David and Michal (detail), Virginio Grana, 1865. Wikimedia
Michal’s Unrequited Love for David
The story of Michal, King Saul’s daughter and David’s first wife—the only woman in the Bible described as being in love with a man—is framed by two window scenes. In the first, she is the spunky, loving bride who helps David escape his pursuers through her back window. In the second, embittered and depleted in spirit, she watches the triumphant David through the window with contempt. What happened in between?
Published: May 23, 2024
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
Biblical translations follow the NJPS, with modifications.
Significantly, Michal’s looks are not mentioned, though the Bible does not fail to describe several women as “beautiful” or “good looking,” among them two of David’s later wives, Abigail (1 Sam 25:3, 42) and Bathsheba (2 Sam 11:2, 27).
Editor’s note: On Michal’s teraphim, see the discussion in Erin D. Darby, “Rachel’s Teraphim: A Critique of the Northern Kingdom,” TheTorah (2021).
For more on the image of the “woman at the window” in the ancient Near East, see Carla Gottlieb, The Window in Art: From the Window of God to the Vanity of Man (New York: Abaris Books, 1981); and Irene J. Winter, “The ‘Woman at the Window’: Iconography and Inferences of a Motif in First Millennium B.C., Levantine Ivory Carving,” in Assyria to Iberia—Art and Culture in the Iron Age, ed. Joan Aruz and Michael Seymour (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 180–193. For the additional meanings of this trope in the Bible as defining women’s existential condition—man was viewed as acting within history, the creator and mover of chronological progression and civilization, while woman was viewed as subject to the immutable rules of nature, fixed in the status of the onlooker, the passive witness to the march of men through history—see Nehama Aschkenasy, “The Ancient Image,” in Woman at the Window (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 13–21.
Bruno Bettelheim suggests that in romantic folk tales, passing the father’s test proves the sexual maturity of the aspiring young man. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Knopf, 1976), 123–136.
Editor’s note: See Sarah Schulz, “Priestly Underpants,” TheTorah (2022).
To the reader, she brings to mind another king’s daughter in a later period, the pagan Jezebel, who appears in splendor at the window in the moment of her ultimate defeat (2 Kgs 9:30–34). Though Michal, unlike Jezebel, is an Israelite, she is equally estranged from the people of Israel, by whom she is remembered as the daughter of the king who, unlike David, fell out of grace with Yahweh and His prophet.
See note 4, above.
For more on the many transmutations of Michal in world literature, and especially the reassessment of her character in early modern Hebrew literature and the turn her figure has taken in contemporary feminist works, see Nehama Aschkenasy, “Michal (in Literature),” Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception ( Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), 18:1159–1160.
Editor’s note: For more on Bluwstein, see the section “The Reading of the Haftarah by a Modern Day “Leper,” in Wendy Zierler, “The Skin of the Metzora and the Heart of the Messiah,” TheTorah (2015).
“Michal,” in Uri Milstein, ed., Rahel: Poems Letters and Life Stories [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Zemorah Beetan, 1985); my translation. Also available online, in Hebrew, in Project Ben Yehuda.
