The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero

by Joel S. Baden

  From another Anatolian state, known as Mitanni, we find even more remarkable data from a sixteenth-century inscription. A Mitanni prince named Idrimi was forced to flee his native land and traveled to Canaan, where he joined forces with and eventually became the leader of the habiru. Idrimi and his habiru attacked the city-state of Alalakh, in modern Turkey, and he became king there—and, fortunately for us, he inscribed his tale for posterity.18 The archaeological excavations of Alalakh have uncovered a remarkable number of written records, including lists of these habiru that reveal they came from disparate backgrounds—they had been thieves, slaves, priests, and soldiers.19

  And in Canaan proper, the habiru were a constant bother. One of the most important archaeological discoveries of the past two centuries was a cache of letters in the Egyptian city of Amarna.20 For a brief period in the fourteenth century BCE, Amarna was the capital of Egypt, and so all diplomatic correspondence was sent and stored there. The letters discovered at Amarna come from city-states in Canaan and Syria, which at the time were vassals of Egypt. As is often the case with such correspondence, many of the letters from the vassals to the Egyptian overlords consist of complaints about various local problems, in hopes that the pharaoh might lend some assistance. A number of these letters specifically mention the habiru, who are accused of attacking the king of Byblos and even capturing a large portion of his territory. They are reported to have killed a number of local rulers south of Jerusalem and seized their territories. In these cases, the habiru seem to be acting independently. But often they were used as mercenaries in battles for regional dominance among the various city-states. One local king named Lab’ayu used habiru troops to seize control of neighboring territories, settling the habiru in conquered towns as an extension of his rule. Lab’ayu’s sons continued the practice after him, paying habiru soldiers to wage war against the city-state of Megiddo. The king of the city-state of Jerusalem complains that his adversaries, among them the king of Gath, have given territory to the habiru, including the town of Keilah.

  These mentions from across the Near East make it possible for us to draw a fairly good picture of the habiru. They were not an ethnic group—indeed, they seem to have come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. Instead, the term habiru is descriptive of a social class more than anything else: they were people who were forced out of normal social structures for whatever reasons and who were compelled to make their livings however they could, wherever possible. They acted as bandits operating independently and as mercenaries available for hire to either side of a conflict. The parallels with David, both generally and, in some cases, with almost uncanny specificity, are obvious.21 David—forced out of Israelite society, raiding and murdering across the wilderness of Judah, and eventually becoming a mercenary for the Philistines—participated recognizably in a centuries-old pattern.

  If the word habiru has a familiar sound to it, there may be a reason. Scholars have long surmised that it is from the term habiru that we get the word “Hebrew.”22 The most common explanation for this etymology, which would not put the Hebrews in a particularly flattering light, is that some proportion of the early Israelite population that settled the small villages of the central highlands of Canaan were of habiru background, perhaps escaping the social structures of the major city-states. The emerging Israelites may have been seen as habiru, not because of their banditry or mercenary activities, but because they existed outside of the mainstream centralized societies. It is perhaps for this reason, as many have noted, that in the Bible it is often foreigners who describe the Israelites as Hebrews, rather than Israelites using the term themselves. One such example is found in our story: when the officers of the Philistine army see David and his men, they ask Achish, “Who are these Hebrews?” (1 Sam. 29:3). If what they mean is “Who are these habiru?” they could hardly have put it more accurately. David’s story very closely parallels that of Idrimi, the Mitanni prince. David was once a prince, or very nearly so—he was, according to the Bible, the king’s son-in-law. He was forced from his position of power into the wilderness of Canaan, where he found a group of outlaws ready to make him their leader. And now, with that same band, he was on the verge of making his triumphant return to power.

  Saul’s Death

  DAVID’S MERCENARY CAREER WITH the Philistines was not brief. He stayed as a vassal of Achish for more than a year—sixteen months, according to the Bible (1 Sam. 27:7). That he stayed so long is testimony to the comfort and wealth that his position provided. David was in no rush to leave the Philistines. He had made a home for himself.

