ABOUT THE REGENT'S ANCESTOR:

Who Was King David?

Excavations at Tell el Hariri on the Euphrates river have revealed that the word "davidum" once served as a title for a military marshal. The possibility exists that the name of the ancient prince may not have actually been David, but regardless the identity of David survives. David was born in Bethlehem, which became the basis for later claims that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as a fulfillment of the prophecies associated with the Davidic legacy. He was the youngest son of Jesse, and he was the only person in history to successfully establish an empire in Palestine, a land known throughout antiquity as a crossroads. Although the rule of his linear descendants was short-lived, the House of David ruled in Jerusalem for 400 years. When Nebuchadrezzar destroyed Jerusalem the House of David became a transcendant symbol of Israel's messianic hope for renewal. Israel ceased to exist as a physical domain, and began its existence as a pure ideal, attainable by all human beings of all the nations of the Earth.

David began his career as an aide to King Saul. Whether he was brought to Saul's royal court for his gifts as a musician (the Psalms are attributed to King David), or because of his victory over Goliath, it was his skill as a warrior that caused his advancement. Generals are natural rivals to kings for the affection of the people, and David's success as a warrior caused a conflict between himself and the faltering leader. The Philistines were about to overrun all of Israel west of the Jordan River. Ultimately, the tale of King David is also the tale of the fall of the House of Saul, and the decline of the Philistines.

Because we look back in time, we see King David as a king forever. In actuality, in his early years, before he became king, he lived as a fugitive and an outlaw. This really speaks to our times, when the United States Government has over 1.6 million people in prison, AMERICAN people. Today the Federal Government has more of its own citizens in jail and prison than any other institution on the Earth.

David's intelligence and intuition endowed him with a talent for public drama, and Saul had premonitions that David would succeed him as king. David's popular success generated an obsessive jealousy within Saul, who felt instinctively that he was fighting for the survival of his dynasty. David's years as an outlaw in the Judaean desert, and as an exile at the court of Achish of Gath stimulated the refinement of his genius. As an outlaw he had no legal protection, and his physical safety depended entirely upon his wits. To become a political and military force David had to win the loyalty of clan chiefs and towns that owed nominal allegiance to King Saul, always overshadowed by the possibility of betrayal.

The arid ranges and steppes of Judah formed a frontier, a no-man's-land where Saul's authority had no influence, where outlaws gathered. In the ancient world the worst penalty the state could exact was life in exile from one's native country, a fate considered at the time worse than death. When first put under the ban, David went into flight for his life. On his way he stopped at the shrine of Nob at Mt. Scopus, and obtained food and the sword of Goliath by implying that he was acting on behalf of King Saul. When it was reported to Saul that the priest Ahimelech had given aid to the fugitive David, the entire priestly community was massacred by the worried king. Only Abiathar was able to escape and join David in the wilderness, beginning a service that endured as long as David lived.

It was in the Judaean wilderness that David launched his movement for the national crown. "And every one who was in distress, and every one who was in debt, and every one who was discontented, gathered to him; and he became captain over them." (I Sam. 22:2) He was in fact a chief of outlaws and refugees like himself. To preserve the esprit de corps of this band -- which numbered between 400 and 600 men -- David became a kind of Robin Hood of Judah, offering aid to the needy and protection to the rich, but his criminal status haunted him. In one case, after saving the property of the citizens of Keilah, a town threatened by the Philistines, David was warned that they intended to surrender him to Saul.

David had tried to secure the protection of the Philistine city of Gath, and was refused the first time; but upon his second appeal King Achish granted him protection. The Philistine nobles were suspicious of their former enemy, and they cancelled out their king's intention to deploy David as his bodyguard in a campaign against Saul. Forced out of the court, David returned to his Philistine residence at Ziklag, which had been looted by the Amalekites. Pursuing them, he overcame them and forced them to relinquish their stolen treasure, which he distributed to the elders of Judah, advancing his own cause in the last days of Saul's tragic reign.

