Why Did David Dance?

So the thing we have in all of these 'ancient texts' is a whole series of complex events, intertwined, and sometimes running parallel - and the accounts are there because they mean something, except who really gets what they mean for certain...

This guy 'David ' - King David of the combined Kingdom of Judah and Israel, he goes stupid one time, and dances (and the modern popular 'South Park' version that too many people have, is that he danced naked...) around this tent where there was some 'Indiana Jones' thing happening inside there.

And his first wife, Michal, derides him afterwards and says he humiliated himself not only in front of his own 'soldiers' I guess you could call them, but in front of slave girls. To which he ripostes that he intends to 'humiliate himself' even more, for those slave girls... 

People commonly- especially the Campbell's Tomato Soup Christians - never really quite work out the different strands in the whole story there. The accounts of this 'King David' are virtually completely secular, and carnal; earthy. He 'picks up' Bathsheba after he sees her bathing nude, he 'arranges' the 'disappearance' or 'death by obvious likely mortal peril'(!) of Bathsheba's husband, he dances wildly to the point that the 'upper echelon of society' there laugh at him, and he encourages 'God' to give him a lot of material things.

Everyone in the modern Tomato Soup arena thinks he danced around or in front of a tent in which was this notorious disappeared 'Ark of the Covenant.' In fact, the Ark of the Covenant was still some ways off, being brought to where he was.The tent was where God was hanging out for the time being.... And, indeed, this God already mentioned to David, 'did I ever chide you people for never having built me a house? I found you in particular, in a sheepfold, I hung around a mountain, in a bush, crossed a desert and a sea with you guys running away from Pharaoh, was out in the fields with you and you never heard me complain one time - so why are you trying to build me a house??'

And then, much later on, the prophets of this combined 'Israel and Judah' mob, 'no longer saw the angels of God in the tent...'

But they did before that. Apparently.

This is an actual place in Oman, and
it shows actual Hojari Frankincense
trees, which are quite different from the
small scrawny bushes in Somalia 
from which a lot of commercial 
stuff comes these days.

Why was David dancing?

The Ark hadn't got there yet.

I don't think that people know, that for a good long while, David was working literally for the Philistines, and that was after he killed Goliath.

No, he was dancing because he'd worked out something; something no one else there had realized.

And the whole of his life - in the standard narrative - is all about earthly, material successes. About his, David's material success. His conquests and his amorous liaisons.

'The Jews' are at minimum two different things: one, the House of Israel, and two, the Tribe of Judah. And they are two completely different things - for one thing Bathsheba was not a Hebrew person, and the whole line of 'David' is riddled with Egyptians, Canaanites, even these weird 'Amalekites' (shape-shifting sorcerers!).

It isn't the Jews that God in the narrative says will cover the whole Earth and consist of a vast number of nations...

It is the House of Ephraim. Now who the hell are they?

Anyway David was dancing wildly, because he was wildly ecstatic... ...about something. Something seriously useful to him. He was no fool. He knew exactly what he was doing, and why, up to a point at least given the context and that, well, he was pretty much, just a peasant out there, 'in the sheepfold.'

Along with this stupid thing, we shot out there,
a song with lyrics: 'back out in woods among the
Evergreens, a little country boy... ...he never
ever learned to read or write so well,
but he could, et cetera.'

This 'God' though you know - and I shouldn't really stick it in inverted commas; I'm just doing that to be a nuisance for the sake of the fighting between the rationalistic atheists and the earnest believers among y'all - this God, He has this habit of being around places that always, and I do mean always, exhibit certain atmospheric conditions. In the case of Mamre and Abraham, it was right beside the Terebinth trees - and if you've ever had the occasion to experience what it is like being anywhere near this particular kind of pistachio tree, it's a strong strong anti-bacterial plant, with a very very medicinal resin present. Bit like, you could say, the anti-bacterial hand-wash they have been using down at the Rave Music Festivals now for oh, I'd say, a good ten years or more.

This clip below is not too long, actually, it goes into an ad towards the end, that's why it looks long: