King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (17 page)

“I see a god,” she whispered in astonishment, “coming up out of the earth.”

“What is his appearance?” Saul asked.

“An old man cometh up,” she answered as if in a trance, “and he is wrapped in a robe.” (1 Sam. 28:12–14)
¹⁶

Now it was Saul who was suddenly terror-stricken, and he fell to the floor of the old woman's hut, burying his face in the ground in obeisance to the ghost he had summoned up. And yet the scene suddenly shifts from terror to burlesque: the spirit of Samuel has been roused from its ghostly slumber and is none too happy to find itself back among the living.

“Why hast thou disturbed me by bringing me up?” complained the resentful ghost.

“I am sore distressed,” whined Saul, who apparently lifted himself from the floor to recite his bad-luck story, which Samuel surely knew as well as anyone. “The Philistines make war against me, and God is departed from me and answers me no more, neither by prophets nor by dreams, and so I have called upon you that tell me what I should do.” (1 Sam. 28:15)
¹⁷

“Why then do you ask of
me
,” said Samuel, “seeing the Lord is departed from thee and is become thine enemy?” (1 Sam. 28:16)

Now it was the ghost of Samuel who recited a familiar litany, reminding Saul that he had forfeited God's favor when he failed
to kill the king of the Amalekites and thus forced the old prophet to finish the job himself. “Thou didst not harken to the voice of the Lord and didst not execute his hot wrath upon Amalek,” Samuel said in rebuke. (1 Sam. 28:18) And then he issued one more chilling prophecy before returning to his ghostly rest.

Saul was so shattered by the unequivocal prophecy of his own death that he fell once again to the ground, not in obeisance but in simple terror. The Bible pauses to note that he had eaten nothing for a day and a night, perhaps in a ritual of purification to prepare himself for the séance, and now he was drained of energy, courage, and even the will to live.

The sight of the ruined Saul stirred a maternal compassion in the witch of Endor.

“I listened to what you said and I risked my life to obey you,” she said with surprising tenderness. “Now listen to me: let me set before you a little food to give you strength for your journey.” (1 Sam. 28:21–22) (NEB)

“I will not eat,” answered Saul. (1 Sam. 28:23)

But the woman, more like a Jewish mother than a trafficker in dead souls, urged Saul to take some nourishment. The two servants who had accompanied Saul on his midnight adventure joined in the chorus: “Eat, eat,” we might imagine them to say. Slowly and perhaps a bit sulkily, King Saul picked himself up from the floor, seated himself on the edge of the woman's bed, and waited while she killed a fatted calf and kneaded a measure of unleavened flour, whipping up a meal of veal cutlets and matzah.

Fortified by her food and comforted by her kind words, Saul departed from the ghostwife's cottage and returned to the encampment where his army waited. To the credit of the crazy old king, Saul did not allow Samuel's prediction of his imminent death to dissuade him from going forth once more to do battle with the Philistines.

Across the border in Philistia, David, too, was caught up in the preparations for war. “And the lords of the Philistines passed on by hundreds and by thousands,” the Bible reports, and David's battle-tested guerrillas followed at the rear of the mighty column. But the odd sight of a contingent of Israelites in the ranks of the vast Philistine army troubled a few of the warlords.

“What are these Hebrews doing here?” the princes demanded of David's patron, King Achish of Gath. (1 Sam. 29:3)
¹⁸

“Is this not David, the servant of Saul, king of Israel, who has been with me these days and years?” replied Achish, who was ready to vouch for David's loyalty. “I have found no fault in him from the day he defected to me unto this day.” (1 Sam. 29:3)
¹⁹

The Philistine generals did not share Achish's credulity. They refused to believe that David was earnest in his defection—surely he would turn on his Philistine allies in order to put himself back into the good graces of King Saul. “He shall not fight side by side with us, or he may turn traitor in the battle,” they protested. “What better way to buy his master's favour than at the price of our lives?” (1 Sam. 29:4–5) (NEB)

Above all, the Philistines still feared the military prowess and sheer ruthlessness of the young mercenary.

