In Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks' retelling of the King David story, the women won't keep quiet and Jonathan gets his man, Tom McKinlay reports.
''David put his hand in his bag, took out a stone, slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell face down on the ground.''
It is one of the best-known passages in the Bible, the slaying of Goliath in the first book of Samuel.
But it's arguably not even the best story about David.
What about the bride price King Saul demanded for the hand of his daughter Michal, the foreskins of 100 Philistines?
Or his terrible betrayal of the good soldier Uriah the Hittite?
David's story is the original epic.
Whether it's feats of great bravery, displays of rare talent or acts of barbaric butchery, David's story has it all.
There is nothing else quite like it in the Bible.
Indeed, it's the first cradle-to-grave biography we have.
But its grand sweep was not what inspired Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks to make the saga the subject of her new novel, The Secret Chord.
Rather, she was prompted by her son Nathaniel's decision to take up the harp, just as did David, the most famous harpist of them all.
Whatever the motivation, Brooks has taken David's story and filled in the gaps, casting the already well-known characters into palpable, three-dimensional relief, in the process providing another way of understanding why the time-worn tale of a distant tribe continues to resonate.
On the phone from her home in Martha's Vineyard on the US East Coast, the Australian-born author says she thought she knew the story when she first decided to take it on but came to realise there was a great deal more there.
''I think we think we know it. I didn't know the best parts of it, actually,'' she says.
''I think, like a lot of people, I thought I knew about David and I could have told you the greatest hits, if you like. I could have told you David and Goliath, because that's a cliche we hear every day, a 'David and Goliath battle', and I could have told you about Bathsheba (Batsheva in Brooks' telling), but I don't think I had a clue about the incredible relationship with his first wife, I didn't realise that the old tying the bed sheets together and escaping through the window came from the Bible.''
Many of the other stories, she discovered on closer acquaintance, are the ones she favours now, particularly the relationship between David and the prophet Nathan (Natan, in The Secret Chord), ''who is the only one who has the guts to tell him that he has let himself down, he has failed, he is not living up to his principles''.
In her novel, it is Natan who records events for posterity.
Brooks, who will be in Dunedin next month as part of a tour to promote the book, says she felt no trepidation in taking on such a big story.
''Not really, to be honest. I feel a certain responsibility to the business of writing about the past. I like to think of myself as fairly faithful to the history, as far as we know it, and I like to let my imagination work in the places where the historical record falls silent and doesn't tell us what exactly happened.
"But with David, it is a fascinating puzzle because he only really exists for us in the pages of the Bible, because he is not written about in any other sources at the time and yet he exists so vividly.
''As the British politician Duff Cooper once observed, he had to have existed because no people would make up such a flawed character for a national hero.''
Beyond the character of David, Brooks found plenty of ground to explore, particularly when it came to the women in his life.
''You only get three or four sentences about each of the women in the [original] narrative but they are brilliant sentences. They give you a real sense of a real person, which is really unusual in the Bible, which tends to be a very blokey book.''
For Brooks, one of the great pleasures was trying to take what is there and ''seeing what an exercise in imaginative empathy would do to flesh out the lives of these intriguing women''.
Raised Catholic in Australia, Brooks was taught by some ''fabulously feminist nuns'' who encouraged her to question everything.
She questioned the Church's treatment of women and lapsed.
Then she met her husband, a Jew, and, cognisant of the 20th century and that Judaism passes through the maternal line, determined she would not be the end of this line.
So, as a gesture ''more to history than religion'', she converted.
As a result, Brooks' David is taken from the Hebrew Study Bible, so Nathan is Natan, among other close transliterations.
Getting the right balance
However, a care for the future of the Jewish world is one thing. Compromising a good yarn is another.
There was to be none of that, Brooks says, regardless of any offence she might give to those who have King David on a pedestal.
''I am of the belief that we don't have the right not to be offended by other people's interpretation. If we are offended, that is the cost of doing business in an democracy. I am offended every day by Donald Trump.''
The possibility of offence is real.
''I read one scholar who said the whole Bible is really about him, in some ways,'' Brooks says. ''Everything that comes before is leading up to his story and afterward the New Testament is so emphatic about connecting Jesus' lineage.''
The Nazarene was born in ''royal David's city'', as the carol recounts.
''So in a way, both the Old Testament and the New Testament really have deep roots in the Davidic story.''
Offence is as likely to kick in as anywhere when it comes to the relationship between David and Jonathan (Yonatan).
For Brooks, they are lovers. Passionate, kissing, all-embracing. For the author, that was a given.
''I think you have to trust the text and I think you have to apply your own experiences and sensibility to it. I am not saying I know the truth of this relationship but if you read the plain word of the text, the text tells us that David and Jonathan's souls were knit together. That is a beautiful characterisation of a full relationship to me.
"And when Jonathan is killed in battle, the lament that David writes is very explicit, saying, `Your love was dearer to me than the love of any woman.'
''So this was a great and powerful love and I find it impossible from where I live in 2015 to imagine a full and profound love like that that doesn't have a physical component to it.''
