Michal in Purgatorio X

A friend recalls the passage in Purg X where Michal looks down upon David:

Li precedeva al benedetto vaso,
trescando alzato, l'umile salmista,
e piu' e meno che re era in quel caso.

Di contra, effigïata ad una vista
d'un gran palazzo, Micòl ammirava
sì come donna dispettosa e trista.

The idea that David is "more and less than king" in his robust dance seems to be precisely what marks him as special both within the Old Testament and within the way the New Testament marks itself as the fulfillment of the Old.

A note on Michal

Samuel is a book largely about succession -- how one kind of order succeeds, and in so doing, succeeds another. Eli the priest is followed by Samuel the Prophet. Saul's failed kingship is succeeded by David.

These figures would be large in any tapestry representing the stories of Samuel. Others would be smaller, set in the distance - the rather large cast of such characters in varying degrees of presence and importance giving the whole work a rich dimensional sense of space and time.

Take Michal - we see and hear of her only a handful of times, but what a richly suggestive figure she is:

• She becomes the bride of David - after he wins her by slaughtering 200 Philistines.
• She "loved David" and helps him escape through a window from Saul's hired killers.
• She is taken away from David and given to Paltiel by a paranoid Saul.
• She is taken from her husband, and is returned to David - her husband follows, weeping.
• She looks down through a window, "despises David in her heart," then castigates him for vulgarity.
• She dies childless.

Despite an apparent prohibition in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 on re-establishing a marriage with a previous spouse who has subsequently remarried, David demands the return of Michal after he is crowned in Judah following Saul's death. It is important to note by explanation that David had not divorced Michal at this point in time but rather Saul had made the act to break the marriage^[1]. Therefore they were not technically divorced and David had not issued a writ of divorcement according to the biblical law.

Thus she's been a pawn, a symbol of alliance and allegiance, a means of uniting the houses of Saul and David, and dividing them. A complicated and conflicted connector in the succession. We hear her voice once -- at the moment David arrives to bless his house, after the harmonies of his dancing before the ark. Whatever Michal feels, she seems to project the self-image of aristocracy. In her eyes, David has been vulgar - as such, he's beneath the station he's arrived at. His peasant roots are showing. (We've seen Saul's roots -- nothing to put on airs about. Yet the airs are there.) 

With this, the succession of David's house reaches a dead end in Michal. Solomon will be born to Bathsheba.

 

David's disrupted dance

These and other extraordinary images of the Hajj and Eid al-Adha - the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that has just ended - can be found here.

While the entire purport and historical reality of the event is far different from the ecstatic dance of the Israelites following the Ark with David in 2 Samuel 6, these scenes might suggest something of the energy and religious intensity with which the recently united people are said to have escorted their Lord and king to the new center of their nation, Jerusalem.

It is interesting that this high moment of the Old Testament, where the tribes and monarchy and their relation to the Lord are all "centered" in (precarious) harmony, is a moment of passage, rather than stasis. The Jews do not go to a fixed place to worship in this scene, rather, they are captured in motion, transporting the ark, encountering a major disruption, then reassembling and dancing their way into the capital.

The high energy of the historical moment, combining solemn awe with at least the hint of vulgarity, ends in the confrontation of David and Michal, who looks down upon him from her window and feels complete revulsion. Instead of coming to rest in a moment of peace after the dynamism of the preceding scene, something like a crack runs through the middle of the moment. Instead of closure, there's a divide between the wildness of David's dance one one hand, and the icy hatred in the heart of Saul's daughter on the other. Something feels irretrievably broken. It's as if the curse upon Michal was sprung from her encounter with the most blessed act in the history of Israel. 

Interesting to ponder how this epitomizes the movement of the Old Testament -- it never rests, there's always the next challenge in the incessant movement of history. Consider how this compares with the geometric balance and equilibrium of Homer's narrative structures, or the sense of closure in Greek tragedy.