words, ‘You have danced
away your marriage’. Hippocleides’ retort, Herodotus says, became

proverbial: ‘It is of no concern (ou phrontis) to Hippocleides’. It is inter-
esting to note the structural similarities with the David and Michal
episode, with Michal in the role of Cleisthenes. Hippocleides’ insouciant
dismissal of his marriage prospects parallels David’s rejection of all
further marital ties with Michal, together with his determination to push
his self-abasement even further.
Self-exposure is the carnivalization of the subject’s pretensions to
glory and power. Indeed, we may take David’s apparently frontal nudity
to be the complete inversion of YHWH’s concealment of his glory.
Michal is therefore mocking David for seeking to associate the glory of
YHWH with his city and his house while debasing his own glory. Of
course, Michal also resents the fact that the king’s glory, which had only
been hers to see, is now shared with servant girls. But this sexual
jealousy should not be understood to be her sole motivation in making
the taunt.14
Further evidence for the ritual nature of Michal’s taunt comes from a
description of another ritual moment when the verbal root BI occurs.
Women who are said to be ‘playing’ (EHBI>) in 1 Sam. 18.7 come out
to greet the king (exactly as Michal does in this narrative) and seem to
taunt him (that is how Saul understands it) with their chant, ‘Saul has
killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands’. Seow believes that
the words of the women are not really abusive since ‘thousands’ and
‘myriads’ were, in Canaanite poetry, ‘not meant to be contrastive’ (1989:
94). This leads Seow to attribute Saul’s understanding of this verse as a
taunt to his ‘paranoia’. I would rather attribute Saul’s understanding of
the verse as a taunt to his awareness that the ritual context calls for mock-
ing speech and, although the hemistichs can be read as simple parallel-
ism, the poetics of the verse allows for reading the second hemistich as a
14. Rosenberg (1986) similarly argues that David’s self-exposure is not ‘simply
offensive to Michal because of the sexual impropriety she finds in it, but because of her
antipathy to David, and perhaps from her misgivings about the cultic innovation that is
occurring’ (pp. 117-18 [italics mine]). Rosenberg reads Michal’s taunt as a rebuke of
David’s effort to restore ‘the sense of king and temple that prevailed in the heyday of
pagan culture in the land’, where the king functioned as ‘the “gardener” of the divine
world and feeder of mankind’. I am claiming that Michal is doing precisely the opposite
of what Rosenberg suggests. Far from resisting the return of ‘king as source of fecundity’
ideology, she is taunting David for failing to uphold its ritual requirement in the Israelite
context of the concealment of divine and royal glory. It is David in 2 Sam. 6 who
undermines the ritual expectations of the mythological role of the king.
stepwise intensification of the first. The ambiguity of the verse (non-

contrastive parallelism vs. intensification) is what makes it playfully
abusive. If Michal is also a ‘player’ in the ritual procession of the ark
and, like the women in 1 Samuel 18, is coming out to meet the returning
warrior king, then we have further grounds to take her words as ritually
sanctioned mockery.
Our most significant source of information about ritually sanctioned
abusive speech derives from Greek sources. We know, as I mentioned
above, that abusive mockery in Greek rituals was part of a sexually
charged environment where laughter, obscenity, and, in certain cases, the
display of a ritual phallus, were used to elicit from the venerated deities,
usually Demeter and/or Dionysus, the blessings of fertility for the
community. In the ancient Near East, an important ritual in honor of the
goddess Pasht at Bubastis in Egypt is recorded by Herodotus (Histories
2.60.1) who describes a procession of boats along the Nile to the delta
city. During the procession, the boats would pull up at the bank near any
riverside town and the women would engage in ritual mockery of the
female inhabitants while others would dance or lift up their skirts and
reveal themselves. These Greek and Egyptian parallels offer evidence of
a broad pan-Mediterranean association of ritual mockery, dance, and
genital exposure (whether by the self-exposure of ritual participants or
the use of ritual objects) in the context of fertility cults. Significantly, we
have the testimony of Plato that similar ritual activities (dance and ‘play’
that, from the context, seems to have involved some form of mocking
speech) were associated with the initiation into the Korybantic Mysteries.
Plato calls the entire ritual the ‘enthronement’ of the initiant (Euthy-
demus 277d-e). The classicist Stephen Halliwell has suggested that an
enthronement scene lies behind the single most important reference to
ritual joking in the ancient world, namely, that found in the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter. In this text, Halliwell has pointed out that Iambe’s
joking mockery follows immediately upon Demeter’s acceptance of a
seat in the home of the king, Celeus, who will build Demeter a temple at
Eleusis and establish her Mysteries there. In other words, what the text
shows us is the close association of ritual mockery and divine enthrone-
ment (Halliwell 2002: 163).
Let us return to the narrative of the procession of the ark to Jerusalem
and summarize our analysis up to this point. The narrative, as I have
already said, should not be taken to provide an accurate representation of
the ritual or of the historical moment when the ark was installed in
Jerusalem. Rather, we should use the reconstructed ritual background in