  As we have seen, however, the lengthy periods of small-time raids were regularly broken up by full-scale battles between the Philistines and the Israelites. And David must have known that his turn for such a battle would eventually come. And indeed, the beginning of 1 Samuel 28 says that “the Philistines mustered their forces for war, to fight against Israel” (28:1). Since David had been more than a year in his service, Achish had every right to expect that David would accompany him to war. In fact, the Bible tells us that Achish made David his personal bodyguard (28:2), a role that is so anathema to the notion of David as the glorious Israelite king that it is almost certainly true.

  Before turning to the description of this crucial battle, the biblical account detours with the famous episode of Saul and the witch of En-dor. Even the basic premise—Saul consulting a witch for help—lets us know that this is not a historical account. Like the anointing of David in 1 Samuel 16, it is a private event with supernatural goings-on, and like the first chapter in the David narrative, it serves to demonstrate that Saul has no further divine right to the kingship. Saul asks the witch to raise Samuel’s ghost, for Saul is afraid of the Philistine armies. Samuel reminds Saul—and us, the readers—that God has taken the kingship from Saul and given it to David. He further tells Saul that in the next day’s battle, Saul and his sons will die and the Philistines will be victorious. One hardly needs to go to great lengths to argue for the fictional nature of the story. But we may note that it complements the episodes of David encountering Saul unawares in the wilderness: the earlier stories point out emphatically that David would never harm Saul; the episode of the witch of En-dor makes clear that Saul’s death in battle will be the work of God. Saul’s time has come, just as David had predicted: “Yahweh himself will strike him down, or his day will come and he will die, or he will go down to battle and perish” (1 Sam. 26:10). But both stories make the same fundamental point: David will not be responsible for Saul’s death.

  Saul’s Death

  The Philistines marched far to the north to confront Saul’s army near the Jezreel valley at Mount Gilboa. This was likely a strategic decision on their part. After decades of fighting on the border between Judah and Philistia in the south, with little to show for it, it would have made good sense to try a new tactic. By moving up the coast and swinging around near the top of the Israelite hill country, the Philistines could attack Saul from a new and unfamiliar direction. The details of the battle are lost to us, but the result is not. The Philistines won decisively and set out in pursuit of Saul and his sons when the rest of the Israelite forces abandoned the field. We may imagine that the royal family had its own private unit of bodyguards, but even these elite forces were unable to withstand the Philistine attack. Saul’s three sons—Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malchishua (the latter two being unknown to us before this point)—were killed, and soon after, Saul was mortally wounded with arrows. According to the biblical account, rather than risk being tortured by the Philistines, Saul asks his arms-bearer to finish him off. The man refuses, so Saul commits suicide.23 The Israelite inhabitants of the area, seeing the king and his sons dead and the army fleeing, abandoned the area to the Philistines.

  The following day, the Philistines returned to the battlefield to collect the loot that was their due as victors. Even after his death, Saul was unable to avoid the physical abuse he had feared. The Philistines cut off his head, stripped him of his armor,
and sent both throughout the Philistine territory as a means of spreading the news of Israel’s defeat. As awful as it sounds, this seems to have been a common method of communication: body parts are also used as wordless messages in the grotesque story of Judges 19–20 (coincidentally set in Saul’s hometown of Gibeah), in which the body of a raped concubine is cut into twelve pieces that are distributed to the Israelite tribes as a call to war.24 Saul’s body, along with those of his sons, was impaled on the wall of Beth-shean, a town near Mount Gilboa. But the Philistines permitted some Israelites from Jabesh-Gilead, a town across the Jordan from Beth-shean, to come at night and remove the bodies and give them a proper burial, in accordance with Israelite custom: “his corpse must not remain on the stake overnight, but you must bury him the same day, for an impaled body is an affront to God” (Deut. 21:23).25

