David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (7 page)

The modest expansion of building activities in Early Iron Age Jerusalem is extremely difficult to link to the Bible’s events. Whether the terraces and other structures on the eastern slope of the City of David were meant to support a citadel, we cannot say for sure.
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We do not even know when, exactly, within the first few centuries of the Iron Age these construction works took place. We know only that at some point, the followers and descendants of David acknowledged Jerusalem as their capital. The official trappings of David’s new regime would have been modest. Business would have been conducted with the highland clans through face-to-face encounters and social interaction. Storytelling would have been a key to his maintaining the continued support of the people of the southern highlands, now that he had been transformed from their occasional protector to their permanent chief.

THE STRATIGRAPHY OF HEROIC TALES

Though the demographic, social, and political realities behind the David-as-Apiru stories all seem to reflect the memories of an early period—possibly memories of the actual realities if not events in the tenth century
BCE
—it is clear that these stories were not put in writing at that time. The cycle of David-as-Apiru stories, containing some fairly reliable memories about conditions in the highlands at the very start of his career, were probably orally transmitted for some two centuries, until the eighth century
BCE
, when the first signs of widespread literacy appear in Judah. For two hundred years, David would have been the hero of tall tales and folktales that celebrated his extraordinary career. Yet oral transmission is quite fluid. There can hardly be a doubt that the form in which we have these stories today—incorporated first into the coherent “Rise of David” narrative and then into the larger Deuteronomistic History—is quite different from that of the original tales. Centuries of exaggeration and storytelling surely transformed some of the elements, deleted others, and added successive layers of political and theological interpolation that reflected the concerns and realities of the tellers.

So how can we begin to separate the layers? The American biblical scholar Stanley Isser suggests that we look at the process of folktale creation itself. He examined the narrative of “David’s Rise to Power” and identified the common mythic themes it shares with bandit tales and hero myths in different historical periods and in different parts of the world. Particularly intriguing are the literary “fossils” interspersed in the text of David’s story. Snatches of ancient heroic tales seem to have been cut and pasted into the narrative at various places. This apparent urge to collect and incorporate all known traditions resulted in two of the most awkward passages in an otherwise well-written text.

Before and after the farewell speech of the dying David—oddly placed in the midst of the narrative of the king’s later years of rule—comes a series of colorful yet almost telegraphic summaries of heroic acts (2 Samuel 21:15–22; 23:8–39) of David’s followers at the very
beginning
of his career, mainly in the wars against the Philistines. To all appearances, the editor or editors who stitched these passages together had collected additional information about the exploits of some of David’s most important followers but failed to integrate these episodes into the free-flowing narrative. So they are placed as something of an appendix containing brief summaries of some stories that must have been well-known folktales themselves.

None of these acts of daring are mentioned in the body of the David story. It is noteworthy that they take place in the same area as his recorded acts, in the Judean hills and their immediate vicinity. Yet in the form they are presented they strip the stories of all their drama and beg as many questions as they answer. Why did Josheb-basshebeth have to battle eight hundred warriors alone? Where was the battle at which the hand of Eleazar the son of Dodo cleaved to his sword? Why was Shammah the son of Agee in a field of lentils? What were the circumstances (and the meaning) of Benaiah the son of Jehoiada slaying “two ariels of Moab,” “a lion in a pit on a day that the snow had fallen,” and an Egyptian with his own spear?

The content in these summaries is extraordinary (as are some of their details, like the description of the warrior with twelve fingers and twelve toes), but they seem intended more to
remind
the reader of well-known tales, whose details were familiar, rather than provide an authoritative historical account. Isser pointed out that these literary traces are apparent fragments of an early body of epic ballads that celebrated the exploits of David and his men. The tales were popular among the people of Judah, but were not incorporated fully into the biblical account. As mere summaries, they provide us with the clear recognition that the compilers of the biblical narrative had at their disposal a vast body of tradition for inclusion in their work. Some tales were selected, others were abbreviated, and yet others were probably rejected altogether. Theirs was a task of collection and heavy editing, surely not an accurate recording of history.

We have not yet discussed what is surely the most famous folktale of all about David: his miraculous victory over the Philistine giant Goliath of Gath, the shaft of whose spear “was like a weaver’s beam” (1 Samuel 17:7). One can hardly even think of the young David today without calling it to mind. It is the act that is probably most widely remembered, and it is presumed by many biblical readers to be a historical event. But among the short summaries we have just mentioned is the following, surprising report:

Who killed Goliath? As we will show in a later chapter, the David-and-Goliath story as we now have it shows the clear influence of much later periods. But here, in one of the abbreviated folktales, presumably an early stratum of legend, we hear of Elhanan’s achievement. Could this represent an early version of one of the world’s most famous biblical tales? Was Elhanan the real name of a hero who toppled a Philistine giant or, as some scholars have suggested, was Elhanan the original name of Judah’s future king?

TALES FOR COLD WINTER NIGHTS

The ancient tales of the bandit hero and his mighty men, recited around campfires and at public celebrations, were meant to impress his followers with his extraordinary exploits, and thereby to instill respect for the hero’s power. He was a man of the people, a brave rebel who fought fiercely against enemies and injustice. He was a man of strong desires and an equally strong determination to resist the overlords, and the injustices that so many of his contemporaries had learned to accept. In every story of his smashing victories and the astounding acts of bravery of his closest comrades, listeners gained vicarious satisfaction and an enhanced sense of security. As the colorful tales spread from mouth to mouth and from village to village, their details grew more miraculously entertaining and (no doubt) less accurate.

The most plausible historical scenario we can propose—based on the passages of 1 Samuel that match the archaeological and anthropological conditions of the tenth century
BCE
in the highlands of Judah—is that an Apiru-like leader known as David emerged as a local strongman at a time of political chaos. He eventually gained enough support among the southern highland population that the respected elders of the area proclaimed him chieftain in the old tribal center of Hebron. Before long he established his seat of his power in Jerusalem and ruled over the region’s farmers and herders, much as Abdi-Heba had done some centuries before. Since the southern hill country was remote from the main trade routes and centers of lowland power, the rise of the historical David would have been a local matter, of concern at first perhaps only to those Philistine cities that faced Judah’s western flank. In that respect, the highly localized stories of David’s bandit days in the cave of Adullam, his coming to the rescue of the people of Keilah, his protection of Ziklag, and his dealings with arrogant sheep raisers would have bound the listeners among the villages of the southern highlands and eastern Shephelah into a community of sympathy and support.

It would be a mistake to assume that the people of the southern hill country had a single, uniformly defined national identity at the time of David. The region was fragmented among its farmers and shepherds, and among its many crosscutting clans. Only later would the people of Judah look back and assume that their designation as a single people had always been so clear. That was due in no small measure to the continual transmission and elaboration of the ancient stories about the founder of their dynasty, whose value lay in the sense of local community solidarity they helped to create. In the following chapters we will trace the layers of mythmaking and historical reinterpretation that were gradually added to the earliest stratum of the Davidic bandit tales. Not everything is clearly datable and many questions remain. But we will present archaeological evidence that can show step by step, era by era, how the biblical legend of David and, later, his son Solomon was formed for an ever-wider coalition of communities—eventually for western civilization as a whole.

David was the founder of something new in the Judean hills in the dawning epoch we now call the Iron Age. There may have been—and probably were—other local heroes in the highlands of Canaan. But David was different from all others. His career was not just a meteoric moment of triumph doomed to live on only in the folktales of a famous local bandit king and soon be forgotten. Whether by cunning, intelligence, or extraordinary historical circumstance, he alone, of all the now-forgotten ruffians and freebooters who roamed the rugged country between the Dead Sea and the Judean foothills, established a dynasty that ruled for the next four hundred years. And even after it lost its political power, it was continuously remembered and revered for millennia.

But the question we must now address is how the appeal and influence of this southern chieftain, who rose from the sheep pens and bandits’ caves, far transcended his original local role. How did David’s memory come to be intertwined with the deepest hopes and national traditions of the vast confederation of hill country villages to the
north
of Judah that would later be identified as Israel?