Of Kings and Prophets – episode eight
Of Kings and Prophets – episode eight
David and Achish plan to double-cross each other, while the Philistines gear up for the ultimate battle against Saul's army, in 'Broken Teeth of the Ungodly'.
Season 1, Episode 8 — ‘Broken Teeth of the Ungodly’
I Samuel 23, 27-29
Synopsis. War is brewing. Achish plans to attack Israel, destroy the house of Saul, and install David as his puppet king. David tells his friends he is only playing along with Achish so that he can leak the Philistine battle plans to Saul. Merav, under the influence of the Witch of Endor’s hallucinogens, tells Saul her dead lover Mattiyahu appeared to her in a vision and told her the Philistines are coming and only David can stop them. Ahinoam discovers an idol in Merav’s room and confronts the Witch of Endor, who reveals that she knows Ahinoam is pregnant with David’s child. Rizpah pays another visit to Gath, and David gives her a couple of messages to take back to Jonathan and Michal. David meets Jonathan and says he plans to sabotage the Philistines’ siege machines. Saul asks the Witch of Endor for help, and she gives him a potion to drink. Lahmi tells Achish he and his men won’t fight alongside David’s men, and Achish replies that he never intended to let David join the actual battle.
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Editing Samuel. This episode covers David’s secret meeting with Jonathan (I Samuel 23:15-18), David and his men moving to Gath (I Samuel 27:1-4), Achish’s aborted effort to make David and his men part of the Philistine fighting force (I Samuel 28:1-2, 29:1-7), and Saul’s visit to the Witch of Endor (I Samuel 28:3-8).
David meets Jonathan to warn him about the looming Philistine attack, and to reveal that he plans to betray the Philistines. The biblical David had at least three secret meetings with Jonathan. The two best-known meetings took place right after David fled Saul’s palace, when David and Jonathan arranged a code, involving archery, by which Jonathan could let David know if it was safe to return (I Samuel 20:1-23, 35-42). But the meeting in this episode more closely resembles the third meeting, when Jonathan met David after David had fled Keilah (I Samuel 23:15-18).
David and his men move to the Philistine city of Gath, and David, to prove his loyalty to Achish, tricks Achish into thinking he killed his brother Eliab. The biblical David and his men moved to Gath (I Samuel 27:1-4), but they did not stay there; instead, they asked Achish to let them live in one of the country towns—and then they began raiding other communities and destroying them completely, so that they could trick Achish into thinking they were raiding their fellow Israelites (I Samuel 27:5-12).
Achish says he wants to install David as a puppet king in Israel, and he says he wants David’s men to join the Philistines in their war against Saul—but when Lahmi says his men won’t fight alongside the Israelites, Achish says he never intended to let David join the actual battle. The biblical Achish expected David and his men to join his fighting force—he even said he wanted David to be his personal bodyguard for life (I Samuel 28:1-2)—but he backed down and sent David and his men back to their town when the other Philistine leaders said they did not trust David (I Samuel 29:1-7).
Saul visits the Witch of Endor at her shop in Gibeah, and he goes alone while wearing a cloak of some sort, perhaps to avoid being recognized outside the shop, though he doesn’t hide his identity from the Witch at all. The biblical Saul disguised himself and visited the Witch of Endor with two other men in a town called, well, Endor, and he did this while his army was camped near Gilboa, and the Witch did not recognize him until after she had summoned the spirit of Samuel for him (I Samuel 28:4-12).
Saul says he outlawed witchcraft “because it is the Law of Moses”. The biblical Saul did indeed expel “mediums and spiritists” from the land (I Samuel 28:3, 9).
Jarri shrugs off the possible death of Eliab by saying to David, “You have other brothers, right?” The biblical David had six or seven brothers, depending on the text (I Chronicles 2:15 says six, I Samuel 16:10-11 and 17:12 say seven). The series has alluded to the other brothers before, but Eliab is the only one we’ve seen.
David says nobody has ever led a successful siege against a walled, elevated city, and Achish says a sustained siege will work because the people will run out of water, which runs downhill away from the city. This is interesting, as the biblical David famously captured Jerusalem, after becoming king of all the Israelites, when Joab led his men up a water shaft in that city (II Samuel 5:6-8; cf I Chronicles 11:4-6).
