God knows how long

I am content in knowing that You are in complete control of today, tomorrow, and all the days of my life. Back To Top. If God is using my blog as a blessing in your life, would you consider making a donation to help pay for monthly expenses? I promise to keep your email safe. Word Blessings has been hosted by HostGator for several years. Their hosting is very reliable and a great value. So, we became an affiliate. Contact Us Audio Bible Teaching. When I Jan write blog posts, I send out an email to let people know.

I invite you to subscribe to my mailing list. You can always un-subscribe. Email Address. We either obey God by faith… or walk away. Help Support Word Blessings If God is using my blog as a blessing in your life, would you consider making a donation to help pay for monthly expenses? Subscribe to Word Blessings. David's self-congratulatory tone is undermined by his comparing himself not to the wise owl himself but to its excrement and to the vanity of that pea-brained fowl which is the peacock.

Finally, the de-. The most essential questioning in David's long story concerns the absence of God. Early in the narrative, David announces that he and God are no longer on speaking terms, and that he at any rate has no intention of renewing the acquaintance without an apology from the Almighty for faults committed against him.

It will gradually emerge that the terminating of relations may not entirely have been David's idea. He complains to the youthful David, who has already been secretly anointed his successor, that God no longer answers his requests for advice.

And the troubled youngster suggests to his elder a possibility that has been disturbing him for some time :. Who else but God could have masterminded a presence so pervasive and at the same time so unsatisfactory? But he, too, admits that the advice he received generally conformed to the advice tfiat he wanted to get, recognizing that «it often seemed I was talking to mysflf.

Of all the passionate questions —. Just as David's narration relentlessly investigates the dynamic, often uneasy, relationship between Ur-text and text, his story treats a network of father-son bonds and betrayals and the brother-to-brother difficulties that derive from them that are the experiential counterpart of the relationship between discursive sources and their derivations.

Conflict characterizes these family relations. David as a boy was the butt of his elder brothers' unkindnesses the comparison with Joseph is implicit ; the sons of his sisters, Joab and Amasa, will also oppose each other unto death; Saul will clash with his heir Jonathan whom he will attempt to put to death, just as he will try to murder his adoptive son David; Amnon will be destroyed by Absalom who will attempt to overthrow his father; Solomon will slay Adonijah who, like himself, will be eager to take his father's place.

David, as he reviews or pre-views, for the execution of Adonijah by Solomon is outside his narrative's temporal scope this lamentable state of things, ponders the betrayals inherent in family relations, in love itself. The family is the locus of the hopeless disharmony that on a global scale breeds social and political strife.

David's narrative emphasizes, not the cultural glories of his reign, but the steady war-making which ironically is described in Yiddishified English — undercutting the post-Diaspora self-image of meekness assimilated by many of his people : «So off I went with my men to Keilah and fought with the Philistines, and hocked and shlugged them and aggravated them too Both men's relations to one another in society and in the family are extensions of the relationship to God.

Alone, at the end of his life, with «nothing [to leave] behind me but my children and my kingdom, » p. This parallel between David and Saul is carefully built throughout. The older David will have to face the revolt of his beloved Absalom. During the revolt, David's resentment is fixed not on his son, whose perfidy is too enormous and yet too natural to be assimilated, but on his nephew Joab.

Joab, one of Heller's most marvellous political opportunists — his motto is «Always do unto others what is best for you » — is proof that loyalty is as suspicious a posture as its opposite. Crazy as Saul in his deranged fixations about me, I was Crazy as Saul, I eyed him narrowly Crazy as Saul I have wished Joab dead a thousand times.

This parallel becomes even more explicit in the vision that closes the novel, during which the aged David, as night closes in on him, sees in the shadows of his room the «eager, bright-eyed» youth that he once was, about to play on his eight-stringed lyre, just as the young David had played to soothe the anguish of Saul. David is thrilled at the sight and sound of this youthful enchanter, just as Saul had been.

And then, like Saul, he is suddenly taken by the urgent wish to destroy him. What goes on in families that they perpetrate such heartless deeds upon each other? God knows I've been guilty of much in my time, but I've never been guilty of anything like that. David is more sincere here than accurate — the heaviest guilts being those impossible to recognize.

Naturally, his most rabid dislike is reserved for the. Interestingly, David's attacks on this most ploddingly ambitious of his numerous progeny include the claim that Solomon has unjustly received credit for David's compositions, the fear of usurpation by the Word haunting his last days far more than any loss of earthly power. Whenever Solomon makes an unwelcome visit to his father's chamber, he is depicted carrying the clay tablets on which he laboriously inscribes the sayings that drop from the royal lips the better, David lets it be understood, to plagiarize them later.

Had Saul been just a bit more fatherly to me I would have worshipped him as a God. Had God ever been the least bit paternal, I might have loved him like a father, p. But, alas, neither fulfilled his potential — God, after all, is only human, and one cannot expect miracles of him. My father the king was mad. My Lord my God was also mad.

And when I realized that, I began to weep. My heart was broken, and I did not care. What choice is left to sons but to revolt? To steal from their fathers words, as the clumsy but effective Solomon does, and then to turn them to their own purposes, and with them to establish through usurpation, their place in the world? What greater homage is there than a revolt like this which at once consecrates its object and constitutes an act of love?

This is what the sweet psalmist does throughout his narration — using the Ur-text and all the texts it has nurtured and informed, to push at the limitations of the text and to renew it by using it against itself. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be indicated in the text. But he knoweth not that the dead are there ; and that her guests are in the depths of hell. Oh, solitude! I, ed. John D. James Nagel Boston : G. God's gift.

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