Of David, a Psalm on Carrying the Ark into the City of David

In their commentaries on Psalm 24, Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler¹ and Robert Alter² infer that the first half of Psalm 24 is a liturgy to accompany individuals as they ascend to the Temple. They presume the second half to be an accompaniment as the Ark of the Covenant is brought into the Temple following a battle, citing I Samuel 4 as evidence of the practice of bringing the Ark to battles. While I do not dismiss the possibility that Psalm 24 was recited during pilgrimages, in checking the context of the citation, it appears to me that the psalm is, rather, a unified composition that is far more closely tied to the Ark’s journeys in Samuel and Kings generally, and to the moment of the Ark’s entry into the City of David specifically.

“Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD? Who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not taken a false oath by My life or sworn deceitfully” (Ps. 24:3-4). In I Samuel 2:12-17 and 22-25, the sons of Eli the Priest are described as scoundrels, using the sacrificial cult for personal gain and committing sexual improprieties. In essence, Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, fail the test of Psalm 24:4, and God determines that they will die. If Hophni and Phinehas were lacking in integrity, they were not lacking in courage: as Israel faces defeat at the hands of the Philistines (I Sam. 4), they bring the Ark of the Covenant down from Shiloh to accompany the army in battle at Even Ezer. But, borne by priests of ill repute, the Ark offers no victory. The Israelites are routed, the Ark is captured, and Hophni and Phinehas are slain (I Sam. 4:11). They will not ascend the mountain of the LORD.

Initially deeply fearful that the Ark would be the vehicle of God’s wrath against them — “God has come to the camp . . . Woe to us! Nothing like this has ever happened before” (I Sam. 4:7-8) — the Philistines conclude in the wake of battle that there is nothing to fear, and carry off the Ark as booty into the very precincts of the Temple of Dagon in Ashdod (5:1-2). Rather than enjoying the spoils of their battle, the Philistines find they have instead stolen a Trojan Horse: God the Warrior now erupts in their midst, toppling the statue of Dagon (5:3), then escalating to plagues in Ashdod (vv. 4-6), Gath (v. 9), and Ekron (vv. 10-12). The Philistines, defeated, resolve to return the Ark to Israel (6:2). By deferring His victory from the Israelites’ own combat until the Ark was carried back to Philistia, God leaves no room for doubt: not by man’s hand was victory secured, but only by the hand of God. So it echoes in Psalm 24:8: “Who is the King of glory? The LORD, mighty and valiant, the LORD, valiant in battle.”

Now begins the ascent of the Ark toward Zion. In I Samuel 6, the Philistines set the Ark on its way to Beit Shemesh in the care of two cows. The Israelites in Beit Shemesh, stricken (v. 19) because they disrespected the Ark by looking at its contents, ask in an eerie evocation of Psalm 24’s interrogatives: “Who can stand in attendance on the LORD, this holy God? And to whom shall He go up from us?” (I Sam. 6:20). Perhaps recognizing that they, like Hophni and Phinehas, have failed the test of Psalm 24:3-6, the Beit Shemeshites call on the men of Kiryat Yearim to take the Ark. It then resides in Kiryat Yearim for twenty years (I Sam. 6:21-7:2).

II Samuel 6 picks up the story, recounting how King David reclaims the Ark from Kiryat Yearim to complete the journey to Zion: “Then David and all the troops that were with him set out from Baalim of Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God to which the Name was attached, the name LORD of Hosts Enthroned on the Cherubim” (II Sam. 6:2). Again, the Samuel narrative evokes Psalm 24, similarly identifying HaShem Tzevaot, the LORD of Hosts: “Who is the King of glory? — the LORD of Hosts, He is the King of glory!” (Ps. 24:10). As the Ark begins its ascent to Jerusalem, God the Warrior — described in the psalm (v. 8) as HaShem Izuz, “the LORD mighty” — again manifests, striking Uzzah, who impermissibly grabs the Ark, setting up an intriguing wordplay between the narrative’s Uzzah and the psalm’s izuz. David, chastened by Uzzah’s death, delays bringing the Ark farther to Jerusalem for three months; when he does complete the journey, David dances, with the text extending the wordplay: “David whirled with all his might [oz] before the LORD” (II Sam. 6:14).

