King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (18 page)

But even as David mourned his missing wives, his men began to blame
him
for the folly of leaving Ziklag undefended. “David was in a desperate position,” the Bible concedes, “because the people, embittered by the loss of their sons and daughters, threatened to stone him.” (1 Sam. 30:6) (NEB) Here we are reminded that David, no matter how charismatic the Bible makes him out to be, was forced to contend with naysayers like any other leader. The people of Judah had been willing to betray him to Saul, and now his own men were ready to rise up and put him to death.

As if to divert the attention of the mutinous army, David announced that he would seek an oracle from Yahweh on what to do next. So he called for Abiathar, the only priest to escape the slaughter at Nob, and bade him to bring along the ephod he had managed to snatch from the shrine of Yahweh. David had used the same ploy once before when his men declared themselves too frightened to carry out a raid on the Philistines at Keilah, and it worked again to silence the mutineers at Ziklag.

The casting of lots, as we have already seen, yielded only simple answers to the questions posed to God—“Yes,” “No,” and sometimes “No comment”—but here the biblical author asks us to imagine the encounter as an intimate conversation between Yahweh and David.

“Shall I pursue?” David inquires. “Shall I overtake them?”

“Pursue” is Yahweh's simple reply by means of lot casting, but then the biblical author suggests that God elaborated upon his answer: “For thou shalt surely overtake them, and shalt without fail recover all.” (1 Sam. 30:8)

Thus reassured of victory by the ultimate authority, David's men forgot all about stoning their commander. Instead they lined
up behind David as he set off in search of the Amalekite raiding party. Finding the enemy in the trackless wilderness, however, was not so easy. After all, the Amalekites were camel-mounted nomads moving through familiar terrain, and they enjoyed a head start of several days. David needed some intelligence on the whereabouts of the raiding party, and his source turned out to be a young Egyptian slave whom the Amalekites had abandoned in the desert when he fell ill.

To restore his strength and loosen his tongue, the Egyptian was given water and food—“a cake of figs and two clusters of raisins,” the Bible reports with convincing detail—and then David himself began to question him. (1 Sam. 30:12) After the fearful young man extracted David's promise to “neither kill me nor turn me over to my master,” he agreed to lead David and his men to the Amalekite camp. (1 Sam. 30:15)
²⁹
As they approached, David saw that the raiders were raucously celebrating their victories, “eating and drinking and feasting because of all the great spoil that they had taken out of the land of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah.” (1 Sam. 30:16)

At twilight David and his men charged the camp, and the fighting continued without pause “unto the evening of the next day.” Four hundred of the Amalekites were able to mount their camels and escape, but the rest of the raiders were slain without mercy. As the oracle of Yahweh had promised, all of the captives— David's two wives and the rest of the women and children—were recovered alive and unharmed, and the flocks and herds of the Amalekites were taken as spoils of war.

“This is David's plunder!” cried the men who had been ready to stone him only a few days before, thus crediting their commander with the ultimate destruction of the Amalekite raiders. (1 Sam. 30:20) (AB)

Any chance to spill the blood of an Amalekite, the ancient and emblematic enemy of the Israelites, made for good public relations. “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven,” Moses had declared in the name of God. “Thou shalt not forget.”(Deut. 25:19) And the fresh supply of plunder gave David an opportunity to make generous gifts to the opinion makers of Judah and the people whose lands he had once raided, thus rehabilitating himself in the eyes of his countrymen. Accordingly, from this moment forward, the Bible subtly revises its depiction of David: he is presented more as a savvy politician seeking to build a constituency than as a renegade guerrilla captain.

