This story serves a number of literary purposes. It gives David a measure of cultic approval, as he is helped by a priest. It emphasizes that God is on David’s side, for Ahimelech gives David the bread only after having inquired of God whether to do so, to which God must have responded approvingly. It brings us back to David’s innocent youth through the reference to Goliath’s sword—David, we are to understand, is beginning again. It demonstrates the depth of Saul’s unhinged anger: the destruction of Nob is an explicit bastardization of the Israelite law of herem, or “the ban.” Israel, according to Deuteronomy and demonstrated throughout the book of Joshua, was to utterly destroy Canaanite settlements during the conquest. The description of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho should look familiar: “They exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and ass” (Josh. 6:21). This is precisely what Saul does to Nob—but this is long after the period of the conquest, and Nob is not a Canaanite town. In his rage, Saul has twisted Israel’s laws and customs.2
The story of David in Nob participates in the same literary program that we are now well accustomed to in the David story: the elevation of David and denigration of Saul. It has no historical value. When these elements are stripped away, however, virtually nothing is left of the narrative. David leaves Nob essentially unchanged: the bread digested, the sword a myth—and never spoken of again in any case. Only Abiathar’s presence continues through the rest of the narrative, and it hardly requires this elaborate story as justification. In short, the entire episode at Nob is a literary construction. There is no reason to think that David was ever there.
David and His Band
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THE WILDERNESS of Judah has been a refuge for those seeking to avoid the eyes of those in power. In the second century BCE, members of the Essene sect moved there to practice their unorthodox religious beliefs in peace, founding the community at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves in the nearby cliffs. The Maccabees fled to the wilderness at the beginning of their war against the Seleucid empire. During the Great Revolt against Rome in the first century CE, the Jewish rebels made their final stand from the forbidding mountain of Masada. A hundred years later, during the Bar Kochba revolt, some of Bar Kochba’s men fled to caves in the Dead Sea area.
David knew precisely where he was going: “David escaped to the stronghold of Adullam” (1 Sam. 22:1), a small site in the hills about sixteen miles southwest of Jerusalem.3 And he knew precisely what sort of people he would find there: “Everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was bitter of spirit joined him, and he became their leader” (22:2). The Bible makes no attempt to sugarcoat the fact that David surrounds himself with a band of misfits and outlaws. Given his whereabouts, he had little other choice. No one would willingly live in the middle of nowhere if there were any other alternative.
Israelite society was a kinship culture. People were expected to live with their close relations in a mutually protective group. Multiple generations lived under a single roof, or in adjoining houses. Marriages were endogamous, that is, people tended to marry within the extended family. Even when someone married outside the kin group, the two families would invent a common ancestry, a process known as fictive kinship, to maintain the kinship basis for relationships. Each kin group possessed its own land, and it was a priority to keep the land within the family at all costs. Communities were close, literally and figuratively, with each member responsible for the others.4 Only under dire circumstances would someone be forced out of that community: for committing a crime, for going deeply into debt, for bringing shame on the family—or for rebelling against the king.
Unlike the story of David at Nob, the gathering at Adullam therefore rings true (though the number of David’s band, four hundred, seems more symbolic than realistic). David would have needed others to help him survive in the wilderness, and the others would have recognized David as one of their own, on the run from the authorities—but also with a history of authority himself, making him a natural leader. David once commanded a royal military unit; now he commanded a private militia.
Just south of Adullam sat the town of Keilah. According to the Bible, Keilah was one day raided by a band of Philistines, and David took his men to protect it. It seems not to have been a particularly spectacular battle; all that is said is that “he drove off their cattle and inflicted a severe defeat on them” (1 Sam. 23:5). This is like the other reports of David’s victories over the Philistines: devoid of detail, except for the rather unimpressive achievement of having scared off some livestock. But David is given his due glory: “Thus David saved the inhabitants of Keilah” (23:5).5 Despite his efforts on their behalf, the people of Keilah do not appear to have been enthralled with David’s arrival. When Saul hears that David is there, and prepares to pursue him, David learns by divination that the inhabitants of Keilah will turn him and his men over to Saul, so David is forced to move along.
