Bible Books
050
Truth, Justice and the Judean Way
King David
Kyle Baker
(New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2002) 160 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Holy Philistia, Batman! DC Comics, the pop culture icon that introduced the world to the likes of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, has added a 160-page graphic novel, King David, to its repertoire. Highly decorated cartoonist Kyle Baker masterfully captures the intense drama of the biblical crusader.
You know the story. Born in smallville Bethlehem, a young, mild-mannered shepherd overthrows his evil nemesis Saul, becomes king, and fights for truth, justice and the Judean way. But David’s kryptonite of lust soon overpowers him. While his soldiers try to take an Ammonite fortress, David takes Bathsheba into his fortress of solitude. Then…Pow Bam Crash!
She’s pregnant, her husband’s murdered, and David would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling prophets and their parables. The graphic novel ends chillingly, right before David and Bathsheba’s first child dies, as prophesied by Nathan. David is playing peek-a-boo with the chubby baby, when Bathsheba enters the room:
“I don’t like his breathing,” she says. “Does his breathing sound funny to you?”
“He’s fine,” David says.
And with those words Baker’s work suddenly closes.
Kyle Baker’s no-holds-barred attitude took me completely by surprise. Most biblically inspired cartoons and comic books depict painless worlds inhabited by the descendants of Barney and Kathy Lee Gifford. In these sugar-coated accounts, Isaac smiles as his dad’s knife begins its descent; the severed head of Goliath just keeps on grinning; and the tragedy of the Flood becomes a nursery tale.a
No such sterilization of the Bible’s violence is found in Kyle Baker’s book. The artist magnificently captures the Bible’s intensity, passion, tragedy, cruelty and aggression. He does not shy away from such topics as Uriah’s murder, God’s call for genocide against the Amalekites and David’s vow to kill all of Nabal’s men who “urinate against the wall”b (1 Samuel 25:22, 34). He depicts the Philistine foreskins that make up Michal’s dowry, and shows David cutting Saul’s garment while the latter relieves himself in a cave.
This is precisely why Baker’s King David succeeds where so many artistic re-creations (especially movies) of the Bible have failed. Baker’s comic graphically depicts what Hollywood films wouldn’t dare—which is why some parents will want to reserve King David for a relatively mature audience.
Baker’s art is creative, dramatic and engaging. Stylistically, he might be described as a combination between Harvey Kurtzman (Mad Magazine) and Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead). He is most talented at capturing his characters’ facial expressions and at paring down complicated scenes to a single snapshot.
Baker creates entertaining dialogue that conveys the constant commotion of the royal household:
051
“Daddy? Can I have some honey?” asks five-year-old Michal, while David politely waits to address the king.
“Of course you can, sweetheart,” says Saul. “You can have as much as you want.”
Jonathan, Saul’s teenaged son, says, “Dad, I need the big chariot. Where is it?”
“Where are you going, Jonathan?”
“Out.”
David finally speaks up: “Your majesty, I’ve been an armor bearer here for three months, and I have not yet been paid.”
“Well, that’s not right. Go to accounting and tell them I said pay you,” says Saul. “Out where, Jon? When will you be home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Accounting said I could not be paid without an invoice,” continues David.
It is obvious that Baker invested much time researching the story’s finer details. For example, when the prophet Nathan rebukes David, he warns that while David sinned in secret (murdering Uriah and taking Bathsheba as his wife), his punishment will be “before the sun” (2 Samuel 12:12). Consequently, the sun becomes a powerful symbol in Baker’s depiction of David’s affair with Bathsheba. David first spies Bathsheba just before dawn, when the sun isn’t shining; she is brought to the palace only at night; at their wedding, the marriage canopy blocks the sunlight. Indeed, the sun does not shine on David again until his meeting with Nathan, when a single ray of sunlight brings to light the truth of David’s sin.
Baker makes several creative additions to the biblical tale, inventing the origins of Psalm 23. In Baker’s account, the youthful David whispers to himself, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil,” as he cautiously approaches the demented and dangerous King Saul for the first time. “Hey, that’s pretty good. Maybe I should write that down,” he mutters to himself.
