The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero

by Joel S. Baden

  It is theoretically possible that David had given instructions to his men to rush in and strip Saul only in the event that Saul died in battle. But in years of warfare against the Philistines, Saul had never fallen before. What are the chances that the only time Saul was wounded, the time when he died, was also the only battle that took place while David was allied with the Philistines? The coincidence is hard to swallow. David must have been involved. Perhaps David and his men acted as a separate unit, chasing down Saul while the rest of the Philistines faced the body of the Israelite army. Perhaps David and his men presented themselves to the Israelites as having double-crossed the Philistines, and thereby gained access behind the Israelite lines.30 Most likely, it was David who gave the Philistines the idea to attack from the north rather than from the south. There was a reason that the Philistines had been unable to dislodge Saul and Israel for all those years. The Philistines were experts at fighting in the plains, their natural landscape; David, from the hill country of Judah, had a military expertise that would have been of great use to them. And David, more than anyone else in the Philistine camp, was familiar with Saul’s tactics, with the way that Saul expected the Philistines to attack, and with the defenses that the Israelites typically mounted. The Philistine victory in this battle probably should be attributed to their unexpected assault from the north—and this new approach probably should be attributed to David. Everything else is a constant; David was the X factor in this military equation. The results speak for themselves. Saul was dead, and David held the royal insignia in his hand.

  To say that David personally killed Saul would be going too far. It is not impossible, but it is not necessarily probable, either. What is probable, even bordering on certain, is that David had a hand in Saul’s death. Everything points in this direction, from the historical probability of David’s presence at the battle to the evidently indisputable fact that David gained Saul’s crown to the overly vigorous biblical claims for David’s innocence. And this biblical defense of David reaches its highest point just after he has finally gained the crown he sought for so long.

  Once David and his men learn of Saul’s death, the Bible tells us, they tear their clothes, lament, weep, and fast—the full litany of traditional mourning procedures in ancient Israel. David then turns his sharp eye on the young man who brought him the news, who wielded the sword that ended Saul’s days, asking him, “How did you dare to extend your hand to destroy Yahweh’s anointed?” (2 Sam. 1:14). Before the man can even respond—and what could he have said in any case?—David tells one of his attendants to kill the man, which the attendant obligingly does. And David proclaims the final word over the dead man: “Your own mouth testified against you when you said, ‘It was I who killed Yahweh’s anointed’ ” (1:16). David’s words—“How did you dare to extend your hand to destroy Yahweh’s anointed?”—hearken back directly to the two episodes in the wilderness in which David refrains from killing Saul: “Yahweh forbid that I should extend my hand against him, for he is Yahweh’s anointed” (1 Sam. 24:7); “Yahweh forbid that I should extend my hand against Yahweh’s anointed” (26:11). Not only did David not have a hand in Saul’s death, but he was emphatically appalled that anyone should. By killing the Amalekite, David is ostensibly avenging Saul’s death.

  The lament that David recites for Saul and Jonathan reaches the extreme limits of the biblical apology. He hardly could be more effusive in his posthumous praise: “How the mighty have fallen!” (2 Sam. 1:19, 25, 27). Saul and Jonathan are presented as Israel’s glory. David calls for nature itself to cease and praises the military might of the two men: “They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions” (1:23). He tells Israel’s maidens to weep. All this for Saul, David’s mortal enemy, and Jonathan, the heir who stood in the way of David’s ascent to the throne. The path has been cleared for David to ascend to the kingship—everything he ever could have wished for has come to pass. But the Bible presents David as wracked by anguish, as expressed in mourning, in murder, and in lament.

  In all of this—the mourning rituals, the vengeance on Saul’s killer, the lament—David is making a performance of grief. But who is he performing for? His band of outlaws, men who have been ostracized from society and have happily worked for the Philistines for more than a year? According to the story, they are the only ones who would have witnessed any of these actions. The performance, rather, is for the reader. It is for our benefit that David goes through the motions of grief, to demonstrate to the last possible moment that he had always loved Saul and Jonathan.