First, against the protests of the frontline soldiers, David insisted on sharing the spoils of war with some two hundred men who served in the rear guard during the attack on the Amalekites. “The share of him that goes down to the battle, so shall be the share of him that tarried by the baggage—they shall share and share alike,” David decreed. “And it was so from that day forward,” the biblical author pauses to note, “that he made it a statute and an ordinance for Israel unto this day.” (1 Sam. 30:24–25)
³⁰

Next, David allotted a portion of the plunder as gift-offerings to “the elders of Judah” and his other “friends” in towns and cities in the land of Judah: “To them that were in Beth-el, and to them that were in Ramoth,” begins the long list preserved in the biblical text, “and to all the places over which David himself and his men had ranged.” (1 Sam. 30:27, 31) Even a few non-Israelite tribes who lived within the tribal homeland of Judah were favored with gifts—the Kenites, for example, and the Jerahmeelites. Significantly, the places that David favored with gifts were located within the vicinity of Hebron, a place regarded as sacred in the legend and lore of ancient Israel and a seat of political authority in the tribal homeland of Judah.
³¹

“Behold, a present for you,” went the message from David that
accompanied each gift, “of the spoil of the enemies of the Lord.” (1 Sam. 30:26–31)

At this moment, the soldier of fortune and bandit-king is eclipsed by the politician and the statesman. Clearly, the biblical author is preparing his readers for David's elevation from fugitive to monarch, but we are also able to mark a change in David himself: he is older and wiser, battle-hardened but somehow mellowed by his exploits in war. His youthful swagger has been replaced by a more regal bearing, and his taste for rough justice has been softened by more generous impulses. David's long exile from the land of Israel is now coming to an end, and when he next sets foot in Hebron, he will be ready to claim the crown of kingship.

The crown that David sought still rested on the head of King Saul, but not for much longer. The king's army, outnumbered and outfought by the Philistines, spilled down the slopes of Mount Gilboa in open rout, and Saul found himself in great peril. “And the Philistines followed hard upon Saul and upon his sons,” the Bible reports (1 Sam. 31:2), a reminder that ancient kings customarily went to war with their armies, and they were the first targets of the enemy forces that sought to decapitate an army by killing its commander in chief. (1 Sam. 31:2)

Jonathan was the first to fall into the hands of the Philistines, and then two more sons of Saul were taken—all three of them were slain where they stood. Now Saul found himself cut off by a platoon of Philistine archers, an arrow in his belly. (1 Sam. 31:3)
³²
At that desperate moment, the Bible suggests, the king of Israel imagined himself riddled with arrows, tortured to death on the battlefield, his body handled like carrion and put on display for the pleasure of the jeering Philistines—and the prospect of an ignoble death was more painful to Saul than death itself.

“Draw your sword, and run me through,” Saul ordered his armor-bearer, “so that these uncircumcised brutes may not come
and taunt me and make sport of me.” (1 Sam. 31:4) (NEB) But the armor-bearer was “sore afraid” to obey and so he refused to draw his sword, choosing to defy the king's last command rather than stain his own hands with the king's blood. (1 Sam. 31:4)

“Therefore Saul took his sword, and fell upon it,” the Bible reports. “And when his armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he likewise fell upon his sword and died with him.” (1 Sam. 31:4–5)

Thus was Samuel's prophecy fulfilled at long last, and Saul's death ended the torment that he had suffered since the day that God withdrew his blessing and abandoned him to his fate. “So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armor-bearer, and all his men, that same day together.” (1 Sam. 31:6) But the peace that now soothed old Saul was denied to the people of Israel. When word of the carnage began to spread, the towns in the vicinity of Mount Gilboa emptied as the Israelites fled in panic. “And the Philistines came,” the Bible says of the deserted houses of Israel, “and dwelt in them.” (1 Sam. 31:7)

Saul's final paranoid vision of his own death came to pass. The next day, as the Philistine soldiers picked their way among the dead on the battlefield, pausing here and there to strip a corpse of any valuables they might find—yet another realistic detail of warfare in the ancient world—they came upon the body of King Saul.

Just as Saul had feared, he was disgraced in death even as he had been tormented in life: the royal armor that he had worn in his final battle was displayed in a temple of Ashtaroth, one of the pagan goddesses of the ancient Near East, and his headless body was nailed to the town wall at a place called Beth-shan,
³³
where it might remind the Philistines of their triumph and the Israelites of their defeat.