Baker’s King David is a hit of epic proportions and will no doubt help bring back the Bible—the uncut version—to pop culture.
Darwin’s Religious Odyssey
William E. Phipps
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002) 208 pp., $16.00 (paper)
When memorializing great scientists, biographers often like to highlight their poetic, religious side. Einstein’s various (largely rhetorical) allusions to “God,” for instance, are frequently cited as evidence that the physicist did not spend all his time thinking about numbers and equations, but was also a spiritual person. People want to believe there is room in a great scientific mind for something beyond facts and logic. Something like faith—or at the very least, awe.
Almost immediately after the great naturalist Charles Darwin died, rumors began spreading that he had “converted” on his deathbed. One pious visitor to the Darwin home is said to have seen him studying the Bible and lamenting how he destroyed the multitudes’ biblical faith. Another report (equally false) claimed that he renounced evolution and sought absolution in Christ. William E. Phipps’s new book with the seemingly oxymoronic title Darwin’s Religious Odyssey may be motivated, ever so subtly, by the same need to redeem our scientific heroes, to make them more saintly (or at least human). But even if that’s the case, it effectively and engagingly tackles an important, insufficiently understood subject: Darwin’s complex and changing views on religion and the place of evolutionary theory in mid-19th-century religious thought.
Phipps, a professor (emeritus) of religion and philosophy at Davis and Elkins college in West Virginia, begins with an account of Darwin’s milieu and religious upbringing. Darwin’s mother was a Unitarian, and her liberal Christian views certainly influenced him later, but he was brought up in the Anglican Church and remained fairly orthodox in his beliefs through the first half of his long life (he died in 1882 at the age of 73). In fact, he was on the verge of taking holy orders when he accepted the invitation to travel on board the H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist and dining companion for the ship’s captain.
052
The rest, of course, is history. His observations in South America, the Galapagos Islands and the South Pacific led Darwin to conclude that all forms of life had evolved from earlier forms through a process of natural selection. The theory—once he published it—shook the Victorian scientific world to its foundations. Oddly enough, it had less immediate impact on Victorian theology. Many priests and theologians of the time, both Catholic and Protestant, avidly followed new advances and theories in science, and some even applauded a new idea that, in their view, exalted God’s creation rather than diminishing it. What could not be squared with Darwin’s theory, however, was the creation account as given in Genesis. It was not God but the Bible itself—at least as an authoritative historical document—that evolution challenged.
Darwin was certainly not the first to question the literal interpretation of the Bible’s first book: Many of the greatest minds of the church like Augustine had already regarded the seven days of creation as a metaphorical, not literal, week, and even professed doctrines of continuous creation—“divine becoming”—that seem in some ways to have anticipated the idea of evolution. Moreover, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy was simultaneously coming under fire from another quarter: biblical criticism. Scholars in Germany were pointing to contradictions 053among biblical texts as evidence of multiple (and fallible) authors writing after the fact, thus challenging the view that the Bible reflected divine revelation. But with evidence massing—not only of species’ mutability but also of the Earth’s considerable age and the past ages of life attested in the fossil record—it was science that was now forcing Christians to make a choice about their central text: either cling to the literal truth of the Bible and reject scientific evidence as false, or accept that the first eight chapters of Genesis, from the creation to the flood, cannot be a historically accurate account of how the natural world assumed its present form. Thus began the war between “Creationists” and “Evolutionists” that has raged unabated to the present day.
