Back to the Grind

I just spent forty-five minutes plowing through the first 12 pages of Adorno for next week. Welcome back, Cole's class.

Yesterday I taught one of the most fun lessons in my Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class, the David and Bathsheba lesson. Tomorrow is another one, the Absalom lesson. David's cool-headed maneuvering in 2 Samuel 11 brought just the reactions that it brought last year--the loyalists called it a "mistake," and the rest thought him monstrous. I did take more care this year to keep David's heroic attractiveness in the picture, letting students do a "moral seismograph" of David's career. I had them chart a line above and below the line of moral indifference, and almost all of them had David at his highest when he achieved his military victories and lowest when he murdered Uriah. The aftermath of Bathsheba's unnamed child's death was the place where folks started to fight.

It's the genius of 2 Samuel, really. I could read David's reaction to six different people and get six different reactions, based on their loyalty to the picture that David painted of himself, the golden boy of Israel. (I, for one, am not fooled.) And tomorrow, when David mourns over Absalom and Joab kicks his butt for it, I imagine I'll get six more different reactions, the pragmatists and the family-sentimentalists and the bloodline-covanenters disagreeing on whether David's treatment of his men after Absalom's revolt was, in fact, as bad as Joab makes it. (It is.)

I graded the last of the second paper this morning, and the third doesn't come in until next Friday. Until then, I crank away on papers and try to sleep a bit.

On second thought, I'd better crank away on those papers.