A Voice I Had Not Known

A Voice I Had Not Known Commentary by Frederica Law Turner Bible Passage The Tickhill Psalter is an extraordinary manuscript. Its name comes from an inscription at the front, asking for prayers for John Tickhill, prior of the Augustinian Canons’ foundation in Worksop, who ‘wrote and gilded this book with his own hands’. Tickhill was prior from 1303 to 1314: the decoration is incomplete, and work on it might have stopped when he was removed for financial irregularities. At Psalm 80 (81 in modern versions), the full-page initial E of ‘Exultate deo…’ is divided into compartments and we see scenes from 2 Samuel 14. The inscriptions in the scrolls which helped identify the scenes were never filled in in this page, but this is King David’s encounter with the wise woman of Tekoa, who advises him on how to deal with his errant son, Absalom. Absalom has fled after murdering his half-brother Amnon, in revenge for the rape of Absalom’s sister, Tamar. Joab, David’s nephew, wishes to reconcile father and son. He enlists the aid of an unnamed wise woman (shown here sometimes in a grey dress and sometimes in red and blue, or green—the artist had perhaps not understood that she was one and the same person throughout). The woman tells David a pitiful tale—that she is a widow, and that one of her two sons has killed the other in a fight and now faces execution. When David promises to save her son from his fate, she advises him to do the same for his own. David relents, and Absalom returns, albeit with the prohibition that his father will not see him. Below the large E, Joab brings Absalom before David, who turns his face away. Finally, Absalom returns to his own house, shown as a battlemented arch with twin turrets. The episodes have no direct connection with the psalm text, but form part of an extended narrative from the lives of Saul, David, and Solomon, derived from the biblical text and from Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, a popular world history which supplement the Bible stories with other colourful narratives. Verse 5 of the psalm identifies God’s speech with an unknown voice (‘a voice I had not known’). Likewise, in his encounter with the anonymous woman of Tekoa, David must be open to what an ‘unknown voice’ has to say to him.