Monday we wrapped up the David unit with the rise of Solomon. I think that, by the end, my students had a real, literary familiarity with David, the kind that one gets by the end of Hamlet or the gospel of Luke. I asserted over and over during the course of the unit that the genius of the books of Samuel, the reason why 1 Timothy can say that it's good for instruction and why Rabbinic Judaisms and various Christian traditions can claim it as good for moral formation, is the texts' insistence upon the larger-than-life goodness of David and the larger-than-life wickedness of David. This is no watered-down "realism" where David is "just like one of us"; he's more rotten than any of us could conceive being one chapter, and he's more heroic and magnanimous than we're capable of the next. I think that, as David faded into his three-line obituary and Solomon rose, Michael Corleone-style, to seize rule of Jerusalem, just about everyone who had been on that ride got it.
And now I get to grade papers.
I'm picking up my brother from the airport tonight and taking a Beowulf exam tomorrow; then it's two and a half days with little brother followed by five days of paper-writing and paper-grading and cantata-narration-writing and perhaps a couple hours of sleep here and there. And then, next Monday, it's back to teaching, this time Job.
Rock and roll.
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