Shortly, in II Samuel 7, David will consult with the prophet Nathan (vv. 1-2), only to find (vv. 12-13) that his dream of creating the ultimate resting place of the Ark, the Temple, will be deferred to his son. While the general unfitness of Hophni and Phinehas with regard to Psalm 24’s test of “clean hands and a pure heart” was discussed above, this choice of words — closely mirroring Abimelech’s plea in Genesis 20:5 following that king’s near-adultery with Sarah — points to David’s later adultery with Bathsheba. The psalmist deems David unworthy to ascend the mountain of the LORD based on his violation of the covenant secreted within the Ark. Lacking the purity of heart to build the Temple, it is left to Solomon to speak of the intentions of his father: “And it was in the heart of David my father to build a house for the name of the LORD God of Israel. And the LORD said to David my father, ‘Inasmuch as it was in your heart to build a house for My name, you have done well, for it was in your heart’” (I Kgs. 8:17-18). Ironically, the only reference to “heart” in the moment of the Ark’s arrival in Jerusalem is when David’s wife Michal sees his joyful dancing and “she scorned him in her heart” (II Sam. 6:16). Ultimately, it is David’s later coveting of and cohabiting with Bathsheba — direct violations of the Ten Commandments enshrined in the Ark — that make him unworthy of bringing the Ark and its tablets to Mount Zion.

But at this point, upon entering Jerusalem, David sees himself and his subjects as Psalm 24:5-6 describes: “He shall bear blessing from the LORD and bounty from his rescuing God. This is the generation of His seekers, those who search out your presence, Jacob.” He does not yet apprehend that the “generation of His seekers” is not his own — he has just retrieved the Ark from the house of Obed-Edom upon hearing that “the LORD has blessed Obed-Edom’s house and all that belongs to him because of the Ark of God” (II Sam. 6:12). The psalm, of course, reflects the reality. Its parallel to “generation of His seekers,” “those who search out your presence” [mevakshey fanekha], appears elsewhere in the Bible with reference to Solomon: “All the world came to pay homage to Solomon [mevakshim et peney Shelomo]” (I Kgs. 10:24; and similarly II Chr. 9:23). Similarly, the psalm’s reference to blessing could well evoke Solomon’s celebration of the Temple and the Ark in I Kings 8, which employs “bless” six times in the chapter (vv. 14, 15, 54, 55, 56, 66), spanning generations back to the Exodus and forward to the future continuity of the dynasty. Ultimately, it is Solomon’s that is the “generation of His seekers,” fit to carry the Ark into the Temple. Unaware of all that will follow, David anticipates building the Temple himself — constructing its walls and mounting its gates, which will one day soon be lifted to admit the Ark and God’s own presence into the Holy of Holies, a hope that resonates in the words of Psalm 24: “O gates, lift up your heads! Up high, you everlasting doors, so the King of glory may come in” (vv. 7, 9).

As the correspondence between the psalm and the Ark narrative developed, Rabbi Alan Yuter³ observed that the psalm contains six occurrences of God’s name and that the verbal root nun-sin-aleph (“to raise”) in various conjugations similarly appears six times — a fascinating observation, because there are six Israelite locations at which the Ark rests in the Samuel narrative: Shiloh, the army bivouac at Even Ezer, Beit Shemesh, Kiryat Yearim, the house of Obed-Edom, and the City of David. Implicit in the six locations are six movements of the Ark; the last of these movements is anticipated but not consummated in Samuel — the movement from the City of David to the Temple Mount. David appears to ritually represent the six-stage journey on departure from the house of Obed-Edom: “When the bearers of the Ark of the LORD had moved forward six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling” (II Sam. 6:13).

