I remember the Bet She’an Valley, Israel, cotton in the great fields swaying back and forth in the hot summer breeze.
I was 21 in 1979 and drove a tractor that gathered cotton in the great fields that surrounded Kibbutz Sede Nahum, and wondered about the craggy mountain that rose above the valley.
At lunch, I drank gallons of water from the shade of the olive orchards, and in the evening by candlelight, I read about Mount Gilboa and how King Saul and his son Johnathan were killed there.
“Oh How have the mighty fallen,” David lamented. From that point onward I was entranced with the story of David.
I imagined myself one of David s outlaws, traveling with him on his journeys through Judah and Israel, surviving by our guile and wits.
Adventure came quickly; A scorpion bite in the Negev desert, arm wrestling a Bedouin for my camel-haired robe and running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. David’s courage became mine.
But it wasn’t the mighty King David I sought but rather the outcast, the troubled one, the desperate David that filled me with wonder.
Who was he as a young child? As a young man? How did his home life shape his character?
The slingshot years were the ones that I wanted to bring to life, not the overblown stories of giants and swords.
I knew Jessie was the father, but what was his mothers’ name. I was adopted and so did not know my biological mothers’ name.
David was mentioned 1000 times in the old testament and not a breath about his mother. Shame!
Nitzavet, or my nickname for her, Nitzy, proved to be a hard taskmaster. After a few ill-written words, she came to me in a dream with grave misgivings. Her gaze shook me from my sleep. I vowed to honor David and cracked on at pace.
The years flowed by, and often I struggled with work, life balance, always feeling much like David, an outcast.
I told people this writing was something important, a poem, a short story, a novel, and that is what shielded me from the real world.
I realized after my mother died in 2003, I needed to get on with the work. Time was not my friend.
I gathered what modicum of talent surrounded me and put it to the test. I began to study the craft of writing historical fiction.
“The Leper Messiah” is the culmination of that long-ago romantic vision, born in the cotton fields and raised high on the shoulders of the shepherd boy and future king.
David is a life’s work.
Robert M. Levinson