How do you determine goodness or evil in a biblical character?

This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘The Problems of Becoming and Being a King’ (1990).

When it comes to interpreting historical books it is easy, is it not, to jump to conclusions according to our prejudices? Some of the rabbis of old Judaism, when they came to interpret Old Testament characters, developed a rule of thumb, and it went like this. If a man was a good man you should interpret everything to his credit. If the man was a bad man, you should interpret everything to his discredit.

According to the Midrash, the Babylonian Talmud, after they'd made the decision, one chap spent six months, expounding the text that says, 'There was none who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the lord like Ahab' (1 Kings 21:25). According to the story, when he had spent six months expounding it to Ahab's discredit, Ahab appeared to him in a dream and said, 'What are you doing, my good man? Why don't you start expounding the second half of the verse which says "whom Jezebel his wife stirred up"?' So for the next six months the learned rabbi expounded the second part of the verse to say that it was all Jezebel's fault, and she stirred up Ahab. And he came to interpret the whole thing to Ahab's credit. It wasn't his fault: he was a good man; the trouble was Jezebel.

Now you may smile at such absurdities of exegesis and explanation, but sometimes we jump to conclusions, don't we? We have our ideas of a character, and we tend to excuse him on every side. Another notorious example in Scripture is David. Some of the rabbis wouldn't hear anything against David at all. You might say, 'What about his adultery with Bathsheba?'

They would say, 'No he didn't commit adultery whatsoever.'

'How do you know?'

'Well,' they say, 'it was the custom in those days for men who went to war to give their wives a bill of divorcement in case they got killed. So actually Bathsheba had been divorced by her husband before he went to the war, so it was okay for David to take her.'

You can follow that kind of exegesis if you like. It comes about by saying, 'David is such a good man that I'm not prepared to take anything that goes to his discredit and says he was bad.' You can do the inverse, you can say, 'So-and-so was a bad man, so everything he did must have been bad.' The question that arises is, by what guidelines do you go about deciding? And as preachers I think that is important that we search the surrounding context and the greater context, for the plain straight indications of the text, and the historian as to whether this is bad or not. And if the historian doesn't say, and if there are no indications, perhaps we ought to leave it to as an open question.