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Spurning A Spear

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25.02.2026

Spurning his spear to kill his deadly rival, Saul, David contrasts

most favorably with Hagen, who kills Siegfried in an attack

in which Wagner’s opera based on the Niebelungenlied casts

hateful Hagen as a spear-armed stabber of the heroic Siegfried’s back,

supporting regime change, spear-sparring with less doubt

than David when he spared Saul from thoughts of regime change backing out,

in a mythogemic biblical report of the removal

of a regime’s royal ruler, Hagen’s program spurned by David with semitic disapproval,

David, the custodian of Israel’s rules stored in a holy ark,

unlike contemporary drivers who drive in reverse the vehicles they park,

protecting his back by wearing on his back the tabernacular ephod,

not using Saul’s spear, his back protected by support of God.

David’s refusal to stab in the back a righteously anointed king with his royal spear contrasts with  Hagen’s use of his spear to stab Siegfried in the back in the final opera of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle), titled Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).

In “The King’s Spear,” thetorah.com, Daniel Bodi writes:

Upon the death of King Ahaziah of Judah (ca. 842 B.C.E.), his mother, Athalya, seizes the throne in Jerusalem and attempts to eliminate any rivals, including her grandson,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)