David was a realist with the ideal of improving the lot of his countrymen. His sincere convictions led to important political results without the cynicism of political intrigue. He excelled in exercising patience, attempting at all times to avoid shedding the blood of any Israelites, knowing it would set back his program for national unification. He dramatized his belief in the sacredness of the royal person to impress King Saul's entourage, and when Saul was killed by the Philistines at Gilboa, David's moving elegy not only voiced his personal grief, but also served to reconcile Saul's following to David's movement. His message of gratitude to Jabesh-gilead for the burial of the royal dead was also a signal of the inauguration of his own reign as king, which was newly established at Hebron.

David had carefully cultivated the support of the elders of Judah, and upon the death of Saul they proclaimed David king of Judah. Saul's son, Ishbosheth, supported by Abner, set up his court at Mahanaim, as the Philistines overran Israel west of the Jordan. For the next seven years David ruled from the capital of Judah, Hebron, as the House of Saul self-destructed. The deteriorating condition of Israel led to a state of desperation, and finally to the assassination of Ishbosheth by his own subjects. Without an alternative, the elders of the northern tribes came to Hebron and anointed David king of all Israel.

As the anointed king of Israel and Judah, the only remaining impediment to his movement to unite the north with the south was the fortified city of the Jebusites, Jerusalem. The walled city occupied an impregnable position, and had been occupied since pre-history. As an independent Canaanite city, Jerusalem had its own king, Melchizedek. The priest-king Melchizedek became the model for sacred kingship which David would introduce into the customs of his realm. When David conquored Jerusalem by having his soldiers enter the city through a water tunnel, which began outside the walls and connected with a vertical shaft inside the city, the city was taken so totally by surprise that there was no defense, and no blood shed. In a move that would become routine in the desert culture of the Fertile Crescent, King David took wives and concubines from the conquored city, confirming his rule over it and establishing it for all time as "the city of David."

King David proceeded to vanquish the Philistines in battles fought west of Jerusalem, in the region that separated Judah from the northern kingdom of Israel. Having solidified his rule he now went on to establish a powerful empire, conquoring and occupying the kingdoms of Edom and Moab, east of Jordan, and installing garrisons at strategic points farther north in Syria, particularly at Damascus. He created a system of tributary states so vast that it was estimated that his non-Israelite subjects outnumbered his Israelite subjects. The realm of King David extended from the upper Euphrates to the Gulf of Aqaba.

David realized that in order to unify the people of his realm he had to make Jerusalem an effective center for his newly united kingdom, with religious as well as political significance. With his genius for insight into the human heart, King David recognized that he had to invest the new royal capital with an emotional appeal for his people. This task was a genuine challenge, as Jerusalem had to compete with other sites that had long histories of sacredness, while Jerusalem was a new acquisition with no role in Israel's past. The sacred sites were places where the community made appointed pilgrimages to celebrate the divine presence since ancient times, and were revered for their continuity of ancient tradition. Shechem, Hebron, Gilgal, Shiloh, Mizpah and Bethel all had associations with the covenant between God and the people. In order to accomplish his plans, the king had to associate the kingship with the covenant of God.

When Jerusalem was confirmed as a possession of David, he left its religious establishment in tact, assuming the pre-Israelite office of priest-king of the city "after the order of Melchizedek." Accordingly, rulers of the House of David at their accession, and in annual festivities that marked the beginning of each year, were proclaimed as sons of God. The annual feast of the covenant was now succeeded by the feast of the king, who now embodied a new covenant between the people and God, as a living symbol of the original covenant between God and Abraham.

King David sought to continue the ancient traditions which formed the identity of the People in Covenant with God, which knew no such restriction as birth from a female Israelite: The children of men were admitted equally with the offspring of women to the community of the nation. David interpreted the institution of kingship in religious terms, radically transforming the culture of the Israelite nation. Kingship became the focus of a profound reconception of Israel's religious faith, with a subsequent impact on the symbolism and worship of the Judaeo-Christian civilization.

The ark was one of the most sacred objects in the lives of the Israelite people, standing for the presence of God. One of its titles was "the ark of the covenant," which was a reference to its central role in sacred covenant-consecrating ceremonies in which God made a solemn agreement with a confederation of tribes called "the people of God." This sacred agreement or covenant between the God of Abraham and his descendants was based on the great acts of rescue and salvation performed by God on Israel's behalf, and was an agreement between God and the whole community. When King David brought the ark to Jerusalem it became the sign of a "new covenant," an agreement between God and the king to safeguard the nation. The king as "the Anointed of the Lord" became a sacral institution to the people under David, which established the city of the king, Jerusalem, as the nation's religious capital.

