2 Samuel 6:1-19
Celebrating
Newness
James Sledge July
11, 2021
The David we meet in our scripture reading
this morning is a shrewd and astute politician. He is well aware that his
kingdom is something daring and new. No one had ever united Israel into a
nation before, and leaving the old, tribal ways behind would be difficult.
David will need lots of things to go just right for this to work.
Perhaps it will help to recall what
happened in previous episodes of the story. Until David’s time, Israel has been
a loose confederation of tribes, tied together by language and their worship of
Yahweh. The tribes sometimes cooperated and sometimes fought with one another.
On occasion, a charismatic religious leader would unite some of the tribes to
deal with an outside threat. But when the immediate threat waned, things
returned to normal.
It seems likely that the growing military
threat of the Philistines led to Israel’s first king, Saul. Saul was another of
those charismatic leaders though he was not a religious figure. He united some
of the tribes and scored some fairly impressive military victories. But Saul
was not a great politician, and he eventually had a falling out with the
religious establishment.
David had served in Saul’s army for a time,
and one of Saul’s daughters, Michal, was married to David. But Saul and David
eventually became rivals, a rivalry that ended when Saul was killed fighting
the Philistines. After that, David’s tribe of Judah named him their king, and
after defeating forces loyal to the house of Saul, David was named king of all Israel.
However, David still had doubters and
detractors. His sort of king was a bigger break with the old tribal system than
Saul had been, and religious conservatives were suspicious of this new king.
Actually unifying the tribes into anything resembling a nation was going to be
difficult, but David had a bold plan.
David chose to put his new capital in Jerusalem,
a city that was not part of any tribe’s territory. David had captured the
stronghold from the Jebusites, and now he proposed to establish the monarchy in
something of a neutral location.
But that was only part of the plan. He
also planned to make Jerusalem Israel’s religious center, giving his kingdom
religious legitimacy and further unifying the tribes. And that brings us to
today’s story, the story of the ark of the covenant.
