David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (4 page)

The Rise of David in the Hill Country of Judah

THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE OF DAVID’S RISE TO POWER
(1 Samuel 16:14–2 Samuel 5)—the vivid drama of the rise of a nobody from Bethlehem to the throne in Jerusalem—has been praised as a masterpiece of western literature and one of the earliest prose epics known. It is filled with acts of daring, bold surprises, bloody violence, and adoring popular acclaim. David enters the stage as a humble young shepherd, sent to the battlefield camp of the Israelites to bring provisions to his three older brothers. There, fired with divine inspiration, he fells the mighty Goliath, and the Philistines are routed. Yet in becoming the new hero of Israel, David must soon flee from the jealous envy and fury of King Saul. During his adventures among the villages and remote wildernesses of Judah, David’s story takes on the character of a classical bandit tale—and thereby reveals its earliest threads. In other words, the true, historic David, as far as archaeology and historical sources can reveal, gained his greatest fame as something of a bandit chief.

As the Bible tells it, after fleeing from Saul, David is refused shelter in Philistine territory and escapes to the cave of Adullam, where he gathers around himself a sizable outlaw band. “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. And there were with him about four hundred men” (1 Samuel 22:2).

As a guerrilla force, David’s men are quick and mobile. They come to the rescue of beleaguered villagers, humiliate an arrogant local strongman, outsmart the ruler of a powerful neighboring Philistine city, and evade the relentless pursuit of King Saul again and again. Extortion, seduction, deception, and righteous violence are David’s methods. His story is filled with larger-than-life ironies, comic episodes, and entertaining events. It is a classical bandit tale of a type known all over the world, then and now, in which popular rebels—like Robin Hood, Jesse James, and Pancho Villa—use bravado and cunning to challenge the corrupt, brutal powers that be. The exploits of some bandits have been gradually forgotten, but the tales of others have grown steadily more vivid over time. Modest events are transformed into astonishing achievements; unique personal traits are exaggerated to a mythic scale. In the case of the biblical narrative, the tales of David’s early bandit days merge into the national history of Israel. When King Saul dies on the battlefield, David is proclaimed king of Judah and proceeds to conquer Jerusalem and establish it as his seat of power. His destiny is to become king of all Israel, yet his days of banditry remain an essential part of the legend of the man.

How can we assess the historical reliability of this tale of the rise of a bandit? On literary grounds, many scholars have seen the entire narrative of David’s rise as a single composition, written during or soon after David’s reign as a kind of royal propaganda to legitimate and celebrate the establishment of the Davidic dynasty. Others, while agreeing that it is a single composition, place its writing centuries later, as a fanciful folktale with virtually no historical value at all. Based on archaeological evidence, and clues within the text, we can now say that the tale could not possibly have been put in writing until more than two hundred years after the death of David. However, the text seems to preserve some uncannily accurate memories of tenth century
BCE
conditions in the highlands of Judah—and may contain at least the traces of a reliable, original account of the events of the historical David’s earliest career.

LIFE ON THE HIGHLAND FRONTIER

Detailed descriptions of environment and settlement patterns are perhaps the most important evidence for dating the Bible’s historical texts. The sheer weight of geographical information and long lists of place-names interwoven in its stories testify to a familiarity with the ancient landscape of Judah and Israel. The many biblical geographical descriptions that today appear to us as tedious lists of obscure villages and natural features interrupting the flow of the narrative were once essential components of its tales. They were intended for particular audiences who would
recognize
the names of the various places mentioned and evoke admiration for the achievements of the various biblical characters in a physical setting that they knew well. A reference to a place known to be in the heart of the wilderness would evoke images of freedom from the tedious routines of peasant life. The mention of a city known to be the seat of regional power—or corruption—would make the hero’s triumphs or evasions there seem all the more memorable. The mention of villages known to be especially poor or endangered by marauders would heighten admiration for the stories of their rescue or relief.

Thus the frequent appearance of place-names and geographical terms in David’s tale in the first book of Samuel should not be seen as a sign of a biblical clerk’s insistence for detail. They speak in a coded language of familiarity with contemporary landscapes of power, whose details, once so vivid, might gradually lose their significance as generations succeed one another and new constellations of cities, wilderness, and farmland emerge. Like preserved fossils embedded in the rock of biblical tradition, they are identifiable in their unique patterns and can be placed in quite specific historical periods. They offer us a key to dating some of the story’s key elements.

Geographical zones and main archaeological sites in the Land of the Bible:
(A)
Mediterranean Sea;
(B)
Sea of Galilee;
(C)
Dead Sea;
(D)
Galilee;
(E)
Jezreel Valley;
(F)
northern highlands (highlands of Samaria);
(G)
Coastal Plain;
(H)
Jordan Valley;
(I)
southern highlands (Judean hill country);
(J)
Shephelah;
(K)
Beer-sheba Valley;
(L)
Judean Desert;
(M)
highlands of Transjordan;
(N)
Negev highlands.
(1)
Jerusalem;
(2)
Samaria;
(3)
Megiddo;
(4)
Hazor.

