Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 2:xlv-xlvi:
Although David is clearly represented as a divinely elected king in [the Deuteronomistic History], he is also seen quite strikingly in all his human weakness, in his relentlessness, and in his moral ambiguity – hardly a figure of royal propaganda. And in regard to the issue of historical causation, events here are the consequence of human actions – in the preponderance of these stories, there is nothing miraculous and no divine intervention. When the aged king is dying, he calls Solomon to his bedside and instructs him to use his “wisdom” to get rid of two men against whom David has a score to pay off, and who also might well threaten Solomon’s throne. This final gesture, worthy of a mafia chieftain, was evidently too much for the Deuteronomist, and so he inserted before David’s hit list a whole swatch of dialogue, in which David, deploying an uninterrupted pastiche of Deuteronomistic phrases, piously enjoins Solomon to walk in God’s ways and keep His commands. What the editor did not feel free to do was to change the inherited text or delete the parts of it he found objectionable.