It is not unlikely that the Philistines might really have attacked Keilah. As we have already seen, Judah, especially those towns to the west, nearer the Philistine heartland, was probably subject to regular incursions. (Keilah is not so far from Socoh, where the battle against Goliath is set.) What seems improbable is that David and his men would venture into battle against an established military force like the Philistines. Whatever arms they may have had, they undoubtedly would have been outmatched. The only plausible rationale for engaging in battle at Keilah would be to win the trust and admiration of the inhabitants. But this is precisely what they failed to do. What, then, was David doing at Keilah?
David’s men were not fit for any sort of regular military engagement. Life in the wilderness did not lend itself to organized preparations for battle. Like most small militias, what David and his men had to their advantage was speed and mobility. Relatively few in number, relatively lightly armed, they had the capacity to move from place to place with ease. Facing the Philistines head-on was out of the question, but going to Keilah directly after the Philistines had finished plundering it would be no problem. Such an arrival would make sense on two fronts. First, David could, with some imagination, position himself as the one who drove the Philistines away. Keilah was a fortified town—“a town with gates and bars” (1 Sam. 23:7)—and the Philistines seem not to have actually entered it: they were only “plundering the threshing floors” (23:1). Threshing was an activity done in an open space, where the wind could blow away the chaff as it was tossed into the air. For a fortified city, this almost certainly meant that the threshing area was outside the city walls.6 The arrival of the Philistine raiding party would have driven inside the city walls for protection those in the fields and at the threshing floor, leaving the Philistines free to plunder the agricultural produce left behind. As the people of Keilah watched, the Philistines finished the job and left of their own accord, at which point David and his men could have appeared and claimed responsibility for scaring off the enemy—driving away their cattle, securing provisions for which may have been the Philistines’ primary goal.7
Second, David may have seen in the freshly attacked Keilah an opportunity. The town was vulnerable, as the Philistines had demonstrated. David and his men could provide a measure of security in case of future raids—in exchange for some security of their own. It seems that David did in fact enter the town with his men, for otherwise Keilah would not have had the chance to give him up to Saul. But it is hard to imagine the circumstances under which a settled community would willingly let a band of ne’er-do-wells into its walls. Such a group would be outside the usual kinship bonds and therefore accountable to no one in the town. They would have to be fed from the town’s supplies—supplies that, given the landscape, hardly could have been abundant. They would have to be housed somewhere—either with resident families or in public spaces, neither of which would be desirable. This, of course, is just what David and his men needed: food and shelter, the very basics that were hard to come by
in the wilderness. If after an attack by the Philistines this second armed band showed up at the gates of Keilah, perhaps a polite but forceful request for entrance would have been difficult to decline.
But it is unlikely that the inhabitants would have seen David as a hero. Indeed, the moment that a greater power threatened to arrive on the scene, the people of Keilah were more than ready to turn David in—not only because his men were sapping their resources, but perhaps out of fear that sheltering him would lead to retribution against the town by Saul. Sheltering a rebel was a crime not taken lightly. In Judges 9 we read of a rebellion against the local ruler Abimelech. The leader of the rebels takes refuge in the city of Shechem, where the people are in league with him. Abimelech’s response is to destroy the city: “he razed the city and sowed it with salt” (9:45). Whether this story is true or not, it reflects a common understanding of how rebellious towns are to be treated (and one that will recur later in the David story). The inhabitants of Keilah wanted none of this. It was in their best interest to make clear that they were not aligned with David. And David, it is clear, was not in any position to take on Saul’s forces. His only choice was to leave.8
The western part of the wilderness having proved inhospitable, David and his men traveled southeast, toward the Dead Sea, into the wilderness of Ziph, named for its most prominent town. This place, however, was even less welcoming than Keilah had been. Saul did not even need to threaten to come down; the Ziphites themselves went to Saul to offer David up. Perhaps they had heard of David’s behavior at Keilah, or perhaps they were better equipped to fend off his requests. In any case, David seems to have found no town to take him in but was rather moving around the wilderness of Ziph in search of hiding places. When the Ziphites returned from meeting with Saul, David had already shifted from the hill of Hachilah, where he had previously been, to the area of Maon, a bit to the south. The biblical account makes the arrival of Saul a very close thing for David, with Saul and his men on one side of a hill and David and his men on the other, each trying to outmaneuver the other—one trying to capture, one trying to escape (1 Sam. 23:26). David escaped only when Saul was called away to defend a new Philistine attack.
This last dramatic detail seems to be fictional, as it exists mostly for the purpose of providing an etiology for a place in the wilderness called “the Rock of Separation.” But true or not, it highlights once again the respective powers and advantages of the two adversaries. David is trying not to confront Saul, but to escape him. Saul is stronger than David, yet David is mobile and moves quickly from place to place to avoid capture. Even when Saul is close, David has the ability to slip away. Hiding in the wilderness, constantly moving, he and his men resemble guerilla fighters, such as have operated in this way from time immemorial. Even today, with the most advanced technology, it is difficult to track down and capture small, highly mobile groups, as examples from Uganda to Sri Lanka to Afghanistan repeatedly prove. It is no surprise that David expected to be safe in the wilderness.
And yet Saul seems regularly to find him—which points to another salient feature of these episodes. Whatever affection the people once may have had for David, it evidently evaporated rather quickly, such that they are perfectly willing to turn him in. This may appear to be fickle behavior. After all, the people loved David when he was fighting off the Philistines. But this is precisely the point: David is no longer fighting off the Philistines. We tend to think of the conflict between David and Saul as one of good against bad, of the righteous against the oppressive. But David and Saul did not live in an abstracted black and white universe. They were participants in an established culture and political system. The tradition of leadership in Israel, as we have seen, was one of “what have you done for me lately?” Leaders were temporary employees, holding their positions only for as long as their constituents needed protection. When the job ended, the position ended. If the person was unable to do the job, someone else would have to step up. Popular affection was pinned not to a person, but to a persona. By trying to usurp the throne, and as a result being forced to flee from Saul to the wilderness, David relinquished his position as officer in the war against the Philistines. He now fought not for Israel, but for himself. As one biographer of David put it, “David’s band survived in the wilderness by terrorizing the local population.”9 He was no longer of use to the Israelites—if anything, he was now a burden. For a people scattered in small towns and villages throughout the hills of Judah and Israel, what benefit would there be in supporting David any longer? His coup having failed, he could not provide the only service that was of value to them—protection from the Philistines. The one who could do that, as before, was Saul, and so it was Saul who commanded the people’s allegiance. Indeed, throughout the story, up to the moment of Saul’s death, there is no evidence that anyone in Israel or Judah has any objection to his rule. Nor should they, since he seems to have done his job perfectly well.
Should David have felt betrayed by the Judahites? He himself was from Judah, after all—why did his compatriots feel nothing special for him? The answer is that Judah was, biblical narratives notwithstanding, not yet a cohesive tribe; scholars believe that it was among the last tribes in Israel to coalesce.10 Judah is strikingly absent from the earliest record of Israelite tribes, that of Judges 5. None of Israel’s early leaders in the book of Judges are said to be Judahites. In fact, the one who comes from that region, Othniel, is identified as a Kenizzite (Josh. 15:17)—an ethnic group, potentially native to Canaan, that was eventually incorporated into Judah—but he is not yet considered a Judahite. The territory of Judah was far larger and less densely populated than that of the northern tribes. As noted above, much of it was uninhabitable wilderness, with occasional settlements dotting the landscape. In such a place communication was difficult and centralized organization much more so. Judah was a region, not a polity. Each town was its own self-enclosed community. Even after the Philistine threat made regional self-defense desirable, it was Israel, the northern kingdom, that provided it. Judah had no need to organize into a unified tribe. David, therefore, was not properly a Judahite—he was a Bethlehemite, from the region of Judah. The inhabitants of Keilah and Ziph had no responsibility for him. Nor does David ever seem to think that they should—he does not appeal to common ancestry in hopes of finding a safe haven. He goes to Judah because it is a wilderness, not because it is his homeland.
