David the Cosmopolitan King
In the Old Testament, David is the King of Israel par excellence. He is fiercely devoted to the God of Israel and used by Him to conquer Israel’s long-standing enemies. He carves out an Israelite Empire by using stern methods that may be off-putting to modern readers. In his lineage and his court, however, we see hints of the love God has for all nations, hints that become beautiful reality in David’s ultimate Son, Jesus Christ.
It all starts far back in David’s ancestry. He has three foreign women in his lineage, and not the kinds one would think he’d be proud of. Genesis 38 tells a squalid story about Judah and Tamar. Tamar is a young Canaanite woman, married sequentially to Judah’s two oldest sons. When God kills both of them for wickedness, Judah superstitiously blames Tamar and puts off his promise to marry her to his last son. Tamar, desperate not to be a defenseless, childless widow, poses as a prostitute to sleep with Judah and becomes pregnant with his twins, one of whom is David’s ancestor. Nobody emerges from the story with much credit, but the need on Tamar’s part to have children in that culture is so understandable that Judah admits, “She hath been more righteous than I” (verse 26, KJV). David himself apparently names one of his daughters after her.
After the Exodus, David’s family tree includes another Canaanite, this one a genuine prostitute named Rahab. While God orders the annihilation of the Canaanite population, Rahab finds salvation by repenting and aiding the Israelites in their conquest of Canaan. She marries an Israelite and furthers the Messianic line one more generation.
Then there’s Ruth. She is a poor widow from the people of Moab, a nation sprung from Lot’s intercourse with his daughter. They are a group singled out so that their descendants are banned from the assembly of God for ten generations. The Book of Ruth is a lovely story, but one of the reasons it was written may have been to explain a potential embarrassment in David’s pedigree. This it does by showing how Ruth trusts the God of Israel enough to go to Israel for a potential life of poverty rather than give Him up for her own people’s gods. God rewards her faith with a noble (and prosperous) husband, and she becomes David’s great-grandmother.
We come to David, and we see at least three more foreigners saved by Israel’s God. Two of them were from nations God had ordered destroyed. Uriah the Hittite’s unimpeachable behavior when David calls him back from the front to cover David’s adultery with Uriah’s wife doesn’t only set David’s sin in darkest contrast. It also highlights Uriah’s faith. He is no mere mercenary; he finds it dishonorable to be any better off than “the Ark and Israel and Judah” and his comrades in the army (II Samuel 11:12, KJV).
Araunah the Jebusite must have been one of the bravest men alive. When David sins in some way with his census, God sends the Angel of Death to hover over Jerusalem, the city that until recently belonged to the Jebusites. In I Chronicles, Araunah’s sons flee at the sight of the angel, but Araunah apparently keeps at his business of threshing the grain, at least according to the NJKV translation. Given that the almost universal reaction of even stalwart believers to angels is fear, Araunah must, in my opinion, have had a deep faith in Israel’s God.
David, in addition to his mighty men, has an elite corps of Pelethites and Cherethites, as they are usually translated. This translation tends to obscure that the Pelethites are Philistines, from Israel’s mortal enemies at the time! We don’t know how many were God-fearers, but we can be sure at least one was. Ittai the Gittite (that is, a native of Gath, Goliath’s hometown) is their leader at the time of Absalom’s rebellion. Again, he is no mere mercenary. When David offers to discharge him as David flees Jerusalem, Ittai swears by the LORD that he will remain faithful to the death.
God’s love for the world is not as clearly expressed in the Old Testament when He has one chosen people, but there are plenty of hints. Even as He’s singling out Abraham and His seed to be His peculiar treasure, God tells Abraham, “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3, KJV). The story of David and the Messianic line has many such indications that God will open salvation to the Gentiles. Three women outside of Israel find salvation in Israel’s God and become ancestors to the Messiah before David. In David’s reign, while he is subduing the nations, three outstanding members of those nations demonstrate their devotion to Israel’s God, and maybe even more who go without being named specifically in Samuel or Chronicles. This is only fitting, as it’s David’s greater Son, Jesus Christ, who tears down the wall of separation to invite peoples from all nations into the kingdom He inherits from David.