“Is this not David,” the lords of Philistia asked the king of Gath, “of whom they sang one to another in dances, saying:

So Achish, dutifully but regretfully, summoned the man he regarded as his faithful vassal to his war tent and ordered him back to his fiefdom in Ziklag.

“As Yahweh lives, you have been upright—I have not found evil in you since the day of your coming,” he said to David, oddly invoking the God of Israel rather than one of the gods and goddesses
of the Philistine pantheon. “Nevertheless, the Philistine lords favor you not.” (1 Sam. 29:6)
²⁰

Remarkably, David did not take advantage of Achish's order, which offered him an opportunity to avoid open warfare against his own countrymen. Rather, as the Bible plainly reveals, David urgently reasserted his loyalty to the Philistine cause. Any enemy of the king of Gath, David insisted, was his enemy, too.

“But what have I done,” David pleaded, “that I may not go and fight against the enemies of my lord the king?” (1 Sam. 29:8)

“I know you are as good in my sight as an angel of God,” Achish said, again invoking the Israelite deity. “But the Philistine commanders have said: ‘He shall not go up with us to the battle.’ So rise up early in the morning, and as soon as you have enough light, depart.” (1 Sam. 29:10)
²¹

David obeyed the order, rising early with his men and leading them back into Gath as the Philistine army formed up into ranks and columns and marched toward Jezreel, where Saul and Jonathan had positioned the army of Israel in battle array. When the Philistines and the Israelites finally crossed swords, David and his men had already retreated to safety deep in enemy territory.

An intriguing clue to David's origin and character may be found in the question that the lords of Philistia put to King Achish on the eve of battle: “What are these
Hebrews
doing here?” (1 Sam. 29:3) The Bible generally refers to the twelve tribes who descended from the patriarch Jacob as “Israelites” or, more precisely, the Children of Israel (
b'nai Yisrael
).
²²
But the Philistines use a very different term for the same people—“Hebrews” (
ivrim
), a word that may have been used to identify David and his men as renegades.

Nowadays, of course, “Hebrew” is the word used to described the
language
of the Bible and, in its updated form, of the modern state of Israel. But the Bible uses the term to identify a
people
, not
a language, and only in very specific circumstances. “Hebrews” is used for the Israelites only in biblical passages where non-Israelites such as the Philistines or the Egyptians are speaking about the Israelites, or where the Israelites are distinguishing themselves from non-Israelites. The distinction between “Hebrews” and “Israelites,” however, remained a mystery until the late nineteenth century, when archaeologists began to uncover references to a people called the Habiru in extra-biblical texts of the ancient Near East.

The Habiru, for example, are mentioned in a cache of diplomatic correspondence dating back to the fifteenth century
B.C.E.
that was unearthed at a site in Egypt known as Tell el-Amarna. The clay tablets were covered with writing in the cuneiform alphabet of the Akkadian language that was used in international diplomacy and commerce in the ancient Near East, and they included intelligence reports from the chieftains of Canaan about newly arrived marauders called Habiru (or “Apiru,” as the term is sometimes rendered in English) who were waging a war of conquest throughout Canaan.

“The Apiru plunder all the lands of the king,” complains the Canaanite chieftain of Jerusalem in one of the Amarna letters, pleading with the Pharaoh for protection against the plunderers. “If there are archers here in this year, the lands of the king, my lord, will remain intact; but if there are no archers here, the lands of the king, my lord, will be lost!”
²³

To the glee of early Bible scholars, who saw the Habiru and the Hebrews as one and the same people, the Amarna letters seem to prove, once and for all and with solid documentary evidence, that the Bible is a work of history rather than a sacred myth. But the initial enthusiasm was tempered when it was discovered that the word
habiru
is found in writings from other sources, too, including the ancient Mesopotamian archives found at Mari, a site on the Euphrates River in modern Syria. As used by these far-flung archivists and chroniclers of the ancient world,
habiru
apparently referred to
any
people who lived outside a settled community rather than to a specific tribe or nation.

