from the Chapter: "David" in Roberto Calasso's
The Book of all Books (2019 American edition, Farrer, Strauss and Giroux)
One nagging thought haunted David all his life.
He knew he had been sought out and chosen when
he was still a boy tending sheep. And he knew it
was his family that would one day produce the
Messiah. He knew that Yahweh would protect him
to the end, like a shield. Yet he felt Yahweh would
never count him among the patriarchs and would
never speak his name beside the names of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. And David knew that that was
as it should be. There was an abyss between those
forebears and himself. For one thing, life was not
so long, not so dense. David felt it in his bones.
He died at seventy, like any ordinary man in these
new times. Exhausted. Throughout the forty years
of his reign, he had yearned more than anything
else to build the Temple in Jerusalem. But Yahweh
said no. You can prepare for its building, he had
said. You can have the tree trunks brought from
Lebanon. But it won't be you who builds the
Temple, you wouldn't be able to finish the job.
Solomon will do it. The question, as ever, was
time. And something else too, perhaps. Which
was even more irksome, since in the end it would
take Solomon only seven years to build the Temple
(page 34).
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