IIC 41: Rewind: Trauma and Shame in King David’s Childhood

Explore King David’s difficult childhood in a way you have never seen or felt before.  Dr. Peter Malinoski also leads you through an experiential listening exercise to help you understand yourself and others better.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up the natural foundations for this Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving, to carrying out the two great commandments that our Lord gave us. And this is episode 41. It’s released on November 9th, 2020. Thank you again for being here with me. This is our fifth episode in our series on shame, and it is titled Rewind: Trauma and Shame in King David’s Childhood. You know, we cover the really difficult topics in this podcast. We go to the really challenging places that other podcasts are unwilling or unable to go because we have to, because people are caught in those places and they are hurting because people are trapped and people are in danger and they are in peril. That’s why we go there. We need to reach out to them. And you know what? We are those people too.

[00:01:56] We have parts of us that are trapped in bad places, places we don’t understand, places we are afraid of, places that we don’t want to go by ourselves all alone. But together, each of us can understand much more of what’s going on within us in our unconscious. Now, this is the second in a subseries of highly experiential episodes. These episodes are opportunities for experiential learning. It’s an opportunity for you to learn a lot about yourself, about who you really are, about your history. Saint Paul, Romans 7:15. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” Romans, just a little bit later in chapter 7, verses 18b-19. “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want, that is what I do.” Listen to those verses. Saint Paul doesn’t understand himself. Saint Paul, pillar of virtue, author of half the books in the New Testament, Saint Paul, who endured outrageous sufferings, amazing self-sacrifice. He’s admitting to being dominated by his unconscious. “I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” This isn’t a question of willpower. Paul had extraordinary willpower. It’s hard to imagine many saints that can best him in terms of sheer willpower.

[00:03:51] It’s a question of insight. It’s a question of understanding. Now our insight, our understanding, it won’t ever be totally complete in this life, but we can have much more insight and much more understanding than we do now. And that’s what this podcast is all about. That’s what Souls and Hearts is all about. It’s about understanding ourselves. It’s about loving ourselves in an ordered way, not just so that we can have the benefits of that ordered self-love, but so that we can carry out the two great commandments: to love our God and to love our neighbor. We’re continuing on our journey through the story of Princess Tamar, crown prince Amnon, Prince Absalom, and King David. We’re going to continue that story by diving much deeper into the inner experiences of these characters and other characters in the stories as they come along. Why did they do the things that they did? Why did they say the things that they said? What were they thinking? What were they feeling? What were they sensing? What were they believing about themselves or about others or about God? What were they desiring? What were they seeking? And also what were they missing? What were they forgetting? What were they not tracking? What were they not noticing? We’re going to look at all of this through Catholic clinical eyes. There’s much more to the story than the brief accounts. There’s much more to the story than meets the eye on the surface. We’re going to be using other sources.

[00:05:34] We’ll use things like archeology to help understand the time and culture. But we’re also going to use psychological insights about shame, about trauma, about motives for things like rape. Why? It’s not just so that you can understand this story and you can understand the people in this story, say, the story of Tamar. It’s to help you understand your story and the people in your story. This is really about you understanding you. I’m going to discuss the different internal parts or modes of operating for men and women to help you gain insight into them. I want to help you to make sense of the actions of the characters in these stories, to see them in three dimensions instead of just in these brief accounts. Scripture is the Word of God. We need to unpack it. We need to decode the human language of revelation, as the Pontifical Bible Commission put it in 1993. In 1993, the Pontifical Bible Commission put out a document called The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church. This was endorsed by Saint Pope John Paul II. And it reads in part as follows. “Psychology and theology continue their mutual dialogue. The modern extension of psychological research to the study of the dynamic structures of the subconscious has given rise to fresh attempts at interpreting ancient texts, including the Bible. Psychological and psychoanalytical studies do bring a certain enrichment to biblical exegesis, in that, because of them, the texts of the Bible can be better understood in terms of experience of life and norms of behavior.”

[00:07:31] So what that means is that the Pontifical Bible Commission, 1993, endorsed by Saint John Paul II, says, look, let’s bring psychology into understanding the Scriptures because it helps us flesh out who the characters were. The document continues, “As is well known, religion is always in a relationship of conflict or debate with the unconscious, and the unconscious plays a significant role in the proper orientation of human drives. Psychology and psychoanalysis lead to a multidimensional understanding of Scripture and help decode the human language of revelation.” That’s what I want for you. I want to help decode the human language of revelation by helping you enter into the experience of the characters, so that you better understand the Word of God, so that you better understand Scripture and so that you better understand yourself. So that opens the doors to all kinds of opportunities. What I’m offering is admittedly speculative. Okay, that’s important. I am speculating about the motives, internal conflicts, and internal experience of real people in these Bible stories. And I’m not going to get it all right, you know. But the point here is to show you a way to think about internal experience, your own internal experience, and also the internal experience of other people in a much deeper and much more insightful way. It’s about learning how to seek inside yourself, to understand your own internal experience, your emotions, your sensations, your beliefs, your attitudes, your impulses, your desires, your intentions, your conflicts, all that internal stuff.

[00:09:21] So this is not about finding out just the facts. It’s about the process. It’s about learning to seek. It’s about learning to find. “Seek and ye shall find.” I’m offering you a way to understand the unconscious, your unconscious, and all the conflicts inside that unconscious, all those mysterious elements, a way to look at this in three dimensions. And I want to do this, and I seek to do this in a way that’s utterly faithful to the fullness of truth, as revealed by the Catholic Church. I want to bring the best of psychology to the fullness of divine revelation, all in the service of being able to understand ourselves better so that we can understand others better as well. You can’t really understand anybody else very well if you don’t understand yourself very well. You’ll misinterpret what you see in the other person. You know, for example, if you can’t tolerate the idea that you might be angry and you sense anger in your relationship with somebody else, you’re going to assume that that anger is emanating from the other person, right? That’s the defense of projection. You’re going to reverse the directionality of that anger. That’s not helpful. We need to know who we are in order to know who other people are. And in order to love other people, we need to know who they are and we need to know what they need.

[00:10:56] And we need to know how best to bring that to them. So this isn’t just some other psychological self-discovery project. This isn’t just some self-improvement project so that we can get to know ourselves. We can gaze deeply into our navels and admire the lint there. No, this is about learning to love other people and to love Christ in them. So we’re going to get some of the minor points wrong. We won’t be 100% accurate. You know, at the end of the day, you know, we die, we go to heaven. And, you know, we find out that, oh, Dr. Peter was wrong about this particular point. That’s okay. Right. You know, Tamar doesn’t need us at this point in her life to empathize with her. She’s dead. She’s experiencing her eternity. So is King David. So is Prince Amnon. So is Prince Absalom. They died nearly 3000 years ago. They’re in their eternal reward, whatever that happens to be. But we’re practicing understanding with these stories. All right. So where have we come from? Just a quick review for those of you that may be joining us midstream, episodes 37, 38, and 39 provide the conceptual foundations for understanding shame, and guilt in the natural realm, in the psychological realm. Those are basic foundational, conceptual episodes. If you haven’t listened to them and you’re a real conceptual thinker, you like principles and ideas first, go back to episodes 37, 38, 39.

[00:12:24] There’s lots of conceptual meat in them, and they’re great. A great place to start. If you learn through stories and examples, though, you might want to pick it up with episode 40. That’s where we began with the case history, and we looked at the story of Tamar. Okay, the overview for today, we’re going to review some basic safety stuff just to make sure that we minimize the risk of people being activated or overwhelmed by anything that comes up in the story, because I’m going to tell these stories in a deliberately evocative way. We’re going to be actually evoking some of our own stuff in order to be able to pay attention to it. But we want to do that in a safe way. We want to do that in a way that’s secure. Secondly, we’re going to review active attuned listening, right? We’re going to have a brief review of, how do we listen to these stories? We went over that in some depth in episode 40, in preparation for listening to the story I told there. And then third, we’re actually going to rewind. We’re going to rewind four generations. We’re going to go back more than a century in order to really understand what went into King David’s developmental history. And that I think is just absolutely fascinating. I learned an absolute ton in preparing for this episode, things that totally blew my mind that I had no idea about.

[00:13:50] And so I want to share what I found with you. Okay, so safety, we’re going to hear about childhood trauma. We’re going to hear about childhood trauma in King David. And that can pull for unresolved trauma in you. Parts carrying your trauma can begin to well up. And I don’t want you to be overwhelmed by that, although I still want you to be able to access that in a way that’s safe. Hearing about shame can also pull for unresolved shame. So how do you care for yourself? How do you attune for yourself? Well, I’m going to encourage you to listen especially to your body, bodyset. Pay attention as you’re listening to these stories, to the question of whether you’re in your window of tolerance, right? Just a quick review, window of tolerance, that’s the zone of arousal in which you are able to function most effectively. I want you to notice if you’re becoming hyper-aroused. That’s where the sympathetic nervous system revs up and gets you into fight or flight mode. Or if you’re hypo-aroused, and that’s where the parasympathetic nervous system shuts you down. You have the freeze response like a deer in the headlights. I want you to pay attention to those bodily reactions. They’re going to tell you very important things. And if it starts to feel too activating, stop. Right. Go over this with somebody else if you feel like you want to continue with it. Take it to your therapist.

[00:15:17] If it does activate you quite a bit, you might want to consider therapy. I’m just going to throw that out there in very direct language, right? Take it slow. Stop if needed. Listen with somebody else if that’s helpful. Respect what you are hearing from yourself about safety and danger. Okay. All right. Active attuned listening. We introduced these concepts in the last episode. We’re going to review them again today. So three levels of listening. Listening to the story, and that’s what we typically think about as listening. And then attuned listening, active attuned listening, listening to yourself, your body reactions, your emotions, your thoughts, your memories, your attitudes, your beliefs, listening to what or seeing what kinds of images come up, noticing what’s going on in the particulars of your internal experience as you hear the story, right? So to the degree that it feels safe enough and secure enough, let’s be open. Let’s allow space for parts of us to be heard, to see what comes up if we’re accepting, if we’re open to what the stories are going to evoke in us. This is part of what Scripture does. It evokes things in us, things that need to come up at some point. And again, remember, God knew before the beginning of time everything you would experience in your life, all the attachment injuries, all the relational wounds, all the bad stuff that was going to happen, everything that would cause shame.

[00:16:54] And he has remedies for it all. Scripture is a part of our healing. The stories in Scripture is a part of our healing. The stories in Scripture are the Word of God. And if he sees us engaging with Him in His Word, that’s going to be healing, if we do this in an ordered way, right? Take what’s helpful. If you find yourself going into fight or flight mode or going down into a freeze mode, stop the episode, take a break, reground, notice what’s going on around you, take a walk, engage in an activity, reconnect with your surroundings. Okay. All right. So it’s the second level, listening to yourself in this attuned, active way. Third level of listening is listening to the characters. If your own house is fairly in order, if your own self is not very activated, then you can be free to really enter into the internal experiences of the people in the story. I’m going to be bringing them into three dimensions. I’m going to be giving a whole lot of backstory, a whole lot of color, to really make them come alive for you. All right, so here we go, King David. We’re going to start with him. We’re going to go back four generations to actually really understand the history of King David. Now, it’s interesting because we hear almost nothing in Scripture about David’s childhood, almost nothing. Scripture really opens in 1 Samuel 16 when Samuel shows up to anoint the future king of Israel.

[00:18:44] By this time, David’s already an adolescent. But I argue that David had a terrible childhood, a childhood full of rejection, full of alienation, full of being misunderstood by other people, full of false accusations, others reviling him, condemning him, mocking him, and shaming him. An awful childhood. And I think David himself misunderstood himself in a major way and did not know who he really was. It helps to understand those terrible childhood experiences, to understand possible motives that David had as an adult, as to why he was so passive and took no action in response to his son, Crown Prince Amnon, raping his daughter, Princess Tamar. If we really want to understand the history of Tamar, let’s understand the story of her father, David. And so we’re going to roll back all the way to his childhood. We’re going to go back 40 years earlier in the story to David’s terrible childhood experiences. Now, I want to be really clear that just because David had terrible childhood experiences does not justify sins of omission, in failing to act in response to the rape. I’m not saying that at all. I want to be really clear about that. But let’s go back to where we first meet David, and then we’ll go back further than that. So we first, we hear about David in Scripture, in the section around his anointing by Samuel, and he was but a youth, 12, 13, 14, maybe 15 years old, something like that.

[00:20:24] So you’ve heard the story, right, where Samuel shows up to Jesse’s house to anoint the future king of Israel. But have you really heard the story? And do you know the backstory? Let’s listen to the story of Samuel showing up at Jesse’s home, and let’s listen to the characters. I’m going to read you 1 Samuel 16, verses 1 to 13. I’m going to read them from Robert Alter’s translation. Robert Alter is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at UC Berkeley. He’s the translator of the Hebrew Bible, and he uses very literal translation. He writes in English what the Hebrew words actually said. He’s not interested in dynamic equivalence. That’s what most translations are these days. And that’s, when you’re doing dynamic equivalent translation, the translator is writing down what the translator thinks the words mean, not what the words actually say. There’s an important place for dynamic equivalence in biblical scholarship. It does make the Scripture much easier to understand for many people, but there are times where we really want to get to what the words actually said, because otherwise translators can fall into what Robert Alter calls transliteration, and that is imposing their own meaning on the words, meaning that wasn’t actually there because those translators are human and they can make mistakes. And so this is a very literal translation of verses 1 to 13 of 1 Samuel 16. All right, so let’s listen now. 