order to understand the text’s message. Whatever the actual ritual may
have been, the narrative in 2 Samuel 6 has to do with the enthronement
of YHWH and his king, David. Their enthronement is represented as
essential to securing the blessings of fertility for corporate Israel.
Furthermore, the narrative shows us that in the case of this particular
enthronement ritual, expectations about the ‘proper’ behavior of the king
were overturned.15 This overturning of ritual propriety leads to the failure
of the house of David and Michal to receive the expected blessing that
was thought to be the consequence of the ritual. Michal’s taunt, ritually
sanctioned though it was, is the cause of her failure to receive the
blessing of fertility. In effect, Michal and David have exchanged ritual
roles. David seems to have been expected to play the serious role of
victorious king and Michal was to enact the role of a ‘player’ who
engaged in jesting mockery. David, however, assumed the role of a
jesting ‘player’, while Michal was cast in the role of a serious disparager
of the king’s performance.16
The misfiring of the ritual reverses the normal expectations, bringing
childlessness rather than reproductive blessing to Michal and David. But
this misfiring does not spell complete disaster for the ‘house of David’.
The very next chapter of 2 Samuel shows that YHWH will indeed bless
David’s house (7.29) with not only reproductive success, but with an
unending claim to the kingship of Israel. The question that we face, then,
is: How did David’s ritual impropriety secure blessing for himself?
David’s self-exposure, an apparent reversal of the self-concealment of
YHWH’s glory, is represented as a refusal by David to claim glory for
himself in the way that YHWH does. In other words, his apparently self-
glorying self-exposure is just what he says it is in his response to Michal,
15. I would like to reiterate that I am not claiming that this reflects historical reality
and that, in fact, the king was supposed to conceal his glory in imitation of YHWH’s self-
concealment. Rather, the narrative juxtaposes the self-revelation of David and YHWH’s
self-concealment in order to make a theological point. What this point is, I will spell out
in the following paragraphs.
16. Alp (2000: 54-61) offers a Hittite ritual text from the Old Hittite Period (1750–
1450 BCE) that provides an interesting parallel to David’s dance before YHWH. The ritual
took place before the king and queen and involved a naked juggler, naked cup bearer, and
naked dancer. An Alacahüyuk relief shows a naked individual, possibly a dancer, who is
thought to be ‘the person who replaced the king temporarily during the ritual’. Although I
am not suggesting that Hittite royal rituals lie behind the narrative in 2 Sam. 6, they do
offer comparative evidence of ritual nakedness and dance, and for the possible sub-
stitution of a lower class person for the king in the enactment of the naked dance.
namely, a form of self-debasement. Michal understands David’s debase-