  David’s Involvement

  WHERE WAS DAVID DURING all this? After all, he was the Philistine king’s bodyguard, so he should have been in the thick of the battle, alongside Achish. The Bible, naturally, will have none of this. Just as they were mustering to march north, we are told, some of the Philistine officers from cities other than Gath asked Achish who his bodyguard was and who the men with him were—“those Hebrews” (1 Sam. 29:3). When they learn that it is David, they demand that he be sent back to his little fiefdom of Ziklag, for they are sure that he will turn against them in the heat of battle. They even recall the Israelite women’s chant: “Saul has slain his thousands, David his tens of thousands” (29:5). Achish relents and asks David to return; David protests; Achish insists; and David and his men turn back south while the Philistines continue north.

  This all seems a bit too fortuitous. David had served Achish for long enough that his credentials should have been well established, even among the rest of the Philistines. It is also difficult to believe that the Philistines would have known about the songs of the Israelite women in praise of David—if such songs were ever really sung. And the back and forth between David and Achish, even as it presents David as almost desperate to fight on the side of the Philistines, serves an important purpose: it tells the reader that even if David had wanted to enter the battle against Saul, he was forcibly forbidden. Again, it is made clear that David could not have had any hand in Saul’s death.

  What follows upon David’s return to Ziklag is equally improbable. According to the biblical account, David and his men take the prototypical three days to return to Ziklag. When they arrive, they find that some Amalekites have raided the town and captured all the women and children, including David’s two wives—but, we are told, they did not harm a single one of them. David and his men, after consulting with the priest Abiathar, take off in pursuit. As they come to the Wadi Besor, the unofficial border between Philistine territory and the wasteland to the south, they miraculously encounter an Egyptian youth who happens to be an abandoned slave of the very Amalekites who had raided Ziklag. The boy leads David to the Amalekites, and David attacks, rescuing his wives and everybody else. In another minor miracle, “nothing of theirs was missing—young or old, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that had been taken” (1 Sam. 30:19).

  Many features of this story testify to its improbability. The raiding Amalekites are understood as acting in revenge for David’s constant raids on their territory during his time with the Philistines—but, as we have seen, those raids are probably part of the biblical cover-up, and so this revenge should be read as a further stage of the same literary program. The chance encounter with the abandoned Egyptian slave boy who points the way forward is a typical literary flourish; it is strikingly similar to the episode in Genesis 37 where Joseph is sent to find his brothers and does so only by happening upon an unnamed man who overheard the brothers reveal their destination (37:14–17). And, most notably, the fact that David recovered everything the Amalekites are said to have taken is both unlikely on the face of it—not a single person dead? not a single woman raped? not a single sheep eaten?—and a remarkable stroke of evidentiary fortune. For, presented with the notion that David was not with the Philistines at Mount Gilboa because he was chasing the Amalekites, one might have wondered where the evidence of the Amalekite raid was to be found: who or what could be accounted as missing to stand as proof that such a raid really happened? Such evidence cannot be provided, however, for the Amalekites touched not a hair on a single person’s head—or because the raid never happened at all. Even the biblical account admits, and tries to explain, the fact that during the battle David was absent from his home in Ziklag. But its explanation is forced.

  Where was David while the Philistines were killing Saul and his sons? By all rights, he should have been right there with them. And—despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the Bible’s emphatic statements to the contrary—we may conclude that this is exactly where he was. Now, David’s simply being on the battlefield where Saul and his sons died does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he did the deed himself. After all, the Philistines would have wanted Saul dead just as much as David did. And it is only in the movies that the hero is able to track down his nemeses in the thick of a major battle and single-handedly do them in. But by the same token, one need not pull the trigger to be convicted of murder; David may well have been responsible for the deaths of Saul and his sons.

