Of Kings and Prophets – episode four
David goes hunting for an unusual dowry in ‘Beasts of the Reeds’.
Season 1, Episode 4 — ‘Beasts of the Reeds’
I Samuel 18
Synopsis. Achish kills hundreds of his own troops for deserting their posts after the death of Goliath. Saul gives David a public promotion, and David seizes the opportunity to ask for Michal’s hand in marriage rather than Merav’s. Saul, mindful of David’s popularity, agrees, but on the condition that David kill a hundred Philistines and bring back their foreskins as proof of his success. David and Joab hire some Hittites to help them. Rizpah tells the Philistines about David’s mission. Michal sends Jonathan to bring David back safely. Ishbaal talks to David’s brother and father to see if he can dig up some dirt on the young upstart. Saul, inspired by David’s love for Michal, tries to rekindle his relationship with Ahinoam. Achish finds David and tells him to take the foreskins from the recently executed deserters. David returns to Gibeah with more foreskins than Saul wanted, and is betrothed to Michal. Michal is happy, until Merav tells her privately that David had sex with their mother.
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Editing Samuel. This episode is primarily about David’s mission to get 100 Philistine foreskins as a bride price for Michal (I Samuel 18:20-27). The episode also covers David’s resistance to marrying Merav (I Samuel 18:17-19) and the beginnings of his very different relationships with Jonathan and the Philistine king Achish.
David says he cannot marry Merav because he comes from a family of no particular standing. That is also the reason the biblical David gave. The text says Saul went on to give Merav to someone named Adriel (I Samuel 18:19), though that is not depicted here, at least not yet. (Merav and Adriel went on to have five sons who were all executed by the Gibeonites to atone for an atrocity of Saul’s after David become king—but that is beyond the scope of this series. The details are in II Samuel 21:1-9.)
David is willing to kill 100 Philistines to pay the bride price for Michal, but in the end he gets the foreskins from a bunch of bodies that are already dead, and he says he and his men lost count after they had gathered 150 foreskins. The biblical David and his men killed the Philistines themselves and gave Saul 200 foreskins—precisely double the requirement—and they “counted out the full number” (I Samuel 18:27).
Jonathan takes a more positive view of David than Ishbaal does, but he doesn’t really start to befriend David until after Michal sends him to help David. The biblical Jonathan “became one in spirit with David” almost immediately after David defeated Goliath—possibly even before David fell in love with Michal—and he gave David his own clothes and weapons as part of a covenant with David (I Samuel 18:1-4).
Achish makes a secret deal with David, which may seem strange given that David inflicted one of the greatest defeats ever on Achish and his armies just one episode ago—but the biblical David did eventually seek refuge with Achish when he was hiding from Saul, and Achish gave it to him and even counted on his support, though this sometimes bothered the other Philistines (I Samuel 21:10-15; 27-28:2; 29).
David goes to a Hittite bar to hire some mercenaries. I don’t believe any of the Hittites in this episode are named, but the Bible does talk about Hittites who worked for David, both before and after he became king. They included Ahimelek (I Samuel 26:6) and, most famously, Uriah, the original husband of Bathsheba (II Samuel 11).1
David doesn’t want to kill women and children, or civilians in general, when he goes hunting for Philistine foreskins, and one of the Hittites draws an explicit contrast between David’s approach and that of Saul, who killed Amalekites of all sorts—men, women, and children—just a few episodes ago. The biblical David was more ruthless than the David of this episode. When he was hiding with Achish, he attacked other communities while pretending to attack the Israelites, and he killed men and women alike so that there would be no survivors who could tell the Philistines what David was really doing (I Samuel 27:8-12). After David became king, he also defeated the Moabites and slaughtered precisely two thirds of them, more or less at random, with the help of a measuring rope; it is not clear if David was slaughtering only Moabite soldiers or members of the Moabite population as a whole (II Samuel 8:2).
When Ishbaal grumbles that David was a shepherd until recently, Jonathan replies that their father used to be a farmer (I Samuel 11:5). Saul already mentioned his past as a farmer when he spoke to David about how he became king, in Episode 2.
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Other scriptures. The episode’s title comes from Psalm 68:30.
Saul remembers how children used to pretend they were Samson, slaying Philistines with the jawbone of an ass (Judges 15:14-17). Now he says they are playing with slings, like David—and when David says he cannot afford to pay the regular bride price for one of Saul’s daughters, Saul says he’ll go easy on David and ask him to kill only a hundred Philistines, and not a thousand like Samson did with the jawbone.
When the Hittites talk about hunting rabbits for food, Joab says the Israelites can’t eat rabbit because it has no hoof (Leviticus 11:6, Deuteronomy 14:7).
Joab is surprised to learn that the Edomites are circumcised. He shouldn’t be, though. The Edomites were descendants of Esau (Genesis 36), and Esau was a grandson of Abraham, the patriarch who received the covenant of circumcision and passed it on to all of his descendants (Genesis 17). Jeremiah 9:26 includes Edom in a list of nations—including Israel—that were circumcised “only in the flesh” but not “in heart”.
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Fictitious elements. Merav taunts both her mother and her sister with the fact that she knows about David’s tryst with Ahinoam, which happened in Episode 2.