It is no great leap to associate these six stages of the Ark’s journey to its destined resting place with the six days of Creation, with its eventual seventh location representing the place of its Sabbath, its rest — notably, the I Chronicles 15 account of the departure from the house of Obed-Edom cites the sacrifice of seven bulls and seven rams (v. 26). The association of the Ark’s dwelling with Creation is one with which the biblical narrative is familiar: the Exodus 39 account of the completion of the Tabernacle is told in seven paragraphs, each ending “as the LORD had commanded Moses,” and concludes (vv. 32-43) with language strikingly evocative of Genesis 2:1-3. Again, the correspondence between Creation and the Ark’s resting place is seen in the sequel to the Samuel account: in I Kings 8, when Solomon delivers the Ark to the Temple, he does so (v. 2) in the seventh month and initiates a celebration lasting (v. 65) “seven days and again seven days, fourteen days in all.” He uses the language of Shabbat in referring to the place of the Ark — “a place where you may rest forever” (v. 13) — tying nicely to Psalm 24’s “everlasting doors” (vv. 7, 9), and the earthly counterpart to “the Heavens, the place of your rest” (I Kgs. 8:39, 43, 49). And so, the introduction to Psalm 24, which extols God as the Creator of the world — “The earth is the LORD’s and all that it holds, the world and its inhabitants. For He founded it upon the ocean, set it on the nether-streams” (vv. 1-2) — becomes evident: if God’s Creation was complete on the seventh day, so too will the Ark’s journey to the Temple be realized.

But whatever his designs for the future, David is exultant as he settles the Ark in a tent that he has pitched for it in the City of David. He offers sacrifices and invokes the LORD of Hosts: “When David finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of Hosts” (II Sam. 6:18). It is not hard to imagine his words of blessing being the very words of Psalm 24.

Rather than the conflation of two psalms as some conclude,⁴ Psalm 24 is an artfully crafted unity, as the correspondence to the Ark saga indicates, and its poetic structure reinforces that conclusion. The psalm has two distinct sections, each ending in Selah. The first contains six verses, again corresponding to the six resting places of the Ark through its entry into the City of David, and thematically corresponds to the concerns of the Samuel narrative, speaking to the character of the people and their worthiness for holy service to this point. It draws its information from the past — Creation, the journey of the Ark, and the performance of the Israelites to date. This section contains three occurrences of God’s name and two of the root nun-sin-aleph, in the pattern HHNNH, with two versets in each verse except the tripartite verse 4, the key sentence of the section. The second section (vv. 7-10) moves into the future, looking to the construction of the Temple and the relocation of the Ark to its final destination, achieving heightened intensity through two interrogatives instead of one and an entirely tripartite sentence structure. Its keyword pattern is NNHHNNH — the last five occurrences repeating the HHNNH pattern of vv. 1-6 and creating a neat envelope; by verse, the pattern is NN (v. 7), HH (v. 8), NN (v. 9), H (v. 10).

In the climactic last verse — “Who is the King of glory? — the LORD of Hosts, He is the King of glory! Selah” (v. 10) — the structure and sound of verse 8 is echoed but not repeated: “Who is the King of glory? — the LORD, mighty and valiant, the LORD, valiant in battle” (v. 8). In verse 10’s first verset, the interrogative “who is He” replaces the “who is” of verse 8, intensifying the specificity of the question, while the response substitutes a full restatement of the question for the clean parallel repetition of God’s name in verse 8 — resulting in a solitary, final invocation of God’s name, reflective of His oneness and primacy.

The two sections and ten verses of Psalm 24 are a celebration of the Ark of the Covenant — its odyssey to the City of David and the aspiration to settle it in the grandeur of the Temple on Mount Zion. But ultimately the value of the Ark is what resides within: the two tablets of the Covenant, represented by the two sections of the psalm, and the Ten Commandments hewn into them, evoked by the psalm’s ten verses. Psalm 24 is too carefully constructed to be a spontaneous composition by David in the moment of entry to the City of David, and its awareness of the Bathsheba incident would indicate later composition. But the structures and allusions of Psalm 24 strongly suggest it was written of that moment, when David “blessed the people in the name of the LORD of Hosts” (II Sam. 6:18) — “the LORD of Hosts, He is the King of glory! Selah” (Ps. 24:10).