Michaelangelo sculpted him; Richard Gere portrayed him; Benjamin Disraeli wrote about him. What is it about David?

Baruch Halpern: He's sexy, he's brave, he's clever, he's romantic, he's a poet and singer and musician and warrior and ruler. And he's flawed: he's ultimately very human, and, inside his family, very vulnerable. He commits crimes, makes mistakes. He gets hurt. I think at one stage or another every reader of the books of Samuel falls in love with something about the figure of David. And he's an epic figure, too. We have more narrative about David than about anyone else in the Bible, Moses included. In fact, the biography of David in 1-2 Samuel is probably the best biography, literarily, ever produced in antiquity.

What prompted you to expose the truth about the real King David?

Baruch Halpern: Two things inspired the book, though I wouldn't call it "the truth about" David. First of all, a team of revisionist scholars has spent the better part of two decades now publishing the claim that David never existed. This book is really intended to make the case that he did exist, and to make a substantial case. Second, no one has really knit together all the types of evidence that triangulate on David — the closest is probably Jim Flanagan's book, David's Social Drama. But we have archaeological evidence both of settlement distribution and of social life, we have recently discovered inscriptions, we have new readings of old inscriptions. This book adds a very close reading of the books of Samuel and Kings, informed by an understanding of how such books were written, and it adds attention to all the possibilities and historical factors that we know must have existed but are not represented in the text. No one has ever tried reading the text as though it were a royal inscription. But since that is exactly what it is — a royal composition — it pays dramatic and graphic dividends to read it the way one would read any other ancient royal inscription. And the fact that reading it that way produces results is evidence both of the antiquity of the books of Samuel and of David's existence. Well, debating David's existence is kind of boring. What this approach produces is evidence of the nature of his activities.

In David's Secret Demons you portray David as someone "whom it would be unwise to invite to dinner" in contrast to the typical view of David "as a man after God's own heart." Why do you claim that David was a serial killer rather than a pious king?

Baruch Halpern: The books of Samuel spend a lot of time providing David with alibis when enemies of his die, usually violently. There is a long, long list of people from whose deaths he profits. Now, as Lady Brackenthwaite says, in The Importance of Being Earnest (I'm paraphrasing here), "To lose one parent is a tragedy; to lose both looks very much like carelessness." It would be natural enough for one or two of David's enemies to pass away coincidentally. But eight or nine? Half of whom are killed by David's subordinates? This looks very much like carelessness. All I know is, knowing David definitely increased the statistical likelihood of dying violently. He wasn't a person I would have wanted to spend a lot of quality time with.

In David's Secret Demons, you say the Bible paints a picture of David as "a ruler altogether too good to be true." Are you implying that the biblical texts are unreliable?

Baruch Halpern: Not unreliable so much as representing a particular viewpoint. I've made it my business to try to look at Israelite history from a perspective different from that represented in our literary sources. That is, all of Biblical literature comes to us courtesy of the royal court of David's family or courtesy of the temple of which his family were the original patrons. So naturally, everything we read expresses a Jerusalemite perspective, looking down from the high hilltops on the rest of the country of Judah, and on neighboring countries, like Israel or Ammon. But there were other viewpoints, and the books of Samuel are very rich material for investigating these — because these books answer a lot of accusations that were leveled against David by his enemies. By following the argument of Samuel that paints David in a favorable light and defends him against the accusations, we can reconstruct not the truth about David, but what his enemies accused him of. Not the truth, of course — because we tend to live in a Manichean political universe in which our friends are angels of Light and our enemies the sons of Darkness. But we can get a picture in the round, recover a perspective otherwise lost to us, about David.

You've said, "We know that Samuel is telling the truth because it is nothing but lies." How do the lies prove the truth?

Baruch Halpern: I personally tend to side with David's enemies, at least in part because it is titillating to engage in some good-natured historical irreverence. I therefore say, Samuel is nothing but lies, covering up David's demons, his murders, his origins, his relations with Saul and his family. But the point is, the books of Samuel defend him against specific accusations, and we do not have any ancient literature, or medieval, that defends a fictional character against accusations of murder or of being a foreigner, and so on. He must be real, therefore. It's interesting, too, that if you look at Shakespeare's plays, the only characters whom he really defends against specific charges are Tudor kings — that is, kings from his patron dynasty — and figures, like Henry V, whom the Tudors invoked as role models from the past.

The other thing about Samuel is that if you read it literally, and very very closely, it looks a lot like other royal literature from the ancient world. It doesn't openly concoct events that contemporaries might falsify — instead, it puts things in the light most favorable to David and especially Solomon. So it is spinning the news, so to speak, just as politicians do today. Think of Bill Clinton's claim to have balanced the federal budget. It was mainly smoke and mirrors, but it was a defensible claim all the same. In some ways, David's people were even more sophisticated than modern spin-doctors; but mostly, the means of persuasion that they employed were, after all, ancient. And just as advertising becomes more and more sophisticated over time, so that television commercials from the 1950's seem extraordinarily crude to us today, ancient advertising — royal images and inscriptions — also developed over time, and became more and more sophisticated. Samuel is basically a 10th-century text. By the 7th century (BCE), Israelite royal literature was absolutely extraordinary in its techniques of persuasion. Samuel in some ways looks crude in comparison. Which is why it is easier to understand its specific agenda.

Is there any good news in David's Secret Demons for readers who are troubled by the notion that the Bible might not be historically accurate?

Baruch Halpern: Personally, I think that the message is very positive for those readers. The book is based on a conclusion from other ancient records — namely, that the authors tend to report real events, almost always, and that they simply put the best possible face on them. Now, if the reader wants to believe that David did not order a bunch of killings for which the text alibis him, that is fine. The heart of my argument is that his enemies accused David of those killings, and that should disturb no one. Admittedly, I do find the accusations persuasive, but that's just me as a historian, and no historian ever gets anything altogether right. Since I think the historians who wrote the historical books of the Bible were real historians, too, I give them some credit for getting things wrong the way modern historians do.

Since you dedicated David's Secret Demons "for the whoops of horror it occasioned" it's obvious that you anticipated how provocative this book would be. Are you afraid of offending those who are already unhappy with your view?

Baruch Halpern: My thought was, let's imagine David from the perspective of his enemies. It's not important to me if the enemies are right or wrong, just that they were real, just like David himself. So I had a lot of fun, and I hope the reader can have a lot of fun, imagining — based on the evidence in Samuel and inscriptions and in the ground — how people who disliked David envisioned him, what problems they thought he was responsible for. And the more time you spend imagining yourself into the minds of the ancient Israelites, the more hilarious the accusations can get.

This is a conspiracy theory book, in the end, which is why I enjoyed writing it so much. And somewhere between the most paranoiac reading of the history that I could come up with — the enemies' viewpoint — and the account in Samuel, the Solomonic viewpoint, lies the truth. Yes, I have a particular vision of David, a reconstruction, but my brief is to expose the unwritten story, including things that the books of Samuel, like other ancient royal records, simply do not speak about. People unhappy with my viewpoint ought to be happy to have another ancient view of David to chew on.

Whose secret demons are you going to expose next?

Baruch Halpern: Teletubbies. No, really, my current project is a history of Biblical Israel, from a non-Jerusalemite perspective. But after that, I'm going to do the astronomy of Biblical books, and its connections to Assyrian and Babylonian astronomy and pre-Socratic philosophy. The fact is, Greek philosophy has its roots in the ancient Near East, and is closely related to classical Biblical prophecy. It's time to nail the connections down carefully and responsibly and to show how both the Israelite and the Greek perspectives contributed to the birth of our civilization.