  The Bible doth protest too much. In story after story, the biblical account strains to reject the notion that David was responsible for Saul’s death. From the two episodes in which David spares Saul’s life in the wilderness to the excuse for David’s absence from the battlefield to David’s reaction to the news of Saul’s death—every episode desperately argues, each from a different perspective, for David’s innocence. The only sensible historical conclusion is that David really did participate actively in the death of Saul.

  THE DAVID OF THE wilderness resembles a figure out of a classic Western film. He is not the righteous sheriff, however, as we might expect. Instead, he is the unscrupulous outlaw, willing to do whatever it takes to survive and gradually gain power. This period is one of extortion, theft, homicide, and—with the death of Saul—regicide. Though David’s actions are far from admirable, we may acknowledge that he is not unskilled in the art of survival. He enters the wilderness as an outcast, with nothing and no one to call his own. He is able to gain a following, avoid capture, find a safe haven among the Philistines, and even make a living—albeit by raiding the towns of Judah. And, when the opportunity finally arises to open the way to the kingship, David makes the most of it.

  Yet the death of Saul did not mean that David was suddenly king of Israel, even if he did literally hold the crown. Attaining the kingship—and, just as importantly, holding on to it—would require further efforts still.

  Chapter 4

  David Becomes King

  A SERIES OF TIMELY DEATHS

  IN THE MODERN IMAGINATION, SAUL is succeeded directly by David. This is what we are taught in religious school, and this is what we find in most introductory overviews of the Israelite monarchy. And, given the biblical presentation, it is a natural assumption. After all, David is predestined to be king, anointed by God’s prophet Samuel—and God himself is said to have stripped Saul of the kingship in order to give it to David. After Saul’s death, therefore, it would seem self-evident that David—who, after all, literally held Saul’s crown in his hand—would ascend the throne and begin his glorious reign over all Israel.

  This version of events, however, is highly abbreviated. David would eventually become king in Saul’s place, to be sure. But his path to the crown was hardly easy or straightforward. We, as readers of the Bible, are prepared for it well in advance. But the inhabitants of Israel and Judah had no such foreknowledge, no reason to assume that David was entitled to rule them. Indeed, it would have been quite the contrary: David, remember, had effectively given up his membership in the community of Judah by going over to the Philistines—and he never really belonged to Israel, the northern territories over which Saul had ruled. He was not a member of the royal family. Indeed, as we have seen, David likely played a direct role in the death of Saul and his sons. From an Israelite perspective, David had about as much right to rule as did a Philistine.

  David, King of Judah

  IT IS THUS SOMEWHAT surprising, from a historical perspective, that directly after Saul’s defeat and death David should be anointed king—though not over all Israel, but rather over only Judah. The biblical account of this event is startling for its brevity. In a mere four verses (2 Sam. 2:1–4) we are told that David went to Hebron with his wives and faithful followers and settled there and that “the men of Judah came and there they anointed David king over the House of Judah” (2:4). For a seminal moment in David’s royal career, this report is
so short as to be almost overlooked. And while the basic facts seem plausible enough, the basic facts are all the biblical authors provide here. The text raises a number of questions to be answered and gaps to be filled. Why, for instance, does David go to Hebron? Who are the “men of Judah”? How did popular acclaim function as a mechanism for anointing a king? Why did the Judahites anoint David? What were the practical implications of David’s new position? The haste with which the Bible describes David’s anointing in Hebron may suggest that there is more to this event than meets the eye—surely, it was not so simple as that.