  The first chapter of 2 Samuel records the moment when David learns of Saul’s death. An unnamed Amalekite man from Saul’s army comes to David at Ziklag and announces the result of the battle, including the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. David asks how the man knows what he is reporting, and the man tells David that he was right there when it happened. What’s more, when Saul was about to die, the king asked this very man to be the one to finish him off, which the Amalekite, obligingly, did. Then, the man says, he took the crown and armlet off Saul, which he then produces for David, saying, “I have brought them here to my lord” (2 Sam. 1:10).

  Almost every bit of this story is problematic.26 Why would someone go from the battlefield far to the north all the way south to David in Ziklag with the news? Surely David should have heard it from the returning Philistines, who had sent around Saul’s head and armor precisely for the sake of spreading the message. And more important, why would a foreigner report news to a Philistine vassal in Philistine territory? What made the man think that this information would be of particular interest to a mercenary? Then there is the man’s story, which directly contradicts the narrative of Saul’s death given in the previous chapter. Did Saul kill himself after his arms-bearer refused to do the deed, or did this young man kill him? And, perhaps most confusingly, even if this man took Saul’s crown and armlet, why, of all things, would he have thought to bring them to David, rather than to someone in Israel?

  The purpose of this bizarre story is to be found in the last of these issues. Somehow, it seems, David—the man whom Saul repeatedly tried to kill, the bandit chief, the vassal of the Philistines—ended up in possession of Saul’s royal insignia immediately after Saul’s death. This fact, which seems on the face of it to be quite damning, is what the narrative sets out to explain—to apologize for.27 Some scholars have suggested that the Amalekite is lying: that he did not kill Saul but instead came upon Saul’s body, took the crown and armlet, and delivered them to David because he thought that by doing so he might curry favor with Saul’s nemesis.28 The Amalekite, in this scenario, exaggerates his role, claiming responsibility for Saul’s death to please David even more. Although this may be what the narrative intends us to think, it is historically unlikely. It requires us to believe that the delivery of Saul’s royal insignia to David is a happy coincidence, the result of the mere chance that a random man happened to rob Saul and think to make his fortune with David. But this strains credulity. The one man in Canaan whom Saul most believed was vying for his crown can hardly have gained it, literally, in this happenstance way. If David ended up in possession of Saul’s crown and armlet, it can only be because David wanted Saul’s crown and armlet. We have to ask, then, how
did this actually come to pass?

  Since we are presented with two conflicting stories, we cannot be certain of how Saul died. Both texts agree that he was mortally wounded. But the story about his suicide seems to have a distinctly literary background: it is strikingly similar to the story in the book of Judges about Abimelech, who is mortally wounded and tells his arms-bearer to complete the deed, though in that case the arms-bearer complies (Judg. 9:53–54). Abimelech is presented as a villain—not least of all because he sought to become king in Shechem, in the course of which he also killed seventy of his brothers (Judg. 9:5). It can hardly be coincidence that Saul, who achieved the position Abimelech sought, dies in almost exactly the same way as his reviled predecessor. The story about the Amalekite, on the other hand, is equally a literary construction, designed to explain how David came to have Saul’s crown and armlet. It, too, has a good biblical parallel, in the story of the capture of the ark of the covenant and the messenger who runs to take the news to the old priest Eli (1 Sam. 4:12–18).29 Together, both stories about Saul’s death emphasize, yet again, David’s lack of involvement: whether Saul died by his own hand or by that of the Amalekite, David’s hands were clean.

  And yet: whoever got to Saul first, and therefore was able to take the crown and armlet off his body, must have been in league with David somehow. It seems likely enough that Saul’s royal objects were taken to David, rather than that David removed them from Saul himself—for that would have signaled to all of Israel that David was a usurper. But he could well have sent someone to seize them. Indeed, if Saul fell surrounded by the Philistines closing in on him, presumably one of them should have looted the king’s body for the royal treasures. And, since we have already seen that it is highly probable that David was at the battle, we may also suggest the possibility that it was one of David’s men who, on his master’s instructions, ran to strip Saul’s corpse of the symbols of kingship.