The Judahite hill country where David rose from shepherd to national leader is an isolated highland bloc, largely cut off from the rest of the country, with only a narrow north-south plateau linking its traditional main towns of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. Its topography today as then is rugged, it soils are rocky and poor, its rainfall unpredictable. Its people survived by adopting a difficult, if highly adaptable, way of life. In recent years, archaeologists working in Israel have undertaken wide-ranging surface surveys throughout the country to study the array of settlements in each historical period and to identify archaeological sites with localities mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts. The general geographical description of Judah in the David story indeed fits the environment, topography, and settlement system of the early phases of the Iron Age, in particular, the tenth century
BCE
.

Isolation profoundly influenced Judah’s history.
*
Its natural geographical boundaries shaped its relations with the outside world. To the west, the hill country drops steeply through a series of narrow, rocky ridges with steep slopes, separated by deep ravines, to an area of foothills called the Shephelah. It was on those slopes of the eastern Shephelah that David reportedly found shelter in the cave of Adullam (1 Samuel 22:1) and won his first great victory with his band of mighty men in defending the villagers of Keilah from Philistine attack (1 Samuel 23:5). Communication and travel from the hill country to the more heavily populated Shephelah and the coastal plain beyond is difficult and dangerous. The main routes descend steeply, dropping more than fifteen hundred feet in altitude in the distance of just a few miles. To the west, the Shephelah forms an utterly different landscape—moderate, fertile, and densely settled with villages. David’s adventures as the unlikely protégé of the Philistine king Achish of Gath occurred along this border between the hill country, the Shephelah, and the coastal Philistine cities beyond.

In the east, the hill country drops into the Judean Desert. An arid zone starts abruptly as the winter rain clouds from the Mediterranean are emptied of all their moisture on the central plateau of the highland ridge. Within just a few miles to the east, the landscape grows increasingly arid and rugged. Twisting ravines carry torrents of winter runoff eastward into the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley. In a few places close to the Dead Sea, like En Gedi, they form rough, deep canyons pocked with caves in their sheer cliffs. It was here that the biblical narrative places David’s dramatic escapes from a pursuing Saul.

In the south, the Hebron hills slope more gradually down to the Beer-sheba Valley; the transition from the arable land to the arid zone is much less abrupt. Here, still-existing place-names evoke associations with the David stories; many of the villages and ruins preserve the names of the ancient, biblical settlements. Khirbet (“the ruin of” in Arabic) Ma‘in is the site of biblical Ma‘on. Khirbet Karmil, less than a mile to the north, is the place of biblical Carmel—both are mentioned in the Abigail affair (1 Samuel 25). Khirbet Zif is biblical Ziph—a hideout of David on the run from Saul (1 Samuel 23:14–15). Es-Samu‘ is the site of biblical Eshtemoa, and Khirbet ‘Attir of Jattir—both villages listed among the places that received a share of David’s spoils in his great victory over Amalek (1 Samuel 30:26–27).

Thus the biblical geography closely matches the actual landscape of the highlands of Judah. But that fact does not necessarily offer us chronological help. The geographical conditions have existed for millennia and this setting would have been familiar to storytellers and mythmakers throughout all of antiquity. Yet if we are to believe that the David stories are not purely imaginary tales imposed on a familiar landscape, we must look to archaeology to discover if the specific constellation of place-names and geographical conditions reflect a unique tenth century
BCE
situation—which later generations would not have known and could not have made up.

THE CLUE OF CHANGING SETTLEMENT PATTERNS

In recent decades, intensive archaeological surveys have provided an entirely new perspective on the evolution of society in the Judean highlands over thousands of years. The painstaking work of surface exploration—carefully examining all traces of ancient settlement over large blocs of territory, dating them by the indications of characteristic pottery types, and plotting them on maps arranged according to successive chronological periods—has offered us a dramatic picture of cyclical demographic expansion and retraction. We know when many of the ancient sites in the area were established and we know when certain regions were thickly settled and when they were not. This information offers us an important tool for dating the possible historical background of the biblical narrative.

Since evidence of extensive literacy is lacking in Judah before the end of the eighth century
BCE
, “The History of David’s Rise” is unlikely to have been put into writing less than two hundred years after David’s time. Is it possible that the narrative was composed at that time and that the general settlement patterns and population distribution described in the story of David’s rise reflect the situation at the
time of writing
—and have no real connection to the situation in the tenth century
BCE
?

The answer is no. The geographical background behind the earliest David stories simply does not fit the eighth century
BCE
, when Judah was a fully developed monarchy with the apparatus of literary production and the need for a national history. First and foremost, in the eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
, the fringe areas of Judah where David is described as fleeing from Saul and conducting his raids and bandit activities were densely settled; they could hardly have been chosen as an appropriate setting for free movement and daring escapes. The area south of Hebron was filled with large villages in easy reach of the central authority in Jerusalem. Even farther south, in the arid zone of the Negev and the Beer-sheba Valley, where David reportedly conducted lightning raids against the neighboring desert peoples (1 Samuel 27:10), a dense network of walled towns, forts, and villages protected the southern borders of the kingdom and offered security for the caravan trade.