ment to have been the result of the gaze of the slave girls, but David
insists that his debasement was in his own eyes. David is thus presented
as deliberately mocking his own phallic power. This self-mockery is the
inverse of Michal’s mockery of David for not gaining for himself what
she understands to be his royal glory by imitating YHWH’s self-conceal-
ing glory. Michal is therefore represented as assuming that YHWH’s
glory is associated with his phallic power. Michal’s theological mistake
explains not only her own failure to gain reproductive blessing from the
ritual but also helps us to understand David’s successful achievement of
the blessing. Let us therefore examine her taunt more closely in order to
tease out its theological assumptions in more detail.
Michal uses the opportunity for ritually sanctioned abuse to taunt
David for having gone too far in his role as leader of the ‘players’. If in
fact David’s assumption of the role of one of the common ‘players’ was
not ritually required, she may have a serious point to make about the
political inappropriateness of claiming YHWH’s glory for oneself and
treating one’s own glory as if it were the parody of YHWH’s and not its
earthly embodiment. And if, as seems quite likely given the emphasis
throughout the narrative on YHWH’s blessing of the house as site of
reproduction, David’s final act in this ritual was to ‘bless his home’
through a re-enactment of a hieros gamos with his queen, then Michal’s
taunt is also meant to suggest that David had in effect trespassed upon
the sanctity of their royal intimacy. Michal represents the ‘orthodox’
view of the ritual and the role of the king in it: the king’s glory is
YHWH’s glory and the reverence due to the latter is due also to the
former. David’s nakedness is no less tabooed than is YHWH’s.
David’s justification of his behavior directly responds to Michal’s cri-
tique. He claims that his revealing dance took place ‘before YHWH’—the
first words David utters—and therefore was not a debasement of his
glory. Allowing his nakedness to be seen by YHWH is a declaration of his
unique intimacy with YHWH. Also, he states that this apparent self-
debasement will not be the last or the most extreme. David does not
intend to compete with YHWH for glory, but precisely by refusing glory
David seeks to remain the chosen one of YHWH. David hints at this when
he speaks of YHWH’s selection of him from all his father’s house to be
ruler over Israel: David was, we are to understand, not the obvious choice.
The intimacy that Michal claimed only for herself was not promiscuously
shared with servant girls but with YHWH alone. David understands this
intimacy to be achieved only through self-lowering. David understands

Michal’s words only to reflect sexual jealousy and to have nothing to do
with her concern for the proper way that a king of Israel should link his
glory with that of YHWH. David ends his reply to Michal by taunting her
with the very word she used to taunt him, ‘get glory’. If servant girls saw
him as he revealed himself before YHWH, that is of no concern to David,
but now he will deliberately ‘get his glory’ from those girls. That is, they
will be permitted to see his nakedness in the intimacy of the sexual act,
which he will never again share with Michal. The narrative ends with the
report that Michal had no child until the day of her death.
David gains YHWH’s blessing precisely by overturning the ritual
‘play’ that aimed at identifying royal and divine glory. David refuses to
stand in the place of YHWH and enact a hieros gamos that would bring
reproductive blessing from YHWH for himself and his house. This entire
narrative gains its full force, I am arguing, only against the background
of ritual performances whose meaning is being refashioned in order to
offer a characterization of the basis of David’s kingship. David’s self-
revelation is precisely counterpoised with YHWH’s self-concealment.
David refuses the role of earthly embodiment of YHWH’s glory. His glory
is his lowliness in the eyes of others that makes possible his intimacy
with YHWH.
By setting David’s reception of YHWH’s blessing against the back-
ground of sexually charged fertility rituals that involved phallic display
(presumably of the ‘players’, and not of the king) preceding a hieros
gamos enacted by king and queen within the palace, the narrative is not
only conveying a message about the way David disrupts the traditional
role of the king as the embodiment of phallic power; it is also preparing
the reader to understand that the moment David uses his kingship as a
cover for sexual violence, he is exposing himself to the loss of his glory.
Thus, his violation of Bathsheba and the ensuing cover-up murder is
ultimately punished by David’s need to flee Jerusalem while his son
Absalom performs a parody of the royal enthronement hieros gamos by
having sex with his father’s harem ‘in the eyes of all Israel’ (2 Sam.
16.22). If we are permitted to use the phrase repeated throughout Leviti-
cus 18 and 20, Absalom has ‘revealed his father’s nakedness’.
I have argued that the narrative in 2 Samuel 6 stages a critique of the
veneration of divine phallic power as the source of reproductive blessing,
mediated to the community through the person of the king. I would like
to suggest that we may find another such critique in the Greek literary
tradition. The Greek parallel provides some valuable insights into the
nature of this religious ideology.
In the Greek world, the veneration of phallic power is exemplified
most clearly in the cult of Dionysus. The divinization of phallic power
may have its origin in fertility cults where a god’s sexual potency was
seen as indispensable to the fertility land and its people, although, to be
sure, a female deity may play an equally significant role. We may think,
for example, of the Greek Thesmophoria, a three-day autumn sowing
celebration dedicated to Demeter as the mourning mother of Persephone
and connected with the effort to insure a successful spring harvest.
Despite the prominence of the female goddesses, the sexual power of
Zeus, father of Persephone, and of Hades, her rapist/husband, defines in
large part the festival’s overarching context. The case of the Thesmopho-
ria allows us to see that when agriculture came to absorbed within the
wider urban economy and its associated male-dominated political hier-
archy, the divinization of phallic power served to legitimize the male
control of female reproductive power. In the Greek cults of Dionysus, the
divinization of phallic power reveals itself in a variety of ways, but, as in
the case of the Thesmophoria, the original linkage of such divinization to
fertility is less important than its role in sustaining the city’s male-
dominated social hierarchies.
Euripides’ Bacchae, a play about the introduction of the Dionysian
cult into Thebes, engages in a powerful critique of the traditional worship
of Dionysus, although it by no means is only critical in its representation
of Dionysus. Euripides’ play represents the precariousness of male-
dominated hierarchies in the destruction of Pentheus, king of Thebes, but
it also represents the ultimate ascendancy of Dionysus’s power over his
female worshippers. Whether it is rationally or morally justified to vener-
ate a deity such as Dionysus who manifests himself as both beneficent
and violent is a question at the heart of the Bacchae. What is more, the
play calls itself into question in so far as it is performed in an Athenian
festival dedicated to Dionysus. In Athens, it was during the Greater
Dionysia—almost certainly originally connected with a fertility cult—
that both tragic and comic performances were held. The festival began
with the display of the god’s phallus in a procession through the city.
Laughter induced by the ribald mockery of prominent citizens by mem-
bers of the entourage during this procession served both to challenge the
city’s social hierarchy and provide a space within which to control the
threatened violence underlying that challenge. Euripides’ Bacchae calls
into question the power of the festival to control social violence if it at

