I feel like I need to start this review with a disclaimer. I am a book purist. I am one of those people who has read the book and complains about all the ways the movie adaptation is not faithful to the book. And so, there was lots of things about A Most Useful Betrothal by Netta Fei (Vide Inc, 2024) that I found infuriating. This is not a book for biblical purists.
One thought that kept running through my head as I read was that if this was a science-fiction book providing an alternate vision of these stories from 1 Samuel then I might be able to get on board. The descriptions are beautiful and evocative, the love story is compelling, and the connection between donkey and girl heartwarming. If you liked Geraldine Brooks’ The Secret Chord (2015) or Anita Daimant’s The Red Tent (1997), then there is a good chance you will like this book and you should stop reading this review right now. Warning, there are also spoiler alerts from here on in.
I recently tried to re-read The Secret Chord. I am a huge fan of Brooks’ writing and I think I have read this book once before I started my theology training. However, this time when I came back to it I could just not stomach the romanticisation of David’s character. The more I engage with the David of the biblical text, the less sympathy I have for the beautiful, faithful, honorable rendition that we receive so often in religious folklore and popular culture. This makes me wonder if my problems with the book are a me issue, because many people loved that book.
In a similar way Fei creates a David (Dawit) who is a hero whose motives are pure and whose actions demonstrate an alliance with his higher self. Dawit is in love with Abigail (Abyga’el), despite being described as being like brother and sister. In this reading, Abyga’el is the adopted child of Samuel (Shmuel) and his wife and has known Dawit from her youth. When Dawit returns he is smitten with the beautiful young Abyga’el, despite the fact that she has herself arranged to be engaged to the fool Nabal.
The fact that Dawit is already married to Michal is downplayed due to the already sour relationship between Dawit and Shaul (Saul). Dawit’s second marriage to Ahinoam is ignored completely, as is Dawit’s (homoerotic) relationship with Jonathan. Ignoring the complexities of these relationships means Abyga’el and Dawit’s story can be written as a love story that overcomes the odds, where Abyga’el implausibly keeps herself pure for Dawit despite being married to another man. Because of course women are expected to be pure, even while playing the trickster role. Except if they are written into the role of Jezebel, like Nabal’s first wife Zahra Salome in this book.
I have also read The Red Tent twice. Once, before theological education and once after. While the deviations from the biblical book in that book also frustrated me, the consoling factor was the way Diamant thoughtfully explored the relationships between multiple wives and their offspring. While I felt liberties were taken, there weren’t such that they drew me out of the imagined world of the novels context. Unfortunately, this was not the case for this book.
Nabal’s slaves are set free to set up a market economy that Nabal agrees to because it will help him get richer. He grumbles that he would just rather keep his slaves but is convinced and everyone’s life is improved. This of course is a very modern conceptualisation that repeats the rhetoric of how the free market allows everyone who chooses to work to flourish, but which doesn’t work so neatly in practise.
Moh, Nabal’s servant, meets Abyga’el one day and is pretty much straight away besties with her, so much so that when Abyga’el is introduced to the household she runs up and hugs him. This physical familiarity between different men and women, of very different stations, in formal and informal situations feels to me a little bit farcical and very anachronistic.
I really wanted to like this book, becuase I am a sucker for a plucky heroine and a unlikely love story. I wanted to be able to give it a pass as something written for a younger or teen audience, which I do read on occasion. However that was not the case. It felt like twenty first century values being inserted into a ancient Israelite context in a simplistic story where good defeats evil through gung-ho ingenuity which is all blessed by Yah (YHWH). In many ways, I felt towards this book the way I felt after watching the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up. I hated it. And I was frustrated by the way everyone else seemed to love it. So, if you like that movie, there is a good chance you will like this book.
And I will take my curmudgeonly self back to constant rewatches of Gilmore Girls.
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