[00:22:09] We’re going to get really ready to listen. I want you to take a couple breaths. We’re really going to work on being open to hearing what’s going on in this passage, to noticing things maybe that we didn’t notice before. I’m also going to read this passage in a way that expresses more of what I think the words actually mean. I’m not going to read it in a monotone. “And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘How long are you going to grieve about Saul when I have cast him aside from reigning over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and go. I am sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have seen me among his sons, a king.’ And Samuel said, ‘How can I go? For should Saul hear, he will kill me.’ And the Lord said, ‘Take a heifer with you, and you will say, ‘To sacrifice to the Lord, I have come.’ And you will invite Jesse to the sacrifice. And I myself shall let you know what you must do. And you will anoint for me the one that I say to you.’ And Samuel did what the Lord had spoken. And he came to Bethlehem, and the elders of the town came trembling to meet him. And they said, ‘Do you come in peace?’ And he said, ‘In peace. To sacrifice to the Lord I have come. Sanctify yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice.’ And Jesse sanctified his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.

[00:23:52] And it happened when they came that he saw Eliab. And he said, ‘Ah, yes, before the Lord stands his anointed.’ And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Look not to his appearance and to his lofty stature, for I have cast him aside. For not as man sees does God see.’ And Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. And he said, ‘This one to the Lord has not chosen.’ And Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, ‘This one too the Lord has not chosen.’ And Jesse made his seven sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘The Lord has not chosen these.’ And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Are there no more lads?’ And Jesse said, ‘The youngest is still left. And look, he is tending the flock.’ And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send and fetch him, for we shall not sit to eat until he comes here.’ And he sent and brought him. And he was ruddy with fine eyes, and goodly to look on. And the Lord said, ‘Arise, anoint him, for this is the one.’ And Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the spirit of the Lord gripped David from that day onward, And Samuel rose and went to Ramah.'” Okay, so first question I had, why wasn’t David there? Right. This is a huge deal. The traditional explanation is, well, you know, he’s the youngest. He had work to do keeping the sheep.

[00:25:47] You know, somebody had to do it. Sheep gotta have a shepherd, you know, lots of wolves running around. Can’t have the sheep just looking after themselves. Nonsense. Jesse was an important figure. He was prominent. He was wealthy. He was established. He had servants. He had field hands. He had lots of people working on his estate. Jesse’s the head of the Sanhedrin. That’s the Supreme Court of the Torah. It wasn’t that David was the only one who could do the shepherding work. That’s nonsense. So I don’t buy that explanation, that somebody’s got to take care of the sheep. He’s the youngest. Another explanation sometimes, he was just forgotten. You know, kids, especially those rascally little ones. You never know what they’re up to. Listen, this is a huge deal. Samuel the prophet has come. This is a huge event. Everyone wants to see this. As an adolescent, David would want to see this. He’s not going to want to be kept away unless he was under orders to stay away. Kids are naturally curious, adolescents. This is the talk of the town. This doesn’t happen every year. Something big is going down. They want to be there. Also remember, Samuel was fearsome. The elders were trembling in Samuel’s presence, asking if he came peaceably or not. If the great prophet Samuel wants to see your sons, you bring them out. Jesse is also upright and good. Jesse is one of the eight princes of men that would come out of Bethlehem.

[00:27:24] That was referred to in the book of Micah 5:4. And according to the Sukkah 52b, this is a book of the Talmud. Jesse is one of those eight princes of man that came out of Bethlehem. So Jesse is not going to disobey the prophet Samuel. He obeys Samuel, brings his sons, all of them, he thinks. He deliberately, though, keeps David out of sight. Why? How could that be? Well, let’s look at the languaging here. When Robert Alter walks us through this with his literal translation, originally in chapter 16, in verses 1 and 5, when referring to Jesse and his sons, he uses the Hebrew banaw. That’s a word that specifically means son. And Samuel goes through all of those sons, all of those banaw, and says, the Lord has not chosen any of these. The Lord has not chosen these. One can imagine a pause here. Jesse looks confused. Samuel has come to anoint one of his sons as king, but he has rejected all of his sons. How can that be? Then in verse 11, Samuel changes his language. Now at this moment, I think Samuel may have been divinely inspired. He was a prophet after all, right? He no longer asks about sons. He asks about lads or young men. In Hebrew, something like hanamari, right? He’s no longer asking about sons, but he’s broadening the word out to lads or young men.

[00:29:19] Jesse is still confused. He catches the word shift. He’s thinking about who’s left in the household. David? I mean, David’s a lad. He’s a young man. Samuel said to Jesse, “Are these all the boys? Are these all the lads?” And Jesse responds, “The youngest lad, the youngest one, is still left, but behold, he’s tending the sheep.” Now, at this point, Jesse’s really confused. He makes no move or offer to go get David. This whole situation is bizarre and unthinkable for Jesse. Samuel sees the confusion and he gets clear and direct with Jesse to help him get with the program. So Samuel said to Jesse very clearly, directly, send word and bring him. That is, bring David, for we will not take our places at the table until he comes here. And after that much direction, Jesse finally sends for David. But he’s still thinking, David, how can that be? The great prophet Samuel wants me to fetch David to him, to evaluate him, to see if David is fit to be king? What is going on? Based on this, I’m strongly suspecting that Jesse can’t imagine Samuel anointing David as king. Why? Remember, Jesse doesn’t number David among his sons. He doesn’t present David to Samuel, even though Jesse’s a righteous man. And Samuel was very clear in his instructions. And also Samuel’s fearsome, right? You don’t want to cross the prophet. You don’t want to disobey the prophet.

[00:30:59] Here is why I think Jesse could not imagine David being king is because Jesse did not know that David was his son. Whoa! That’s why this is so mind-blowing for Jesse. Jesse did not know that David was his son. Jesse just entered the Twilight Zone here. It’s going to take some explaining, right? How do you not know that David is your son? How could that be? But that’s actually what I think happened here. And that’s something that almost nobody knows. Let’s go back to David’s birth. What do we know about David’s birth? We know that David, according to Scripture, David was the eighth son of Jesse. He was the youngest son of Jesse. Jesse was the son of Obed. And Jesse was also the grandson of Ruth and Boaz. Right? And so let’s go back, right? Let’s go back to understanding some of the history here, because it’s really important to understanding why it’s possible that Jesse did not know that David was his son. David wrote in Psalm 51:5, so this is David. He said, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Now, traditionally, most commentators think David was referencing original sin, the sin that plagues us all. You know, Adam and Eve, the forbidden fruit, all that business. Saint Robert Bellarmine, for example, in his commentary on the Psalms, writes of this verse, verse five of Psalm 51, that the iniquities and sins alluded to could not have been the sins of David’s parents, for his parents were pious and devout people.

[00:33:05] He alludes to the sins of our first parents, as is evident from the Hebrew. Okay, so that’s what Saint Robert Bellarmine said. Robert Alter, in looking at the Hebrew text in his particular literal way, says David may indeed trace it, the sinfulness, back to the sexual act through which he was conceived. The Hebrew is entirely consistent with David being the product of illicit sex, adulterous sex. So that leaves the question, what if we interpreted verse five exactly as David wrote it? What if we interpret it as the words mean, in sin did my mother conceive me? What if that means exactly what it says? What if David’s mother conceived him in an act of sin? What if she committed adultery and David was the byproduct of that infidelity? Do we have any evidence of that kind of infidelity? Yes we do, we do from other sources. We’ve got to go back four generations, though. All right. So David’s great-great-grandparents were Naomi and Elimelech. Naomi and Elimelech. And they fled from Bethlehem to Moab in a time of famine. And remember the Moabites and the Israelites were historical enemies, and there was this terrible famine in Bethlehem. Naomi and Elimelech, they flee to Moab to get away from it. Elimelech dies there.

[00:34:37] They have two sons, Mahlon and Chilion. Those two sons marry Moabite women. Mahlon marries Ruth, and Chilean marries Orpah. And then Mahlon and Chilion both die. Right? So that’s how we have Naomi. And we have Ruth, her daughter-in-law. Naomi wants to go back to Bethlehem. The famine is over. Ruth wants to go with her. Right. So Ruth and Naomi go back to Bethlehem. That’s where Ruth meets Boaz. Boaz is really impressed with their kindness. It doesn’t seem to match up with the reputation of the Moabites. Boaz and Ruth fall in love. Now, the traditional Jewish law explicitly forbade Hebrew women from marrying Moabite men because of how the Moabites treated the Israelites when they were wandering in the wilderness after being freed from Egypt. But that applied to Hebrew women marrying Moabite men. Remember, what we got here is a Moabite woman wanting to marry a Hebrew man, right? So the traditional Jewish law explicitly forbade that one combination, but not the combination of a Moabite woman marrying a Hebrew man. So Boaz and the Jewish sages understood this law according to the oral Torah, which forbade certain types of intermarriage, but not others. Right. And this assumes that there’s been conversion, right? That the Moabite woman has converted to Judaism, which Ruth did. Right. So there was still this ethnic prohibition, even if the Moabite man converted to Judaism, he still couldn’t marry a Hebrew woman.

[00:36:30] That wasn’t allowed. But this was allowed, right? So Ruth and Boaz marry, and with his marriage to Ruth, Boaz was going to make this oral Torah tradition much more widely known because there’s a lot of confusion about it. But Boaz died the night after his marriage with Ruth. Ruth is widowed a second time. And Ruth conceived that night, though, subsequently gave birth to their son Obed, who was the father of Jesse. All right. So what follows now is some secondary sources that cite the Midrash, which is a Jewish biblical exegesis. And I want to give credit to an article entitled “Nitzevet, Mother of David: The Bold Voice of Silence” by Chana Weisberg on the website chabad.org. This article looks at David, David’s mother, through the Midrash. And the Midrash was initially a method of interpreting the literal meaning of biblical texts in the Jewish tradition. In time, it developed into a sophisticated interpretive system that reconciled apparent biblical contradictions, established the scriptural basis of new laws, and enriched biblical content with new meaning, not altogether unlike what we’re trying to do on a psychological level. They were doing it within the Jewish tradition. And according to the Midrash, during Ruth’s lifetime, many individuals were doubtful about the legitimacy of her marriage to Boaz. Boaz wasn’t there to make the counterarguments because he was dead. Ruth was a Moabite, right? Even though she had converted to Judaism, ethnically, she was Moabite. Many believed that Boaz’s death proved that God had condemned the marriage, right, and that God had punished Boaz and Ruth by wiping out Boaz and leaving Ruth a widow.