The men of Judah refuse to fight alongside the Israelites because Jonathan killed the Judean elder Eitan. The uneasy relationship between Judah and the rest of the Israelite tribes is a recurring theme in the biblical text. Even when Saul led the united kingdom, it is sometimes described as if it were two separate entities, “Israel and Judah” (I Samuel 17:52, 18:16); and after Saul died, David became king of Judah and Ishbaal became king of Israel, and there was war between them for two years (II Samuel 2-4). David became king of all Israel after Ishbaal died, but then the kingdom split in two again after David’s son Solomon died (I Kings 12, II Chronicles 10).
David promises Rizpah vengeance against the Edomites who murdered her family. The biblical David did crush the Edomites after becoming king of Israel—killing 18,000 and making the rest his subjects (II Samuel 8:13-14; cf I Chronicles 18:12-13)—but he also authorized the execution of Rizpah’s children (and Merav’s!) to save Israel from a curse that had fallen on Israel because of Saul (II Samuel 21:1-14).
Saul tells Merav he is afraid of what’s to come, and Ahinoam finds him casting lots in the palace as he prepares for the coming battle. The biblical Saul was filled with terror when he saw the Philistine army on the battlefield, and God did not answer his calls for guidance, whether “by dreams or Urim or prophets” (I Samuel 28:5-6).
Ahinoam is pregnant with David’s child, which would seem to be David’s first child. If this show is following the theory that the biblical David was married to the same Ahinoam that Saul was married to (see my notes on Episode 2), then her pregnancy fits with the tradition that David’s Ahinoam was the mother of his eldest son, Amnon (II Samuel 3:2, I Chronicles 3:1)—assuming, of course, that the Ahinoam of this series carries the child to term and does not “get rid of it” as Ishbaal demands.
David says he has “only about 500” men at his command. The biblical David had 600 men when he was hiding from Saul (I Samuel 23:13, 25:13, 27:2, 30:9-10).
David promises Jonathan privately that he won’t raise a sword against Saul, and he says he plans to betray the Philistines when they march against the Israelites. The biblical David made a show of sparing Saul’s life on two occasions when he had the opportunity to ambush Saul (I Samuel 24, 26), but it’s not clear what he planned to do when Achish told him to join the Philistines in fighting the Israelites.
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Other scriptures. The episode’s title comes from Psalm 3:7.
Saul says he outlawed witchcraft “because it is the Law of Moses”. The Law of Moses condemns witches, mediums, spiritists, sorcerers, and so on in a number of passages (Leviticus 19:26, 31; 20:6; Deuteronomy 18:9-13), and it specifies the death penalty for sorcerers and the like in Exodus 22:18 and Leviticus 20:27.
Ahinoam finds an idol of the Canaanite goddess Asherah in Merav’s room. Asherah worship is not mentioned in the biblical accounts of Saul or David’s reigns, but it is condemned several times in the Law of Moses (Exodus 34:13; Deuteronomy 7:5, 12:3, 16:21), and it’s a recurring problem in the book of Judges, before Saul’s reign (Judges 3:7, 6:25-32) … and then it isn’t mentioned again until the divided kingdom, after the reigns of David and Solomon (starting with I Kings 14:14-16, 22-24).1
At the “burial” for Eliab, David prays: “In your honour, brother, may Elohim smite our enemies. For you, we will shatter the teeth of the ungodly. We’ll turn their bones to dust. May Elohim bless our people in your name.” This prayer is not taken from any specific passage, but there are references to shattered teeth in two of the biblical David’s psalms, one of which—the one that gives this episode its title—he wrote while fleeing his son Absalom (Psalm 3:7; cf Psalm 58:3-6, II Samuel 15-18). The book of Job also talks about smashing the teeth of the wicked (Job 29:17; cf Job 4:7-10).
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Fictitious elements. There is a lot of scheming here, beyond what any of these characters do in the biblical text.
In the text, David goes to Achish to hide from Saul, and Achish expects David to help him fight Saul, and that’s that. But in this episode, both David and Achish have more complicated plans in mind: David wants to get close enough to Achish to learn the Philistine battle plans and get them back to Saul, while Achish tells Lahmi he never intended to let David do any actual fighting on the battlefield. Also, Achish tells David to kill Eliab to prove his loyalty, and David seizes the opportunity by pretending to kill Eliab so that Eliab can go back to Keilah and await David’s orders.