On the third day after David's return to Ziklag from his skirmish with the Amalekite raiding party, a stranger appeared at his camp. His clothes were ripped, dirt was sprinkled in his hair—both traditional signs of a man in mourning—and when he was ushered into the presence of David, the man fell to the ground and prostrated himself in submission.

“From where do you come?” David asked.

“Out of the camp of Israel, I have escaped,” the man explained.

“How went the matter?” David asked, eager to know how Saul and his army had fared against the Philistines. “I pray thee, tell me.”

“The people are fled from the battle, and many of the people are fallen and dead,” answered the stranger. “Saul and Jonathan, his son, are dead, too.” (2 Sam. 1:3–5)

Here at last was the moment that David had been awaiting ever since Samuel had anointed him as Saul's successor to the throne of Israel. Since then, David had managed to survive the mad king's effort to murder him, first when he was still at court, then during his fugitive years in the wilderness, and finally as a mercenary in service to the Philistines. All the while, we may imagine, he must have wondered whether the holy oil that Samuel had poured over his head so many years before had been a blessing or a curse.

But David dared not rejoice at the word of Saul's death, and he continued his interrogation. The stranger was courageous (or foolish) enough to identify himself as an Amalekite—surely he risked sudden death by doing so!—and then he proceeded to tell a remarkable tale about the last moments of Saul's life, a much different version from the one just provided by the biblical author.

The man had happened upon Saul on the slope of Mount Gilboa in the heat of the battle. Though mortally wounded, the king still leaned on his sword as the chariotry and cavalry of the Philistines pressed down upon him. And then Saul cried out to him. “Stand beside me, and slay me,” begged the king, “for the
throes of death have seized me, but there is still life in me yet.” The stranger complied, putting Saul to the sword as an act of simple mercy.

“I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm,” the stranger disclosed to David, “and I have brought them unto my lord.” (2 Sam. 1:9–10)
³⁴

The notion that the crown of Israel was put into David's hand by an Amalekite who confessed to slaying King Saul must have shocked and perhaps even outraged the original readers of the Bible. Yet the Bible, which gives two versions of the battlefield death of Saul, offers no other explanation for how the symbols of kingship once worn by Saul came into David's possession. So we are left to wonder which version of Saul's death is true—did Saul fall on his sword or was he put out of his misery by a passing Amalekite?—and what role, if any, David played in this mysterious episode.

Of course, the inconsistent accounts of Saul's death could be yet another pair of doublets, each originating with a different source and both used by a biblical editor who did not bother to harmonize them. Another explanation is that the Amalekite was simply telling a lie—perhaps he had plundered the king's dead body and then made up a tale to tell David in the belief that he would reward the man who had finished off his rival and brought him the royal insignia. If so, the Amalekite badly misjudged David.

“How is it that you were not afraid to put forth your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?” David asked in pious rage. “Go,” he told one of his own men, “and fall on him.” (2 Sam. 1:14–15) Then, as David witnessed the hasty execution of the last man to see King Saul alive, he uttered a cold benediction.

“Your blood be upon your own head,” he said, “for your own mouth has testified against you.” (2 Sam. 1:16)

A less wholesome meaning can be detected in the same text, a crack in the wall of apologetics that has been thrown up around the figure of David by the biblical sources. The Court Historian, presumably an insider at the court of the Davidic kings and
perhaps even an eyewitness to some of the events he describes, made every effort to show David as wholly pure of motive. Never does David openly covet the crown or actively conspire against Saul. Not once but twice, David declines to slay him when he has the chance to do so. Again and again, David declares his love and loyalty to the rightful king of Israel. Yet the biblical author feels obliged to address the awkward question of how the royal crown and bracelet ended up in David's hands so soon after Saul's death.

Surely the original readers of the Bible—no less than the modern reader who is inclined to see conspirators under every bed—must have wondered whether David played a more active and more sinister role in these curious events. Did the king of Gath, for example, carry the crown back to David with the intent of putting his trusted vassal on the throne of Israel as an ally and even a quisling? Or is it possible that David went to war with the Philistines after all and plundered the dead body of Saul with his own hands? The Amalekite's story, conveniently enough, acquits David of any such treachery and was meant to put an end to such scandalous speculation.