the same time is the site of the worship of a god who, with a smile, can
‘mock’ his enemy Perseus by dressing him in women’s clothes and
setting him up to be dismembered by his mother.
Euripides’ questioning of the cult of Dionysus reflects his critical
distance from the cultural norms of his day, partly the result of his debt
to the so-called Sophistic enlightenment. Certainly Euripides is calling
into question the idea that Pentheus’s phallic power—or that of any male
authority or male-dominated hierarchy—is an embodiment of Dionysus’s
divine power. But, unlike the Hebrew Bible, we are not offered a repre-
sentation of divine power as fundamentally moral. It is the hybris of
Pentheus that is punished and not his violence against the women wor-
shippers of Dionysus. When David is punished, it is because he has vio-
lated Bathsheba and murdered her husband, although we may understand
the source of this violation to be his hybristic assumption of the tradi-
tional trappings of royal ‘glory’ through sexual predation. Despite the
differences between the Euripidean and biblical critiques of the venera-
tion of phallic power, we may nonetheless recognize that both seek to
expose the dangers of a too-close identification of a male god’s phallic
power and that of a merely human ruler. We may understand David’s
play in 2 Samuel 6 as a form of deliberate self-abasement, the very thing
that Pentheus rejects until he is led by Dionysus to mock his own preten-
sions to phallic power by dressing in the costume of a female worshipper
of the god. For Pentheus, this self-abasement comes too late.
It may seem illogical to speak of YHWH as the object of veneration on
the basis of his phallic, procreative power, a theological position I am
claiming that the author of 2 Samuel 6 is attributing to Michal. How can
YHWH be so venerated if he is explicitly identified as consortless? With
whom will YHWH engage in the signal act that consummates the portrait
of a phallically potent deity? This is not the only issue confronting us in
attempting to understand the religious ideology represented in the taunt-
ing figure of Michal. The presence of a consort is not the only desideratum
for a religious ideology that valorizes divine phallic power. Reproductive
success for the male deity requires a divine family, and a genealogy for
the ruling deity.
If we take the Greek religious system, codified in Hesiod’s Theogony,
as representative of an ideology that vests a single male ruler, Zeus, with
authority based in part upon his monopoly over weapons of phallic
cosmic destructive power—the lightning bolt, but also the force of the
‘Hundred Handers’ whom Cronus had pushed back in Gaia’s womb—we

