Mikal

Strong is the tension between Saul and David by which he feels threatened and awaits the opportunity to destroy him. The Story presents it to him through his daughter Mikal: "Mikal, Saul's daughter fell in love with David, they told him about it and he liked it because it offered him a pretext to make him perish, in fact he thought: I will give it to him, but it will be a trap for him and the hand of the Philistines will be upon him. " Saul agrees, asking as a dowry the foreskins of a hundred Philistines, sure that he would fall in the struggle. David accepts and returns victorious, bringing the king double the required foreskins. Saul realizes that the Lord was with David, but his hatred grows so much that he wants to kill him. But Mikal urged him to flee and as a woman in love, intelligent and determined, she organized the escape: she drops him from the window and places in her bed a puppet made with terafim (family idols, something similar to the Penates among the Romans) thus drawing deceived the servants of the king.
Saul does not give up and orders that it be brought to him with the whole bed.

The scene is ironic and comical at the same time : the servants return to Mikal pretending to be in bed and sick and find themselves in front of a puppet. When asked by her father "Why did you deceive me?", The daughter justifies herself by lying: David would have threatened her with death if she had not let him go. Mikal pretends to be a frightened victim, but she is the winner. The ruse has succeeded and the persecuted can escape, thus starting an escape time during which Saul gives Mikal to Palti the son of Lais as his wife.
But David, returned and crowned king, claims possession of his wife Mikal remembering that he made her his wife at the price of one hundred Philistine foreskins. Mikal returns to her husband and disappears in the story of King David's victories and rise. We find it again in the solemn moment in which the Ark enters the procession "in the city of David": Jerusalem conquered. Looking out of the window, "she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord and despised him in his heart." She, the daughter of Saul had been accustomed to many other manifestations of royalty and David's behavior seems out of control, just like a "man of nothing".

This way of looking at the bridegroom denounces a relationship now devoid of affection , tenderness and admiration and reveals the inability to understand to what extent the love for the Lord who had chosen him filled his heart with his husband. Mikal does not understand, but the people appreciate and share. Before the Ark the king did not behave as a sovereign holder of power, but became a servant and officiated as a priest (the ephod he wore reveals it) mediator of blessing and jumped and danced to express joy like a man whatever because God alone is the Powerful and to him alone honor and glory compete. Mikal has his heart closed to love and it is perhaps for this reason that he had no children until "his death" as the narrator concludes.
(1Sam 18.20-29; 19.11-18; 25.44; 2Sam 6.14-23)

Anna Maria del Prete
NP August / September 2020