These two relatively long verses
are an unusual instance of the intervention of a Deuteronomistic editor in the
dialogue of the original David story that was composed perhaps nearly four
centuries before him. The language here is an uninterrupted chain of verbal
formulas distinctive of the Book of Deuteronomy and its satellite literature: keep
what the LORD your God enjoins, walk in His ways, keep His statutes, His
commands, and His dictates and admonitions, so that you may prosper in
everything you do and in everything to which you turn, walk before Me in truth
with their whole heart and with their whole being. The very mention of the
Teaching [torah] of Moses is a hallmark of the Deuteronomist, and as
phrase and concept did not yet have currency in the tenth century. The long
sentences loaded with synonyms are also uncharacteristic of the author of the
David story, and there is no one in that story—least of all, David himself—who speaks
in this high-minded, long-winded, didactic vein. Why did the Deuteronomistic
editor choose to intervene at this penultimate point of the David story? It
seems very likely that he was uneasy with David’s pronouncing to Solomon a last
will and testament worthy of a dying mafia capo: be strong and be a man, and
use your savvy to pay off all my old scores with my enemies. In fact, David’s
deathbed implacability, which the later editor tries to mitigate by first
placing noble sentiments in his mouth, is powerfully consistent with both the
characterization and the imagination of politics in the preceding narrative.
The all-too-human David on the brink of the grave is still smarting from the
grief and humiliation that Joab’s violent acts caused him and from the public
shame Shimei heaped on him, and he wants Solomon to do what he himself was
prevented from doing by fear in the one case and by an inhibiting vow in the
other. In practical political terms, moreover, either Joab, just recently a
supporter of the usurper Adonijah, or Shimei, the disaffected Benjaminite,
might threaten Solomon’s hold on power, and so both should be eliminated. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 2:441)