[00:38:28] Well, Obed is born from that union. Then Jesse is born from Obed and his wife, who is unnamed in Scripture. We don’t know who Obed’s wife was, Jesse’s mother. And then Jesse’s wife is never named in Scripture. But according to the Midrash, it was Nitzevet, an Israelite woman, a righteous Israelite woman. And Jesse, so now we’re getting closer to David. Okay. I appreciate you walking through this with me. I know it can be a little confusing. The details, if you don’t follow all the details, it’s okay. I’ll give you the main things to take away from this. But Jesse married Nitzevet. So Jesse’s got some of this Moabite ethnicity. He’s got some Moabite in his blood, through his grandmother Ruth. After Jesse had seven sons with his wife Nitzevet, after many years of living together, right. He was a righteous man. He was a spiritual leader in the community. He began to have doubts bothering him about whether or not his lineage was forever tainted by this Moabite blood. Was he ethnically pure? This was like an attack of scrupulosity. And it was at this point in the Midrash that he resolved to cease all marital relations with Nitzevet in order not to dishonor her. Right.

[00:39:50] He abandoned the marriage in order to not dishonor his wife and bring shame upon her because she, as a pure Israelite woman, would be sinning if she were bound by marriage to someone who was of this impure Moabite ancestry. You might say that he abandoned his marriage to her out of love for her, to protect her. He kept her in his household, met her physical needs and cared for her. But they were divorced. And the seven sons knew this. They knew about the separation of their parents. Their parents were no longer lawfully married. And there’s the rub. Jesse began to doubt the legitimacy of his seven sons to succeed him in taking over his estate and his position within the Israelite community. If his lineage was impure and his marriage was invalid, then his children were bastards. So after years of continence, Jesse, wanting an unquestionably legitimate heir, devised a scheme to have a baby son following the model of his forefather Abraham, through his wife’s Canaanite maid. If Jesse has a son from such a union, that son would be recognized by all as a legitimate heir, thus securing Jesse’s family line. And that sounds weird, but it’s true, right? Because the maid was not a full-blooded Israelite, because she was Canaanite, that’s okay, because he’s not a full-blooded Israelite either. Jesse brought this plan to the maid, and the maid who loved Nitzevet, told Nitzevet about the plan, and the two of them planned one of these midnight switcheroos. That sometimes happened in the Old Testament, just like old Laban had done so many years earlier with Leah and Rachel to fool Jacob, right, into marrying Leah instead of Rachel, which is the one he loved, right. That kind of situation.

[00:41:47] And Nitzevet loved Jesse. She wanted more children with him, even though they were no longer married in the eyes of Jewish law. So in the dark, Nitzevet took the place of her maid, and had what would be considered adulterous relations with Jesse. And on that night, Nitzevet conceived baby David. And Jesse had no clue until months later, when it became obvious that Nitzevet was pregnant. Now, how in Hades did that happen? Nitzevet, she’s not talking. How did Nitzevet become pregnant? Because Nitzevet was considered to be unmarried, Jesse and his seven sons believed that she had committed adultery or fornication with somebody. And actually, according to Jewish law, she had committed adultery with Jesse, even though he didn’t even know it was her. He thought it was the maid. They were no longer married. But because Jesse had ended the marriage with a divorce decree, it was actually adulterous. And nobody knew that except Nitzevet and her maid. Nitzevet had committed adultery with Jesse. And that’s why David can say in Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

[00:43:07] Now the other seven sons, they wanted to kill their adulterous mother by stoning her as the law called for. And they wanted to stone that illegitimate baby with her. But out of love for his former wife, Jesse intervened. He prevented it from happening. Nitzevet did not reveal to Jesse that the child was his, for she did not want to shame him. She did not want to embarrass him by revealing the truth of what had happened, what she had done. Instead, she chose to bear the shame of their son by herself. Unaware of the truth behind his wife’s pregnancy, but having compassion on her, Jesse ordered his sons not to touch her. He ordered them, do not kill her. Instead, we’re going to have this child be born. We’re going to treat this child as a lowly and despised servant. In this way, everyone will realize that this child’s status is questionable, that it’s irregular, that he’s a bastard, he’s illegitimate, and he will never marry an Israelite woman. Okay. So from that time onward, from David’s birth onward, he was treated by his brothers as a disgraced person, as a social outcast, worth nothing, a servant doing the worst of the tasks, doing the most dangerous tasks. Right? That’s why he’s out there with the sheep, you know, dealing with the wolves and the wild creatures. That’s a dangerous occupation, even though he is but a young boy or a youth.