Today,
habiru
is probably best understood as a term for “fugitives” or “refugees” who might show up as bandits or brigands in one place, soldiers of fortune in another, or what we today would call illegal aliens almost anywhere in the ancient Near East during the second millennium
B.C.E.
The most desperate among them might have sold themselves into slavery for the simple expedient of a place to sleep and a daily meal, but most of the
habiru
, like the ones mentioned so tantalizingly in the Amarna letters, were marauders who descended upon towns and farms that offered the prospect of easy plunder.
²⁴
Thus, the word
habiru
certainly applies to David and his little army of malcontents, and that may be what the lords of Philistia meant when they used the word recorded in the Bible as “Hebrews.”
²⁵

An oblique but intriguing glimpse into the ways of the
habiru
—and the real life of David—is afforded by a much more recent phenomenon, the so-called
klephts
of nineteenth-century Greece. The
klephts
, according to historian Paul Johnson, were “bands of debtors, jailbirds, fugitives, misfits, victims and adventurers who could not flourish in society but took to the hills to live by violence.” They tended to leave shepherds unmolested, since many of them had been shepherds themselves, but they “robbed unguarded travelers [and] sometimes carried out mass attacks on villages.” The bands were exclusively male, and members may have engaged in homosexuality among themselves. A “successful bandit,” who had “built up a band that was strong in reputation, men and sheep,” might be able to put himself in service to the governing authority as a
kapitanos
, an officer in charge of a paramilitary unit, thus passing “the frontier from illegality to legality.”
²⁶

On every point, the
klephts
bear a striking resemblance to the Habiru of the ancient world and to David and his men during their fugitive years. David started out as a shepherd, but he literally “took to the hills” when he forfeited the favor of King Saul. He prided himself on his generosity toward the shepherds who served the rich Nabal, but he did not hesitate to shake down the rich man himself. He routinely led his men in “mass attacks on villages,” and then he relied on his fearsome reputation to put
himself in service to the king of Gath. His declaration of love for Jonathan suggests that he may have shared the tastes of the
klephts
in matters of the heart. “Local folk songs often told the tale of how a bandit became a famous and rich kapitanos,” Johnson writes of the
klephts
²⁷
—and the same might be said of the Bible and its heroic account of David's ascent from bandit to king.

The Bible presents David as a lordly figure who moved in the loftiest circles of power and privilege in ancient Israel, the son of a landowner from Bethlehem and the son-in-law of King Saul. Later, he will marry into other royal families, and the biblical genealogists will contrive a long and honorable family tree for him. And yet the Bible also depicts David as a fugitive, an outcast, a mercenary. So we may wonder if David was, in fact, an outsider who bullied and insinuated his way to power and then inspired his royal biographers to rewrite history in order to cast him in a heroic and romantic light. Perhaps the notion of David as a
habiru
is closer to the truth—and, if so, it helps to explain the bloodthirsty exploits of his fugitive years and the ruthlessness that figures so crucially in his character.

Classic Bible commentary holds that David was only bluffing when he offered to go to war against Saul, and insists that he meant all along to act loyally to the nation of Israel. The troubling question of what David would have done if his Philistine masters had called his bluff is left unanswered. But now, as if to sweeten the sour taste that the whole episode leaves in the reader's mouth, the biblical author hastens to credit David with an act of courage that counterbalances his apparent treachery.

Three days after leaving the Philistine army, David and his men finally reached Ziklag, but they found only empty, smoking ruins. In David's absence, the dreaded Amalekites had raided the place, setting the town afire and carrying off the women and children. Even the wives of David, Abigail and Ahinoam, were gone.