Any other reading is only possible ''if you had some opprobrium about homosexuality'', she says.
''I think we have come to a point in human history where we can accept that love is love.''
Indeed, Brooks was ''ticked off'' when the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in the 2004 film Troy was not portrayed as physical.
''Why would you do that? It is just crazy; you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to come up with any other interpretation.''
Of David's women, Brooks nominates Michal (Mikkal) as her favourite.
Her marriage to David is drama and tragedy, verse upon verse in the scriptures.
And Brooks draws that out in The Secret Chord, imagining a more complex dynamic still to explain the withering denouement.
Brooks says the few short lines that capture that moment in the book of Samuel are one of the most brutal marital scenes she has read.
''She devastates him at the moment of his greatest joy; she just pulls the rug right out from under him as only somebody who has loved you and knows you can wound you.''
The patriarchy might want to take a breath before approaching some of Brooks' empathetic imaginings, not only the scenes involving Michal but also the opportunities afforded Bathsheba and Tamar to give their testimony.
''We always see these things through the male gaze, so I tried to turn the camera around, if you like, and change the point of view,'' Brooks says.
The rape of David's daughter Tamar, by her brother, is ''a horrible scene'' the author says was hard to write, but she was going to whitewash nothing.
Experiences of Middle East
In rebalancing the narrative, Brooks drew on her previous life as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, including in the Middle East.
''I spent so much time with all kinds of women in the Muslim Middle East, often women who were in very powerful families, and they did not exercise power publicly but they certainly did privately within their relationships in ways that are not clear.
"I think one of the reasons that US foreign policy has been such a failure in that region is the unwillingness to recognise the significance of the mosque and the bedroom in Middle Eastern society.
''If you do not understand that, you are always going to make mistakes the way we have been doing.''
If David's relationships with those close to him were fraught, his interactions with strangers were often beyond the pale.
Witness 1 Samuel, 27:9: ''David struck the land, leaving neither man nor woman alive ... ''.
Spurred on by his conviction in a divine calling, anything was allowable.
There's more viscera than Game of Thrones, and Brooks doubles down.
It is impossible to read the story without considering events in the same part of the world today.
''You can't escape the contemporary resonances of this story,'' Brooks says.
''They are everywhere and not just the Middle East. That's where it is easiest to see them, but I have to say I was struck when I was writing this book, General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, his troops used to call him King David.
"And it turned out to be ironic, of course, when he failed his own moral code and committed adultery with his biographer. It is like, oh my God, nothing changes!
"Power has its temptations and its empowerments and men who wield great power often fall massively short of the ideals that they espouse.''
It is striking, she says, that this land is still being fought over 3000 years later.
However, Brooks does not recognise a David in the cast of the 21st century.
''I don't see any characters that have the nuance. One of the things that make him such an intriguing subject is that he is a braid of characteristics both good and bad. I don't see a lot of good in Bashar al-Assad, in the leaders of Isis or even Bibi Netanyahu; I think he is a contemptible leader in many ways.
"Let's not even start on the Saudi royal family. I do not see the artists and poets, the people striving to do better. I just see a bunch of bloody-handed tyrants out there.''
None of her experience helps her see a way through the conflict in the Middle East today.
''No, I wish I could say I did. I think it is just getting bleaker. I think the rise of Isis is the most dispiriting thing that has happened in my lifetime.
''I don't think it lends itself to an easy solution. Force, to the extent that any outside country is willing to wield it, is not going to be the answer.''
So having picked apart his story and put it back together for The Secret Chord, Brooks says she views David much as she did when she began.
''I love the complexity and the full humanity of this man. Everything happens to him, every human experience, the best and the worst,'' she says.
''You have to look at this as a man who struggles as we all struggle and often fails to live up to his own best principles, but when he fails he acknowledges his failures and tries to rectify them, which is more than a lot of powerful people do.''
'Passing the love of women'
The nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan remains contentious, University of Otago senior lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Old Testament studies James Harding says.
That is, first of all, because the text is ambiguous.
''They don't tell us explicitly that there was a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan but they do tell us quite clearly that Jonathan loved David.
"At one point, this is after Jonathan has died, David says that Jonathan's love was greater than the love of women, ... that is the main text that has provoked this interpretation.
''The second thing is that ancient texts are not working with quite the same understanding of human relationships and sexuality that we do. So modern readers have a tendency to read things into ancient texts that may not be there, but not necessarily unfairly, because there are overlaps between the two.
''You know, the strength of a modern committed same-sex relationship has a significant overlap with the strength of an ancient same-sex relationship regardless whether it was sexual or not.''
Whatever the case, the relationship is remarkable.
''It is the only case in the Old Testament where you have a male friendship of that strength,'' Dr Harding, who has his own book on the topic, The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception, says.
''Interestingly, in literature, this idea that David and Jonathan had a sexual relationship is quite prominent and so Geraldine Brooks is actually fitting in somehow with that in an interesting way.''