[00:44:44] Right. So the community is going to pick up on the conduct of the brothers. This stuff gets around. You know, this isn’t just going to remain in the house, this isn’t some sort of house secret. No. The rest of the community knows that this boy, this David, is shameful, that he’s guilty, that he’s a bastard. Right? They know from the conduct of the brothers that he’s to be treated badly. He must have done something wrong. He’s got to be guilty of something, right? And so the community rejects David as well. That’s why David was not initially counted among Jesse’s sons. That’s why he was out tending the flocks in a distant pasture. That’s why he was barred from the celebration like a Cinderella figure. Right? Condemned, despised, abandoned by almost everyone except his mother and her maid. Right. That sounds like a type of Christ to me. All right, so let’s get into these characters’ heads. I want you to think of the sense of betrayal that Jesse must have felt, right. He ended his marriage with Nitzevet to protect her from shame and from dishonor and from spiritual death, because he loved her. He made that sacrifice. And then she goes sneaking around and having sex with some other guy, getting pregnant, making him a laughingstock and disgracing herself. What was that? What was that about? Think about the burden of Nitzevet, right? She actually did commit adultery in the eyes of the Jewish law.

[00:46:50] She bore the shame. She bore her son’s shame for that. Only one maid knew the truth. Not even David knew the truth. She’s not going to tell him, right. How is he going to keep that to himself? Right. That gets out? Man, that’s live. That would be really explosive, right? She’s shunned by all, treated as an outcast, she has fallen from this elevated position of being Jesse’s wife. High, high society down to being nothing, right. But she waits for justice. She’s disrespected and shamed by her seven sons who do not understand, who cannot understand, who wanted to kill her. Think about that. What’s that bringing up for you? Think of the shame and the surprise of the seven brothers. David is to be our king. David, the object of our ridicule, our scapegoat, the one we mistreated, the one we’ve abused, the one that we have outcast, the one that we have treated so badly. He is going to take power in Israel. Right. Let’s think of David, huh? Think of David now. The bastard child, an object of ridicule, hatred, rejected by everyone except his mother, growing up without a father, not knowing who his father really was, persecuted ruthlessly by his brothers, these brothers who wanted to kill him when he was in the womb, right? They would have gotten rid of him. Now, by God’s grace and power, by God’s justice, God has lifted him up from the lowest position and set him to be king over Israel.

[00:49:15] Who would have thunk that? But my friends, that is classic God for you. That’s the kind of thing that God just loves to do. He’s a God of surprises. Now, if you need to take a little time to go through this and to write down what’s coming up for you, how you can relate, what connects with this, what doesn’t connect, whatever. It’s time to begin that exploration. We’re moving on to Psalm 69, Psalm 69. The traditional Jewish interpretation is that this is about David’s childhood, that David is writing about his childhood. We know this is a Psalm by David, right? But listen to this and think of the adolescent David, the bastard, the rejected one, right? Think about this as being written, or at least experienced before his anointing as king of Israel. Think about it as he remembered and relived his childhood experiences. And I don’t know, maybe he wrote it before. Maybe he wrote it in the depths of feeling this at the time. Psalm 69, adolescent David. Listen to yourself as we go through this. What resonates with you? Write it down. Let’s value your reactions. Let’s listen to those parts, what they want to share with you. And again, remember, if this gets to be too much, if this gets to be too much, take a break. Slow it down. Ground yourself. Right, right. But I bet you’re going to hear the psalm with a completely different understanding.

[00:51:11] This is what David says, “Save me, oh, God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying and my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause. Mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies. What I did not steal must I now restore? O God, thou knowest my folly. The wrongs I have done are not hidden from thee. Let not those who hope in thee be put to shame through me, O Lord God of hosts. Let not those who seek thee be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel. For it is for thy sake that I have borne reproach, that shame has covered my face. I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s sons. For zeal for thy house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult thee have fallen on me. When I humbled my soul with fasting, it became my reproach. When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them. I am the talk of those who sit in the gate. And the drunkards make songs about me. But as for me, my prayer is to thee, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of thy steadfast love, answer me. 