  David’s choice of Hebron as his new residence, and in fact as his capital in Judah, was a strategic one. The city sits squarely in the middle of the hill country of Judah, in one of the highest areas of the region. Already a thousand years before David, Hebron was the most significant city in what would eventually be called Judah. It was both a cultic site and, more important, a royal city encircled by a massive wall, an administrative center from which the surrounding area was controlled.1 The significance of Hebron in the region is evident from its prominence in the early biblical traditions: it is in Hebron that Abraham dwells and that the patriarchs and matriarchs are buried (with the exception of Rachel). When Moses sends spies to go explore “the hill country,” they go to Hebron. For someone with royal aspirations, there could be no more symbolic place to be anointed than in the ancient royal city of Hebron.

  What is not obvious at first glance is just how odd it is that David should have relocated to Hebron at all. Since we know he will become king there, the move seems natural. Yet this is the same David who, fewer than two years earlier, was unable to find even temporary shelter among the inhabitants of Judah. Towns and regions far less important than Hebron—Keilah and Ziph, for example—were all too happy to turn David aside. Yet suddenly, and without comment, David is able to settle himself, his family, and all of his men and their families in one of the largest and most important cities in Judah. Something has changed.

  In fact, two significant transformations have occurred since David last found himself in the hills of Judah. The first is the defeat and death of Saul. When David first entered the wilderness, Saul was powerful enough both to regularly send search parties after David and to be viewed by the Judahites as the better bet, so to speak—to all appearances, Saul and his army had the upper hand in the conflict against David and his ragtag militia. Keilah and Ziph were able to refuse David’s advances because they knew that Saul would support them if necessary. With Saul’s death, however, there was no longer a greater force to stand behind the Judahites’ denials of David. The second change is the rise in David’s military power during his time among the Philistines. No longer a relatively ill-equipped gang scrounging the wilderness for supplies, David and his men now had a comfortable home base, ample supplies from their many months of raids, and almost certainly improved arms thanks to the Philistines whom they served. David did not move out of desperation any longer—now his movements were calculated. If he relocated to Hebron, it was because he had the power to maintain his presence there, especially in the vacuum created by the absence of Saul’s military counterweight.

  The point, then, is that it was not the attitude of the Judahites toward David that changed. Indeed, after more than a year of David’s regular raids from Philistia, it was likely that their feelings had only hardened against him. What changed was their ability to do anything about it. This is all to suggest that David’s move to Hebron is less a mere relocation and more an act of aggression. Note how his settlement there replicates that of the Philistines in the north. After the defeat of the Israelite army, the Philistines occupied the conquered territory. That they could settle their own people in Israel without the native populace being able to prevent it signaled Israel’s complete subjugation. This is especially true in a culture like that of ancient Israel, in which familial possession of the land was of the utmost importance, protected by custom and law. It was rare enough for an Israelite to move within Israel—an outsider settling in the land would have been an indication of the people’s abject weakness. Settlement equals possession; it is a mark of power. And so, too, David, in the south, moves into the very heart of Judah, to one of its oldest and most famous cities. By settling in Hebron, he makes a bold statement about his strength relative to that of the inhabitants of Judah. They once may have been able to push him away, but they are unable to do so any longer.

  Hebron was the logical choice for David for another reason. It was the main city of the Calebite tribe. In the book of Joshua, when the conquered land is apportioned among the Israelite tribes, the city of Hebron is granted specifically to Caleb, the tribe’s eponymous ancestor, as a reward for his faithfulness during the episode of the spies in Numbers 13–14: “So Joshua blessed Caleb son of Jephunneh and assigned Hebron to him as his portion” (Josh. 14:13). David’s move to Hebron was more than merely symbolic: he was making good on his right to be the Calebite chief, a right he claimed when he killed Nabal and married Abigail. At the time, he was unable to assume the position because he had not yet amassed enough power. But that was then.