David’s Innocence
THE BIBLE PRESENTS A pair of stories about David coming upon Saul unawares. The first, in 1 Samuel 24, takes place at En-Gedi, the oasis at the edge of the Dead Sea. There, Saul enters a cave to relieve himself, not knowing that David and his men are hiding in that very cave. David’s men encourage David to attack Saul, but he refuses. Instead, he sneaks up and cuts off a corner of Saul’s cloak—somehow accomplishing this without Saul noticing. As Saul starts to leave, David steps forward and shows him the swatch of cloth, thereby demonstrating that, though he had the opportunity, he did not lay a hand on the king. Saul admits that he has been in the wrong, even proclaims that David will be king and have a dynasty, and requests that David not wipe out Saul’s family after he has achieved the throne. David agrees, and they part ways.
The second story, in 1 Samuel 26, happens in the wilderness of Ziph. There, Saul falls asleep, and David sneaks up beside him. Again, David’s men encourage him to kill the king, but David refuses, saying that when Saul’s time comes, his death will be by God’s hand or in battle. Instead, he grabs the spear and water jug lying beside Saul and takes them some distance away. He calls to Saul from the top of a nearby hill and shows him the spear and water jug, thereby demonstrating, as in the incident in the cave, that he did not lay a hand on the king even though he had the opportunity. Again, Saul admits that he has been in the wrong and even proclaims that David will prevail. Then they part ways.
Even in their barest outlines, the two stories are virtually identical; there is no need to detail the many nearly verbatim verses. It is high
ly improbable that both stories are true. But, as with the stories in 1 Samuel 16–17 examined in chapter 1, in fact neither of these stories is anything more than a literary invention. Two major themes are at play in these passages. One is Saul’s admission of guilt and acceptance that David will one day be king. Only according to the pro-David biblical account does Saul have anything to be guilty of. As we have seen, it is the biblical authors’ aim to make Saul’s pursuit of David unjustified both by repeatedly proclaiming David’s innocence and by making Saul out to be mentally unstable. More confusing, however, is Saul’s declaration that David will indeed be king. Even in the biblical narrative, why would Saul say such a thing? The only explicit reference to David’s future kingship comes in the private anointing ceremony in 1 Samuel 16, of which Saul cannot have had any knowledge. In fact, part of the Bible’s agenda is to make clear that David was definitively not seeking the kingship at all. What we have here, then, are two episodes composed with the larger literary scope of the David story in mind, with the knowledge both of the private ceremony in 1 Samuel 16 and of David’s eventual ascent to the throne. Outside the literary world of the Bible—and even to a certain extent within it—Saul would never have said such a thing.
The second major theme, and perhaps the more interesting, is David’s demonstration of his lack of desire to kill Saul. On the surface, this seems to be merely a response to Saul’s aggression: David shows that he is not trying to attack Saul—again this affirms his explicit lack of desire for the kingship—so why is Saul trying to attack him? The more important statement, however, is not only that David did not kill Saul, but that David would never kill Saul: “Yahweh forbid that I should do such a thing to my lord, Yahweh’s anointed—extending my hand against him—for he is Yahweh’s anointed” (1 Sam. 24:7). “Who can lay hands on Yahweh’s anointed and be innocent? . . . As Yahweh lives, Yahweh himself will strike him down, or his day will come and he will die, or he will go down to battle and perish. But Yahweh forbid that I should extend my hand against Yahweh’s anointed!” (26:9–11). What David says in these lines is that he is bound by his own faith in God never to attack Saul.
The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero Page 10