God's salvation of Israel from the Philistines through the instrument of the House of David became the central motif of the new covenant with the people. The covenant God made with David said that his throne would be established through his sons and their sons forever. The ark of the covenant, once in Jerusalem, was still a sign of the presence of God -- as it had always been -- but this presence was now exemplified by the sacred person and life of the king, who led the ark in sacred processions. The sacral king became in effect a mediator of the blessings of God upon the nation: Security, life, and fertility for the land and the people.

As a result of King David's reign of forty years, the term "messiah" -- anointed -- became a powerful archtypal symbol of renewal. After the Babylonian captivity and the Diaspora, the title became associated with hopes for national restoration. Initially this was interpreted in a short- term, literal sense, that one of King David's lineal heirs would re-establish the empire of David from the sacred city of Jerusalem; but eventually the ideal of the messiah came to embrace a transcendant vision of the salvation of the nations, and the restoration of the Earth to a state of peace and prosperity the ancients called "Paradise."

When King David died he was succeeded by his son Solomon, who built the Temple. Solomon became the proto-type of the wise philosopher-priest-king, and he embodied the hereditary promise of the House of David to provide the nation with the soundest judgment. When King Solomon passed away the union between the two kingdoms dissolved, but the House of David ruled as the kings of Jerusalem for four centuries. King David's primary tool for binding the various tribal communities together into a nation involved his taking of wives from each tribal community, who collectively formed his harem. This has been a given of Desert royalty, and was deployed as recently as this century, when Ibn Saud used the tactic to create the modern state of Saudi Arabia. It also created a large pool of descendants. Records from the year 1000 B.C. are not available to confirm any family's descent from the Davidic house; Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia claimed to be a descendant of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon.

The forty years in the Desert of the Great King is a beacon that transcends time, carrying forward the legacy of his life through his living heirs to the modern world. Generation after generation the knowledge was kept alive, passed from father to son, of the identity of the royal House of David, under the threat of persecution that sought the extinction of a living line of personages. When power is shielded by lies, truth is preserved in secret, where it must retire until the Spring, when it, like all life, is renewed.

All things natural have their season, and the season of renewal is upon us. We must rise up above our petty quarrels and make the effort to see the dignity in all men and women. We can no longer wallow in the depths of self-pity and despair, but must act forthrightly for the salvation of the nation. Associating authority with commerce has led the people to self-destruction, and if there is any hope of avoiding the fragmentation and dissolution of modern civilization, it will only come from the re-discovery of our humanity.

On the Ides of March, 1889, a direct descendant of King David was born of the House of Chaitlin in the Russian Empire. Saint Henry Abraham Chaitlin migrated to America in 1910, where his marriage was arranged in the old-world fashion to a cousin of the same descent, Saint Rose Coffman. Queen Rose of Chaitlin was a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses, as was Saint Henry the Lion, through his mother. The only son of Saint Henry the Lion and Queen Rose was born in 1927, Mel Chaitlin. His marriage to Shirley Ely in 1958 laid the foundation for the royal family of Ely-Chaitlin, when the following year the future Regent of the United States was born on April 18th, 1959, Marc Eric Chaitlin.

Marc Eric Chaitlin succeeded to the chieftaincy of Ely at age 14, when his maternal grandfather passed away December 7th, 1973. The House of Ely descends from the family of Queen Boadicea, and is distantly related to the English royal family. On 27 December, 1975, Marc Eric used his authority as a traditional chief to restore legitimate royal authority in the United States, after a 199 year interregnum, with the institution of the Free Territory of Ely-Chatelaine. In 1982 the Dynasty of Ely-Chaitlin was formally created, and on 11 April, 1993, the Nation of America was founded by the Cry of Stillwater Bay (traditional name of Capistrano Bay). On 2 January, 1994, the chieftaincy of Americans was proclaimed a Regency, as a preparatory move towards the legal restoration and reconstitution of legitimate government in the United States.