Michal is the youngest daughter of Israel's first king, Saul. She is also the first wife of King David. Her relationship with David begins in the context of the ongoing power play between David and Saul. She will be an important factor in this struggle and in the rough transition from Saul's royal line to David's. Her story reveals her to be a dynamic woman with a strong sense of agency, who nevertheless suffers in love at the hands of more powerful men.
What we learn about women
- We see an example of a woman who makes her own effective choices and charts her own course on several occasions, but who still suffers from the decisions of men she cannot control. This is not unusual in anyone's life, male or female, of course!
- Michal is able, in protest, to continue to influence important events around her, even though she also suffers for her actions.
- As the daughter of a king, and the wife of a king, Michal is in such an important political role. This kind of role is as constricting as it is glamorous. Neither her father nor her husband protect her. Instead she is used by Saul as a trap to catch David, and by David a prize to show that he has gained control of the kingdom.
What I'm wondering
- Does Michal know God?
- Did David ever love Michal the way she initially loved and chose him?
Michal and David's love story has a clear arc, and Scripture gives us more of Michal's romantic feelings than we sometimes get from our female characters. In the beginning, Michal falls in love with David. King Saul first sees this as useful, though he will later perceive it as threatening. Saul sets David a military challenge to win Michal's hand, in which he hopes David will be killed. However David completes it with flying colors, building his glorious military reputation even further. When Saul sees how much his people and his daughter Michal love David, he becomes very worried. He ultimately sends a secret force to assassinate David. But Michal finds out, and thwarts her father's plan to kill her husband. She helps David with a daring escape which succeeds, but results in his permanent exile from the royal court.
With David gone, Michal finds herself in trouble for treason. She saves herself by claiming that David threatened her with violence. In David's absence, Michal is left alone for years, and their relationship never recovers. Michal eventually remarries when David takes two other wives. As the biblical text continues, David's two newer wives, Abigail and Ahinoam, are frequently referred to as David's two wives, while Michal is no longer mentioned. She is remarried to Palti, who seems to love her deeply. David continues to take many other wives and concubines while he is exiled from Jerusalem.
David finally returns to Jerusalem after the death of Saul and demands Michal to be given back to him. When she is taken away from her new husband Palti, he follows after her for some distance, weeping. This seems to foreshadow a bit the foul play that will take place when as king, David will steal Uriah's wife Bathsheba, and then murder Uriah. At this point, Michal does not seem to be any longer in love with David. Instead she views him with contempt. When David returns to the city, becomes king, and brings the Ark to Jerusalem in celebration and joyful dancing, she openly insults him. Her story ends after this, with David rebuking her, and the text saying, "So Michal, the daughter of Saul, remained childless throughout her entire life."
Though David is always talking about God and his relationship with him, Michal is never recorded interacting with God. This may simply be unreported, but we don't know how well she knew the Lord. It is hard to draw out any moral of the story from her life, but she is a character one can imagine identifying with. And she also seems to illustrate the way life can develop through heartbreak and injustice that seems unfair and remains unresolved.
Michal certainly suffers much from her relationship with David. It's possible that her testimony against him, saying that he threatened her when he escaped King Saul, caused an initial breach between them. Probably though, David would have had no way of coming to her aid, and she could not have come with him--so her choice would have been to do what she did, or to be convicted as a traitor. But to stay in Saul's house at all, was to limit her options with regard to David. David seems to take at least one of his new wives at the same time ("meanwhile") as Michal is remarried to Palti. Maybe one marriage was a response to the other? But that's not clear. If David had remained faithful to Michal would she have been married to Palti? If she had been able to leave her father's house, or to keep from marrying Palti, would David's commitment to his first love have kept him from pursuing so many other women? This is the first round of disappointment and brokenness in their relationship.
When David later demands Michal back from Palti, it is a new chapter. Having gone their separate ways, and seeming to achieve peace, David now tears Michal from her new husband. Her anger with David keeps any old love from rekindling, and Michal is left, again it seems, alone in the house of a king who is keeping her from the one she loves. I do wonder why David does this. Is he trying to prove that he was always coming back for her? Is he pridefully angry that his wife was given to another man? It sort of sends a message that even though she has made another life for herself, she is still under the control of her first husband. And he chooses not to allow her to continue in that freedom.
Michal is clearly a strong woman. She chooses David in love. She thwarts her father, the king, to save his life, and then does what she needs to to save herself when David is gone. She appears to succeed in a second marriage when David begins relationships with other women. When David eventually returns and removes her from her second, probably happy, marriage, she is not shy about criticizing him even though he is the powerful king of Israel. She seems to have maintained her fortitude and done her best with the cards life has dealt her. But this strength of character is not enough to earn her a happy ending. When her resolve to make the best of situations and advocate for herself is exhausted and her frustration comes out in a complaint about the king, she is rebuked by David, and then is unable to have children.
There is an important implication of Michal's childlessness. This is the loss of the possibility of a son of David who would also be a grandchild of King Saul. This son would have had the perfect pedigree to be the unifying new king of Israel. Seen in this light, is this barrenness of Michal's to be understood as a punishment for her insulting David (how I had previously thought of it), or a continuation of God's rejection of Saul's house? Perhaps it is even something of a punishment for David, who has been very freely taking wives and concubines, and now has many sons with varying levels of preference and qualification vying to succeed him. Or maybe it simply records the animosity between Michal and David, which meant that she had no more opportunity to have children. In any case, it is a bitter way for her story to end.
Parenthetically, when it comes down to it, I wonder how interested she would have been at that point in her life in having children with David. Though she had been his first wife, there are now many other women who have born him other older sons. She had also been Palti's wife, and may have wished for children with the husband who wept to have her stolen away. I also think it's interesting that the final recorded verbal interchange between David and Michal centers around what the servant girls think of him. It has a touch of Michal's jealousy, and David's disregard for her jealousy, about it.
The tragedy in Michal's love story is apparent. And stories like it are not hard to find in our own lives and the lives of those around us. What is unwritten, but what I hope was actually there for Michal, is the deep love of the Lord who was always with her and able to redeem and remake her life again and again, with or without husbands and children. We can take this sad story to God, and mourn with Michal for all that she lost, despite her best efforts. But we can also hope with her for other gifts that can only come when something else important has been taken away.
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