  Although the death of Saul may have been the precipitating event for David’s incursion into the heart of Judah, his movements were not unplanned. Saul’s defeat opened the door for David, but he had been laying the groundwork for the establishment of his power in Judah for quite a while—beginning with his marriage to Abigail. Moreover, it seems likely that the entire time he was among the Philistines was intended to prepare for just this eventuality. As we have seen, David’s main activity during the sixteen months of his residence in Ziklag was the regular raiding of Judahite towns. While such raids had obvious economic benefits, we should not overstate the tangible rewards that resulted from them. These towns were not major centers of commerce; they were not blessed with agricultural or material abundance. What could be captured in a raid was probably hardly enough to justify the expense of mounting the expedition in the first place. And from the Judahite perspective, the raids were not economically crippling—there is no evidence that any Judahite community was destroyed, abandoned, or even deeply harmed by these Philistine advances (we may note the example of Keilah discussed in the previous chapter). David’s raids were, as such minor attacks usually are, less about tangible reward and more about the intangible message they sent. The ability to enter Judah unopposed, and to leave without being pursued, sent a clear signal of regional dominance. David’s raids were aimed not at Judah’s economy, but at its psyche. The Judahites would not have known where or when David might strike—they would have had to be constantly on guard, constantly reminded of their susceptibility to attack. In his time with the Philistines, David established himself as a fearsome presence.

  At the same time, however, he was taking a different tack, though one that contributed to the same basic ends. In 1 Samuel 30:26–31, we are told that David sent some of the spoil he had captured to the elders of Judah. The text suggests that this spoil was from David’s vengeful attack on the Amalekites who had captured Ziklag, but we have already seen that that story is a patent apology for David’s participation in the battle against Saul. The notice of David sending spoil to Judah may contribute to this apologetic end: in theory, the receipt of the spoils from David would prove that he was not on the battlefield. Yet this notice seems, unlike the rest of the story, to have a ring of truth to it—in fact, it may well be further evidence of David’s concerted efforts to establish himself as the power figure in Judah.

  We may note the detailed list of the towns to which David is said to have sent these spoils: Bethel, Ramoth-negeb, Jattir, Aroer, Siphmoth, Eshtemoa, Racal, Hormah, Bor-ashan, and Athach, as well as the regions of the Jerahmeelites and Kenites (30:27–31). All of these Judahite towns are clustered in the south, near the top of the Negeb desert. What is notable about this list is that it matches almost perfectly the list of areas that David told Achish he had raided, when (according to the biblical author) he was in fact raiding
various tribes to the south. David told Achish, in 1 Samuel 27:10, that he was raiding “the Negeb of Judah or the Negeb of the Jerahmeelites or the Negeb of the Kenites.” We have already seen that David almost certainly did raid those territories—which means that he also seems to have sent spoils to precisely the same places.

  This conclusion is, remarkably, confirmed by the biblical text itself, which describes the places to which David sent spoils as “all the places where David and his men had roamed” (30:31). Earlier, the biblical authors had (unconvincingly) told us that David did not in fact raid those regions but had lied about doing so to appease Achish. Here, however, we are told that he and his men actually were in those places. In other words, the cover-up has slipped away momentarily. This suggests that a historical account of David sending spoils to Judah—to the very towns that he was raiding under Achish—has here been reconfigured to serve as part of the apology for David’s whereabouts during the battle against Saul. The question, then, becomes under what circumstances David really did send spoils to Judah, if it was not when the Bible says it was.

  Before coming to the when, however, we must understand the why. How would it benefit David to redistribute to the towns of Judah the very spoils he had taken from them in the first place? As with the raids in which the spoils were captured, the sending of gifts back to Judah is important more for its symbolism than for its content. It sends a message: David has the power to take away, but he also has the power to give back. He is in complete command, able to punish or reward as he sees fit. David clearly doesn’t need the spoils—he is not dependent on them for his survival; they are worthless to him. Their value is with the communities from which they were taken, and David, in controlling the spoils, is stating clearly his value to these communities as well. By taking and giving, David is saying, “This can go one of two ways: you can oppose me, or you can support me—and you can see what each choice entails.”2 If this behavior seems familiar from stories of the modern mafia, it is no coincidence. The knowledge of how to use power to control a population is as old as power itself.