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Philistine religion. Zaphra says the Philistine god Dagon has warned the Philistines to be wary of David. Exactly how he has warned them is not specified.
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The supernatural. Zaphra’s message from Dagon might be supernatural in origin, or it might not. We don’t know how she received it or what form it took.
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Geography. Rizpah goes all the way to Gath to tell Achish about David’s mission to kill Philistines. Google Maps says it would take almost 12 hours to walk from Gibeah to Gath, so we can assume she spent at least one day getting there and one day getting back. Does anyone at Saul’s palace notice that she went missing for so long?
Achish captures David and makes a deal with him while David’s group is staking out a trade route near Beth Shemesh, a city that is on the route from Gibeah to Gath. Achish says David is “miles beyond your borders in the heart of an enemy land”, but the one reference to Beth Shemesh in this part of the Bible indicates that it was Israelite territory, though it was close to the Philistine border: When the Philistines sent the Ark of the Covenant back to Israel on a cart, Beth Shemesh was the first Israelite town it came to (I Samuel 6).2 Prior to that, Beth Shemesh was one of the 13 cities throughout Israel that had been set aside for the Levites (Joshua 21:16).
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Timeline. Achish says he and Saul have been at war with one another for 27 years. This raises an interesting question: How long was Saul king over Israel? No one really knows. I Samuel 13:1 says Saul was king for only two years, but most scholars assume a digit is missing and that the verse should say twenty-two years or something like that. In the New Testament, Paul says King Saul ruled for 40 years (Acts 13:21), but many scholars assume that that’s a round number meant to fill a gap in the historical record. (The number 40 also symbolizes the significance of Saul’s reign. Can it be coincidence that Saul, David, and Solomon—the three kings who ruled over the united Israelites—are all said to have reigned for exactly 40 years each?)3
Saul says he married Ahinoam after he had already become king—which means all of their children were born after Saul became king. For what it’s worth, II Samuel 2:10 says Ishbaal, who may have been Saul’s youngest child (note the name order in I Chronicles 8:33, 9:39), was 40 years old when Saul died. That could be just another round number too, but if we take it literally, and we assume that Saul did not reign for more than 40 years, and we assume that Ishbaal was the youngest of Saul’s children, then we would have to conclude that all of Saul’s children were conceived before he was king, and most (if not all) of them were born before he was king, too—in which case the biblical Saul must have married Ahinoam before he became king. (But if Ishbaal was actually less than 40 years old when Saul died, then it’s possible that he and Saul’s other children were born after Saul became king. Possible.)
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Women. The female characters drive a lot of the action in this episode. Rizpah tells Achish and Lahmi about David’s mission to kill a hundred Philistines. Zaphra advises Achish on how to use the information that Rizpah has brought them. Michal sends Jonathan to retrieve David, and thus facilitates the friendship between them.
Merav remains as manipulative as ever. When it looks like she will be marrying David, she asks her mother what sort of clothes her mother’s former lover would like her to wear. She tells Michal that men are supposed to die for princesses like them. And when David returns victorious and his betrothal to Michal is confirmed, Merav finally lets Michal know that she once overheard David having sex with their mother.
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Sex and/or nudity. At the beginning, Ahinoam walks into Saul’s chamber and finds him sleeping with his concubines. By the end, Saul has summoned Ahinoam in a bid to rekindle their romance—and he apparently does this because David’s love for Michal reminds him of what it was like to be young and in love with Ahinoam.
Michal, for her part, tells David to be “patient”, and she seems to want to wait until they are married before they have sex. When Michal summoned David to the palace in Episode 2, David assumed she wanted to have sex with him—but since he was intercepted by Ahinoam, we never learned what Michal was planning, exactly.
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Violence. The episode begins with a dream sequence in which David is hanged from the palace’s balcony. This is the second consecutive episode in which David visualizes his own death (following his “death” at the hands of Goliath in Episode 3).
Achish executes hundreds of Philistine deserters for their cowardice in Episode 3. He ends up letting David take the foreskins he’s looking for from these bodies.
David and his mercenaries kill a dozen Edomites during a skirmish.
Ishbaal tells Eliab to cut out the tongue of a young Bethlehemite who spoke critically of Saul, and Eliab is about to obey the order when Ishbaal changes his mind.
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God talk. Curiously, the only real god-talk in this episode comes from the Philistine queen Zaphra, who says the Philistine god Dagon has warned them to be wary of David.
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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
Interestingly, the main Hittite in this episode is of clearly African descent. There were at least two ancient people-groups that are now known as “Hittite”: the Anatolian empire that lasted until the 12th century BC, and a Canaanite tribe that is mentioned many times throughout the Old Testament. Scholars debate whether these were the same ethnic group or two ethnic groups with similar names. It seems unlikely that the Anatolian Hittites, who lived in what is now Turkey, would have been African, but the biblical Hittites are linked to Canaan, the son of Ham (Genesis 10:6-20), and Ham is generally associated with Africa.
Beth Shemesh is where seventy Israelites looked inside the Ark of the Covenant and were immediately struck dead, like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark (I Samuel 6:19).
David’s 40 years come from II Samuel 5:4 etc., Solomon’s from I Kings 11:42 etc.