Achish unveils a new “long-range siege machine” that can shoot a spiked hook through a city’s wooden gate and pull it down.
The assassination of Merav’s lover Mattiyahu at the beginning of the series continues to hang over everything else. Merav has visions of him, while Ishbaal learns that Mattiyahu died because Rizpah was spying on the Israelites for Achish.
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The supernatural. There is some ambiguity around the kind of “magic” performed by the Witch of Endor. For starters, it is unclear if Merav is really being visited by the spirit of her dead lover Mattiyahu, or if she is merely hallucinating him while under the influence of the Witch’s concoctions. (Mattiyahu seems to have accurate information about the looming Philistine attack, but is it really information that Merav couldn’t have picked up from somewhere else?) Also, at first it seems that the Witch might have learned about Ahinoam’s pregnancy by supernatural means, but it turns out she heard about it from Rizpah, who heard about it from servants in the palace who were getting medicines for Ahinoam’s morning sickness.
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Geography. Rizpah says she’s going to Beersheva to visit relatives when she’s really going to Gath to meet the Philistines, and when she gets back, Ishbaal says she’s been gone too long because Beersheva is “barely four hours away”. But Google Maps says Beersheva is closer to 20 hours’ walk from Gibeah, whereas Gath is only about 12 hours’ walk from Gibeah. So, not only does Ishbaal seriously underestimate how long it takes to get to Beersheva, it would seem that going to Gath should have taken less time, not more.
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Timeline. It’s not clear exactly how much time has passed since David and Ahinoam had sex (in Episode 2). But we know that at least 40 days passed after that before David fought Goliath (in Episode 3), and that three weeks passed between David’s wedding to Michal and the murder of the priests in Nob (in Episode 6). So the sex between David and Ahinoam took place at least two months ago, which means it makes sense for Ahinoam to be feeling morning sickness ’round about now.
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Women. Ahinoam is pregnant. The servants told Rizpah about the pregnancy, and Rizpah told the Witch of Endor. It is Merav, rather than Saul’s male attendants, who puts him in touch with the Witch of Endor. David gets Rizpah to take a couple of messages from Gath back to the royal palace in Gibeah.
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Sex and/or nudity. Ishbaal has sex with Rizpah. Merav walks around the palace naked while she is under the influence of the Witch of Endor’s hallucinogens.
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Violence. David pretends to kill Eliab with his sling. The royal parents slap their children: Saul slaps Merav, and Ahinoam slaps Ishbaal. Achish shows off his new war machine, which can penetrate wooden gates and pull them down.
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God talk. Ahinoam finds an idol of the Canaanite goddess Asherah in Merav’s room. David says he will pray to Elohim to watch over Rizpah, and she says she can take care of herself. Jonathan tells Ishbaal the victory David brought the Israelites by killing Goliath wasn’t “luck”, and “if you don’t see that by now, you’re blind.”
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Miscellaneous. Ahinoam says Merav is “on a crusade.” This feels a bit anachronistic, as the word “crusade” originated in the Middle Ages as a word for military campaigns that were waged by Christians in the name of the cross (crux in Latin). This series takes place over a thousand years before Christianity existed, and come to that, it takes place centuries before the first known crucifixion of any sort.
Rizpah is impressed that David, a mere shepherd, can write. It’s not clear how David planned to get his messages to Jonathan and Michal before he learned that Rizpah is a spy who makes regular visits to Gath. Meanwhile, Ishbaal asks if Rizpah can read; it might not be a skill most concubines possess, but Rizpah is a former princess, so it’s not impossible that reading and writing were part of her education.
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Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine | scripture index
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TV show recaps:
Prophet Joseph | The Bible | A.D. The Bible Continues | The Chosen
Movie scene guides:
Risen | The Young Messiah | Paul, Apostle of Christ | Mary Magdalene
The different but similarly-named goddess Ashtoreth is mentioned twice during Saul’s reign, but is never associated with Israelite worship during his reign: in I Samuel 12:9-11, the prophet Samuel talks about how the Israelites worshiped Ashtoreth during the time of the Judges before Saul’s reign; and in I Samuel 31:10, the Philistines put Saul’s armour in the temple of the Ashtoreths after he dies on the battlefield. Ashtoreth isn’t mentioned again in the text until Solomon worships her a couple generations later (I Kings 11:5).