We’ve spent the last two sessions analyzing Naval’s role in this story; it’s time to turn our attention to the other half of this power couple: Avigail.
It’s the longest speech by a woman to another person in תנ״ך, and it’s a beautiful sentiment about faith in הקב״ה and David, but the last line is slightly jarring: it sounds like Avigail is flirting with David, the man who is threatening to kill her husband. And then the last lines make it worse:
Rabbi Hayyim Angel compares the story of Avigail to petting a porcupine. Going from front to back is smooth, even pleasant. Going from back to front gets you a palmful of painful quills. The story in situ is, as we discussed last time, a tale of near-disaster but ultimate redemption for David, though his rapid marriage to Avigail seems a little odd. Reading it with our knowledge of what is yet to come—the story of Bat Sheva—makes reading this story painful. As Rav Medan says, מהו
החיפזון בנישואי אביגיל לדוד עוד בטרם יבש דמו של נבל בעלה? The whole interaction of David and Avigail seems, כביכול, sordid.
Rabbi Angel was kind enough to give me his source sheet for that shiur, and much of what I am going to say is inspired by that shiur.
Now חז״ל certainly saw the foreshadowing here of the incident of Bat Sheva:
And the idea that there was a physical attraction between David and Avigail and that they actually were “flirting”, is not just in my mind, and is not a “modern”, literalist interpretation, but is supported by חז״ל. The Midrash notes a subtle criticism of Avigail in our text:
And Ibn Kaspi sees a similar criticism of David later on:
(We will deal with the difference in the names of David’s son later). While both שמואל and דברי הימים are words of קדושה, there is a difference between ספרי נביא and ספרי כתובים. When there is a discordance between שמואל and דברי הימים (and there are many such discordances) I will assume that דברי הימים is meant to be read literally, that its פשט is closer to the משמעות, while שמואל is meant to be more poetic.
The bulk of what we know of Avigail is from the Gemara in מגילה:
The Maharasha explains this to mean not that she intentionally “showed some leg”, but that when she started her journey, David sensed her beauty and was attracted to her from so far away.
The Midrash also says the attraction was on David’s part, and much more direct:
Chekhov’s Beauty Mark
And the text itself certainly indicates that there was a physical attraction. Avigail is called יפת תאר, just as David is called (שמואל א טז:יב) טוב ראי. And no one in תנ״ך is called “good looking” without there being consequences, negative consequences. Reading about Avigail’s beauty makes us suspect that it will cause some unpleasantness.
מצא אשה מצא טוב
In one sense, this is foreshadowing David’s weakness with women that we will see in the Bat Sheva incident (and we will explore further when we deal with the mystery of Avshalom’s mother). But what are we to make of Avigal’s role? She is one of the seven נביאות in תנ״ך:
And in fact, she is one of the three prophets who give מוסר to David:
And Avigail is held up as the paragon of wifely virtue:
The Rema miPano understands the midrashim about Avigail’s “exposing her thigh” as a metaphor for her prophecy:
Finding Your באַשערט
I would go back to a previous “questionable” marriage to try to understand what is going on here:
חז״ל saw in this ה׳'s long-range plan for the Jewish people:
The attraction of Yehuda and Tamar is seen as divinely mandated, brought by the מלאך הממונה על התאוה. Yehuda was destined to be the ancestor of the kings of Israel. While it “should” have happened differently, with Tamar married to one of his children, ה׳ manipulated the situation to force the two of them together.
Similarly, David and Avigail were destined to come together:
And this physical attraction was a reflection of that destiny. But Avigail, as the נביא, reminds David that even something divinely inspired and biologically mandated can be wrong; if ה׳ wants it to work out it will. We do not say, with Isaac Asimov, “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” And it does work out: we have the only explicit miracle that ה׳ performs on behalf of David:
The Good Son
So what happens with this divinely mandated union? We never find out much. We only know they have one son, called כִלְאָב in שמואל and דניאל in דברי הימים. As we said before, I would take the version in שמואל as poetic: his name was דניאל but the נביא calls him כִלְאָב. Why?
Rav Medan hypothesizes that he is named after נבל הכלבי, that this son is a sort of יבום to continue the name of Naval’s family, descended from Caleb (he also brings up the possibility that this son is actually Naval’s, adopted by David). The Midrash takes the name homiletically:
And what happens with this son? Strikingly, nothing. We see David’s other sons, אמנן, אבשלום, then אדניה involved in the intrigue of the royal succession. Only דניאל never tries to be king. The gemara says he died without sin:
And Rav Medan hypothesizes that this disqualified him from being king:
He was too good to be a good king. So what was the purpose of the marriage of Avigail and David? I think it was for her to be his נביא. She was the one to warn him about the danger he was facing, in the test that would destroy his kingship: אמרה לו: לא תהיה זאת לך לפוקה, זאת—מכלל דאיכא אחריתי, ומאי ניהו, מעשה דבת שבע. The marriage gave force to that prophecy, like other such “performance art”:
Even closer to our story is the story of הושע:
I think, though I have to admit I have not seen this elsewhere, that this is why Avigail “had” to marry David. This was the actualization, the פועל דמיון, of the נבואה of בת שבע.
Tempting Fate
And perhaps this is why they name him דניאל; G-d shall judge me׃ The gemara tells us some of the backstory to the Bat Sheva incident;
And we all know he fails the test. Why? I think it is because he drew the wrong conclusion from the Avigail incident. David learned that he had to have faith in ה׳, that when something was meant to happen he did not need to sin to make it happen. ויגף ה׳ את נבל was a lesson that he took to heart:
But I think he took it too far. He took it for granted that ה׳ would take care of things, in the way that David wanted. I think David saw Bat Sheva on that fateful night, felt the feelings that he had previously felt for Avigail, and knew what had to happen. Bat Sheva was destined for him, and David was feeling the מלאך הממונה על התאוה. I think there was no doubt in his mind that when he took her, ה׳ would take care of her “former” husband, that he would soon get the news that Uriah had fallen in battle, just like ויגף ה׳ את נבל, so too would it be written ויגף ה׳ את אוריה.
I don’t have any proof of this idea, but I think it’s hinted in נתן's reproach of David:
It’s hard to understand the order and the repetition in this pasuk, but I would say: בזית את דבר ה׳ by not listening to Avigail, then את אוריה החתי הכית בחרב in your mind; you considered him dead so את אשתו לקחת, and then, when it turned out Uriah was alive, אתו הרגת בחרב בני עמון.