[00:52:51] With thy faithful help, rescue me from sinking in the mire. Let me be delivered from my enemies and from deep waters. Let not the flood sweep over me or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me. Answer me, O Lord, for thy steadfast love is good. According to thy abundant mercy, turn to me. Hide not thy face from thy servant, for I am in distress. Make haste to answer me. Draw near to me, redeem me, set me free because of my enemies. Thou knowest my reproach and my shame and my dishonor. My foes are all known to thee. Insults have broken my heart so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me poison for food and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. Let their own table before them become a snare. Let their sacrificial feasts be a trap. Let their eyes be darkened so they cannot see and make their loins tremble continually. Pour out thy indignation upon them, and let thy burning anger overtake them. May their camp be a desolation. Let no one dwell in their tents, for they persecute him whom thou hast smitten, and him whom thou hast wounded, they afflict still more. Add them punishment upon punishment. May they have no acquittal from thee.

[00:54:25] Let them be blotted out of the book of the living. Let them not be enrolled among the righteous. But I am afflicted and in pain. Let thy salvation, O God, set me on high. I will praise the name of God with a song. I will magnify him with thanksgiving. This will please the Lord more than an ox or a bull with horns and hooves. Let the oppressed see it and be glad. You who seek God, let your hearts revive. For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own that are in bonds. Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moves therein. For God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah, and his servants shall dwell there and possess it. The children of his servants shall inherit it, and those who love his name shall dwell in it.” Okay. So we’re going to review just briefly the five dimensions of shame. Remember that shame is a primary emotion. It’s a bodily reaction. It’s a signal. It’s a judgment. And it’s an action. And in this psalm, we see the shame as a primary emotion, right? We see David saying, we hear David saying, insults have broken my heart so that I am in despair. Right? That’s what shame can do. That hammering sense of inadequacy can lead us to despair, right? He’s struggling with that. Part of him is struggling with the despair, and other parts of him are hanging tight with the faith.

[00:56:14] Right? He’s afflicted. He’s in pain. He’s in distress. He’s feeling the shame. He’s got bodily reactions, right? Shame is a bodily reaction. He’s weary with crying, weary with crying. His throat is parched. It’s dry. His eyes grow dim. I mean, it’s one of those things that happens in a freeze response is your vision goes dim. He’s feeling it in his body. You know, as far as shame being a signal, that’s harder for me to detect in here in this particular passage. It’s hard to know how much of that David is taking in. He’s hinting at it with this sense of being, you know, sinking in the mire, being overwhelmed with the flood sweeping over him. You know, I’ve come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me. I think that’s possibly shame. You know, a signal to just shut down, become inhibited. Don’t draw any attention to yourself. I’m not 100% sure about that. And then a judgment. I’m not sure that David takes it in. Right. I’m not sure that he takes it all in because there’s this, you know, at the end he’s able to rise up and worship God anyway. And to see God hearing the needy, he’s professing his faith in God. So I’m not sure how much he was taking in at that time. So I’m not sure about how much he was judging himself as shameful.

[00:58:09] But then as an action, you can see all the shaming that people were doing, right? More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause. Mighty are those who would destroy me, who attack me with lies. The insults of those who insult thee have fallen on me. I’m the talk of those who sit in the gate, and drunkards make songs about me. You know, the ones who sit in the gate are the elders, right? They’re the ones that sit by the gates. These are the respected people who are gossiping about David, right? That’s gotta hurt, right? They give me poison for food and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. Again, here we’re seeing David as a type of our Lord Jesus Christ, the type of Jesus our Savior. Right. You know, vinegar to drink. That’s what Jesus got on the cross, right? All right. So this is again, getting really long. We gotta pull it to a conclusion for today. I’m going to again invite you to share these podcasts. Let people know. I know I ask you that every week now, but you guys have been doing a great job. There are more and more listeners, which is going to allow me to do more with these podcasts. Share it on social media. You can go to our website at soulsandhearts.com/coronavirus-crisis. 

[00:59:45] Get the word out. Give your personal recommendation. Let people know. Discuss what you experienced in this story of David’s childhood with another person who has listened to it. So get a buddy to listen to this with you so that you can discuss it. You know, somebody that you trust to share your experience with. And you can do that if you’re in the RCCD community, you can do that on our boards. You can do that with somebody that you’ve agreed to do that with through private messages as well. If you’re not in the RCCD community yet, the community is temporarily closed to new members. We will be reopening in 2021. But if you go to soulsandhearts.com/rccd, you can sign up for a waiting list so as soon as it reopens, you can know about it and we’ll get you in there. For those that are in the community, this Wednesday, November 11th from 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m., we’re going to have a Zoom meeting. We’re going to be discussing the story of Tamar. We’re going to be discussing trauma and shame. We also discuss this if folks have listened to it all grounded in a Catholic perspective. I’m going to be going into some of these areas in a deeper way than I can with the podcast. So RCCD members, by all means, join us if you can, on Wednesday, November 11th, 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time. And with that, we’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.