clearly see how this polytheistic theology is put into the service of
legitimizing male power, whether vested in a king or an aristocratic elite,
over a society’s reproductive resources, both material and cultural. In a
highly stratified urban culture, polytheism and the veneration of phallic
power are inextricably linked. If the narrative of 2 Samuel 6 carnivalizes
the pan-Mediterranean veneration of divine/royal phallic power, it can
show us how, more fundamentally, both Israelite monotheism and the
consortlessness of YHWH are central pieces of a religious critique of the
veneration of phallic power. If we understand Israelite monotheism to
arise, at least in part, from a critique of this aspect of the ideology of
kingship in the ancient Mediterranean, then perhaps we may view Michal
as a figure whose infertility—in contrast with the supra-natural fertility
of Sarah, for example—symbolizes the ‘withering away’ of the consort
function in the biblical representation of YHWH, especially in relation to
the sexually charged theme of the glory (5H3<) of YHWH. Unfortunately,
it is outside the scope of this study to argue on behalf of this larger claim
about the nature of Israelite monotheism, but I think it is possible to see
that 2 Samuel 6 constitutes a critical moment in the Hebrew Bible’s
deployment of a general critique of the worship of divine phallic potency.17
To conclude this discussion of the narrative of David’s play in 2 Sam-
uel 6, I hope to have shown that this text offers a utopian portrait of a
self-debasing king who, in his moments of religious clarity, refuses to
identify himself as the embodiment of YHWH’s phallic power. This king
carnivalizes the ritual associations of YHWH’s ‘glory’ as the source of
Israel’s corporate fertility and blessing. He is represented as making his
own royal nakedness the source of self-mocking ‘play’. If, as readers of
the biblical narrative in Genesis, we imagined that any revelation of
human nakedness exposed the ‘image of God’ to view, the narrative in
2 Samuel 6 shows us that as a form of self-humbling before YHWH, the
revelation of nakedness can be a way to show both one’s distance from
and proximity to YHWH’s glory. Far different is the exposure of the
nakedness of the conjugal ‘one flesh’ that David will perform when he
comes to occupy, in a sense, the place of Michal within the royal house,
gazing out upon another’s nakedness. Just as when Michal ‘despises’
17. As a first step in making such an argument about Israelite monotheism, I would
need to examine other biblical uses of the verbal root B54, especially in the narrative of
the annunciation of Isaac’s birth in Gen. 16. This examination is the subject of my current
work.
David, she distances herself from YHWH, so David’s sexual predation is

an allegory of his assault upon YHWH himself, or at least upon the
intimacy that had previously joined David and YHWH. His procession out
of Jerusalem (2 Sam. 16) during which he is cursed by Shimi is the
inversion of the ark procession, and the repeated use of the verb ==B
(‘curse’), in this passage is the ironic inversion of his use of the same
verb (in the niphal) in 2 Samuel 6 to describe his self-debasement. Poised
between his entrance into Jerusalem and his flight from it, David is
represented in 2 Samuel as epitomizing the existential challenge posed to
collective Israel in its relation to YHWH, namely, to gain the blessing of
reproductive success through the its self-humbling, through the
debasement of phallic power, and the veneration of a god of invisible
glory. YHWH’s exile from the house built to shelter his glory will be
brought on, as Ezekiel will admonish his listeners again and again, when
Israel ‘reveals her nakedness’, that is, turns towards the phallically potent
gods of the surrounding nations.
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versity Press).
Biale, David
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Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist
1984 Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
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Fertility Rituals and The 1 SM 6

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Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

Vol 31.1 (2006): 63-80

David’s Play: Fertility Rituals and the

Keywords: Bakhtin; Israelite monotheism; genital display; Greek religion; patriarchy

The narrative in 2 Samuel 6 describes the rituals and events surrounding

phallic power.1 I am not concerned to demonstrate the historical accuracy

When David hears that the house of Obed-Edom has experienced

From Seow’s collection of evidence, it seems clear that the narrative

of Obed-Edom to the blessing of the people and the blessing of the

away your marriage’. Hippocleides’ retort, Herodotus says, became

stepwise intensiﬁcation of the ﬁrst. The ambiguity of the verse (non-

Jerusalem. Rather, we should use the reconstructed ritual background in

namely, a form of self-debasement. Michal understands David’s debase-

intimacy to be achieved only through self-lowering. David understands

into question the power of the festival to control social violence if it at

‘Hundred Handers’ whom Cronus had pushed back in Gaia’s womb—we

David, she distances herself from YHWH, so David’s sexual predation is

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