Although personally shaken by his own insights into the natural world—he experienced a crisis of faith in the years immediately after the Beagle voyage, as he was coming to grips with his new theory and overcoming his hesitancy to publish it—Darwin did eventually come to appreciate that the Bible was valuable in ways other than as history. Equally important to him was the moral guidance it provided—especially in the New Testament. Phipps devotes much of his book to underscoring the Christianity of Darwin—not Christianity in the sense of profession of a creed, but Christianity in the sense of conduct. Darwin consciously strove to emulate the example of humility, charity and industry set by Jesus in the Gospels and expressed in the Sermon on the Mount: “The golden rule, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise’…lies at the foundation of morality,” Darwin wrote in his Descent of Man. This idea was present in Darwin’s view of the natural world: He was impressed by the fact that cooperation and individual self-sacrifice generally benefit the survival of animal species. And he noted that every human culture, whatever their professed religion, has some version of the Golden Rule. If there is a difference between humans and animals, Darwin wrote, it is that humans are capable of enlarging their sphere of concern beyond their own immediate tribe or troop, and can experience “disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man.” (The misnamed concept of “social Darwinism”—used by late-19th-century robber barons to justify unrestrained greed—in fact reflects the individualistic philosophy of Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer, who actually coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”)
So what exactly was Darwin’s religious odyssey? Where, in terms of the spirit, did his science take him? Starting from the standard, unreflective faith in biblical inerrancy shared by most Victorians, his first stop, and the place he remained for most of the second half of his life, was theism—the belief that God’s creative power manifests itself in nature’s flux and growth, not in miraculous intervention. Unable to fathom a God that would directly countenance the myriad individual sufferings and acts of cruelty in nature, Darwin preferred to think of God as a creator of rational laws that operated on their own, without further divine assistance, to the overall betterment of life.
So against the mistaken view of Darwin as an enemy of faith, Phipps invokes the American philosopher William James: Darwin’s natural theology, his theism, was one “variety of religious experience” among many—one that was growing in importance during the latter half of the 19th century, even if it still was not mainstream.
But it is a stretch—indeed, a bit misleading—to call Darwin’s lifelong scientific quest a religious odyssey. The seeds of religious awe attested by the young Darwin in his journals—for instance while exploring a primeval forest in Brazil or gazing from the summit of a peak in the Andes—did not bear fruit in his later years as any kind of mature religious feeling, and he eventually tired of the unanswerable theological debates his work had sparked. He admitted in his late autobiography, in fact, that over the course of his life he had suffered an increasing atrophy of his religious (as well as poetic and musical) sensibilities. Having devoted himself so single-mindedly to the empirical observation of nature, in the end, nothing could really impress him but the earthworms he tirelessly watched in his garden. But even if awe eluded the elderly Darwin, he was never an atheist—and he never set out to challenge the faith of others.
To overcome the myth of Darwin-the-atheist, Phipps draws heavily on previously unpublished letters and other newly available material, in addition to secondary sources. If anything, the book sometimes feels too weighted with evidence: One gets the sense that the author tried to include every reference to “God” in Darwin’s letters and journals—every “thank God” or “God bless you,” however perfunctorily offered—to buttress his argument. But as a result of this (forgivable) lapse, the reader also emerges from the book with a much more vivid sense of the place of God in Victorian life and manners. Religion is to be found as much in the considerate “God bless you’s” as in the profounder sentiments that eluded Darwin in his later years, and Victorian society was thoroughly steeped in God-talk. This, too—the presence of God on the tongue if not always in the heart—is a variety of religious experience, one that 054never lost its importance for Darwin.
It would have been easy to write a religious apology for the greatest 19th-century scientist—making him more of a Christian than he was. But despite the somewhat misleading title, Phipps’s approach to his subject is balanced and thoughtful. There are no deathbed conversions. Darwin emerges clearly and forcefully as a man grappling with received ideas and a personal crisis of faith without, however, budging on his scientific convictions. The divine, Darwin ultimately came to realize, was unknowable—it cannot be attained, nor challenged, by science. “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”
Truth, Justice and the Judean Way
King David
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Footnotes
The Five Scrolls has been published in three editions: The congregational edition (reviewed here) includes both the translation of the five books and prayers to accompany the reading of the books in the synagogue on the holidays when it is traditional to do so; the next version, without prayers, in a larger format than the congregationnal ($60), and the special limited edition in large format printed on rag paper with a hand-pulled Baskin etching, signed and numbered by the artist ($675). In all three versions, Baskin’s 37 watercolor illustrations are included.