Hayyei Sarah (Haftarah)

“Adonijahu shall rule”

This week’s haftarah (1 Kings 1:1-31) is of an altogether different type. It is not a particularly pleasant story, involving an old man’s humiliation, brothers struggling over their inheritance before their father is even dead, and royal court intrigue.

The story takes place in the last days of King David. The king is very elderly, and constantly feels cold. A young girl, Avishag (also, incidentally, a Shunemite), is brought to share his bed and warm him up: a kind of living hot water bottle. The text rather pointedly observes that she served this purpose alone; despite her great beauty, “the king did not know her” (v. 4). The demise of the king’s sexual powers, which evidently becomes known, serves as a signal for open rebellion and jockeying for the succession. David’s sons, Adonijah, gathers a group of followers and claims the throne. The scene is like a kind of replay of the rebellion of Absalom years earlier (2 Sam 15-18): indeed, the very first thing Adonijah does is to take a chariot, horses, and fifty men running before him, exactly like Absalom (compare v. 5 with 2 Sam 15:1). Even the cast of characters—Joab ben Zeruiah and Eviathar the priest, disgruntled royal retainers, who supported both Absalom and than Adonijah—is the same. The Adonijah faction goes to the spring of Rogel, just outside the city, and proclaim him king with a huge feast, blowing of the shofar, and shouts of “Long live the king Adonijah.”

Meanwhile, word of this gets back to the royal palace, where Adonijah’s the Davidic loyalists are gathered, including his son Solomon. Nathan the prophet lays a plan for gaining the kings’ support for confirming Solomon’s right of succession. Bath-sheba is the first to approach the king: the strategy is presumably that the woman whom he once loved with a reckless passion (and still loves?), now in the role of a weighty royal matriarch, would have the greatest persuasive power over him, particularly if pleading on behalf of herself and her son Solomon. They fear that, if Adonijah in fact comes to power, both she and Solomon (and the other loyalists: Nathan, Zadok the priest, Benayahu, etc.) will be ruthlessly slaughtered as soon as David is gone. Then Nathan enters, asking as if innocently, “Did you really say that Adonijah is to be king?,” thereby forcing him to proclaim Solomon his rightful heir. The balance of the chapter (vv. 32-53), which is not read in the haftarah, describes how this choice was affirmed in a public anointing ceremony, and ends with Adonijah begging Solomon for his very life.

Those of us living in the Middle East are reminded, lehavdil, of the scene enacted some years ago, when the dying but strong-minded King Hussein came home to straighten out the succession to his own throne, and the dramatic last minute change in which the young prince Abdallah superceded his uncle Hassan.

In a revealing remark near the beginning of this chapter, the narrator comments of Adonijah that “his father never chastised him in his life, asking him ‘Why did you do that?’.” In other words, this whole shameful affair, pitting brother against brother, had its roots in a profound educational failure on the part of David. As courageous as he may have been on the battlefield, as decisive and regal as he may have been during his forty year reign as king, he was an indulgent, sentimental, weak father, who did not know how to put limits on his own children (see almost anywhere in 2 Samuel). One may well imagine Solomon uttering the verse in Proverbs, ”spare the rod and spoil the child,” in reaction to what he witnessed growing up in this strife-ridden royal family. Needless, to say, these lessons are applicable to those o us in humbler walks of life as well.

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Why was this particular passage selected as the haftarah for this portion? On the face of it, it was chosen because of the death of Sarah with which the portion begins (Gen 23:1-2). There are two major death-bed scenes in the Torah, which dominant their respective portions: that of Jacob (Vayehi; Gen 48-50), and that of Moses (Vezot ha-berakha; Deut 33-34). The former takes as its haftarah the immediate sequel to the chapter under discussion (1 Kgs 2); the latter, read on Simhat Torah, when we finish the entire Torah, takes the chapter immediately following it in the Bible, Joshua 1, as its haftarah.

But Sarah’s death, while opening this week’s parsha and providing its title, is not elaborated in any way. It thus seems strange that it should provide the basis for selection of the haftarah. The two main subjects of the portion are: the negotiations to buy the cave of Machpelah (Gen 23), which, while required to bury Sarah, is quite different from a death-bed scene; and the search for a wife for Isaac (Gen 24). But it would seem that the Rabbis were hard put to find any suitable passage from the Nevi’im for either of these episodes. Offhand, there are no tales of shidduchim, of the process of match-making, in the Prophets. (There are a number of sordid sexual episodes: David and Bathsheba, the rape-killing of the concubine in Gibeah, and Amnon and Tamar, but the Sages specifically state that these are “not to be read publicly,” and in any event this is something quite different. Samson’s marriage (Judges 15) is the only wedding described in any detail, but the girl was a non-Israelite, his parents disapproved, and the whole business ended rather badly. There is, to my mind, a significant parallel to the purchase of the cave of the Machpelah in the story of Jeremiah and his uncle Hanamel, who redeemed a plot of land in Anatoth prior to going into exile, as a sign of confidence in the eventual return to the Land of Israel (Jeremiah 32); however, chapter is already “taken” as the haftarah for Behar. If I had my ‘druthers, perhaps I would have use it here, using Chapter 34 of that same book (about the sabbatical year) as the haftarah for Behar rather than for Mishpatim, and turning elsewhere (perhaps to Joshua 24—the making of a covenant with the people over the observance of the “laws and statutes” of the Torah) for Mishpatim—but the Masoretes did not choose that particular route.

Beyond the seeming lack of other available options, the Sages clearly found valuable lessons and values expressed in this particular chapter. First, the educational insight already mentioned above. Second, and more important, we know that the Davidic dynasty was of great importance in Jewish history and deeply captured the midrashic imagination; it is integrally connected to our Messianic hopes; it is even explicitly mentioned in one of the blessings of the haftarah, suggesting that the Prophetic readings generally were related to the hopes for restoration of the Davidic monarchy. Hence, the establishment and confirmation of the first link in David’s succession, described here, was of vital importance (even if the rival was also Davidic), and deserving of a place in the canon of haftarot.