The Harlem bodega: Trump's 'water shaft' moment
The enthusiastic welcome received by President Trump at a Harlem bodega after Day 2 of the farcical hush-money trial in Manhattan reminds me of David's taking of Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, the king popping up in the city center unexpectedly through an obscure water shaft, a story told in both 2 Samuel 5 and 1 Chronicles 11.
New York City, certainly Harlem, seems an impenetrable anti-Trump stronghold, just as the walled city of Jerusalem was an anti-David stronghold. David, though, having ruled for seven years from Hebron, had set his eyes and heart on Jerusalem for his new capital.
Victory seemed unimaginable. When David and his warriors marched on the city, the Jebusites jeered in derision. Lining the walls with their lame and blind, they taunted, "Even our blind and the lame will turn you back!" – thinking, "David cannot come in here" (2 Samuel 5:6).
It would not be through gates and walls that David entered the city, but through a shaft, part of ancient Jerusalem's water tunnels from the Gihon Spring. In today's archaeological park known as 'Ir David (the City of David), one descends to imagine with thrill David's astonishing victory.
Jerusalem's defeat was one of foolhardy overconfidence. The present trial in Manhattan, surely the weakest of all the lawfare tactics marshaled against Trump as he aims to take again the "stronghold" known as the White House, seems to me an exercise of slapdash overconfidence.
The Deep State's outlandish prosecutions of the former president and current opposition candidate seem grossly overoptimistic, as if imagining that their "lame and blind" can stop Trump's momentum.
Half of America, at least, see prosecutors like the politically-driven Alvin Bragg and the clearly compromised Fani Willis as lame, while judges like the Biden-supporting Juan Merchan and the bench-smirking Arthur Engoron are regarded as blind (not in the proper sense meant by "Justice is Blind," but in being willfully blinded by Trump-hatred).
The Deep State's ultimate "lame and blind" hope, though, are not those whom they have positioned "on the walls" as key players in the courtroom, but rather the voter spectators, consumers of the media-biased Trump Derangement Syndrome daily spouted from MSNBC, CNN, the AP, and the recently, rightly and hysterically self-exposed NPR.
To those with eyes to see, such banana republic prosecutions sprout from the soil of a weaponized justice system, resulting in an embarrassing display of Jebusite-sounding, "You can't come in here!" bravado from the tops of Washington's walls.
But, is the tide turning? The hearty Harlem bodega welcome suggests it may be, a scene I think of as President Trump's "Water Shaft" moment.
Mercilessly ridiculed by the Jebusites, King David told his men, "Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft (Hebrew = tzinnor) to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates" (2 Samuel 5:8, though another way to understand the Hebrew construction, as in the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh, is, "the lame and the blind, who are hateful to David").
In 1867, Sir Charles Warren, a British engineer, discovered a vertical shaft from the Gihon Spring that he identified as part of Jerusalem's ancient water system. Many speculate that "Warren's Shaft" was David's military strategy, his startling path to power that won the stronghold of Zion, the Jebusites seeing but not believing what was happening, just as legacy news anchors on April 16 were incredulous at Trump's hearty Harlem reception.
Perhaps Trump's Harlem bodega welcome will be but one of many "Water Shaft" moments to come, when Trump emerges, David-like, in unlikely places at unexpected times, all critical to his aim of retaking the stronghold of Washington.
If so, imagine the Inauguration Day scene on Jan. 20, 2025. The sad reality of a politically polarized populace guarantees both delirious dancing and profound anguish.
When I wrote "Dancing with David," an archaeological mystery based on actual Dead Sea Scroll discoveries, I began with Psalm 151, David's autobiographical song of his unlikely victories.
"Wait," you ask, "aren't there are only 150 psalms in the Bible?"
Yes, your Bible has only 150 psalms. The Septuagint, however, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek finished about two centuries before Jesus, includes an unnumbered psalm after Psalm 150. In it, David tells two life events: 1) being anointed by Samuel, despite being the smallest of his brothers; and 2) defeating Goliath in battle, despite the giant's reputation as undefeatable.
For 2,000 years, without a Hebrew text of the psalm, it was imagined that Psalm 151 was simply a Greek invention. The 1958 discovery of the Great Psalms Scroll in Cave 11 erased that assumption. Lo, and behold, the Dead Sea Scrolls had produced the Hebrew original of Psalm 151, David's telling of his anointing and his defeat of Goliath.
Why, though, I wondered (as Jesus and his disciples also perhaps wondered) did King David abruptly stop with only two stories?
In "Dancing with David," I imagined a 2021 discovery in Cave 53 of an older version of Psalm 151, David taking his story of astonishing victories much further along the trajectory of his life, all the way to his dancing in front of the Ark of the Covenant as he paraded it into his "water shaft" conquered City of David.
While David was leaping and dancing before the Lord with all his might, girded only in a linen ephod, his wife Michal (King Saul's daughter from the Old Dynasty), despised him in her heart (2 Samuel 6:14-16).
We may be sure that, should Trump lead the Inaugural parade next year (and, equally, should he not), the Davidic scene of both ecstatic joy and weighty despair will be repeated.
Such are times in which we live.
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