by Paul Johnson
The Philistines were a far more formidable opponent than the indigenous Canaanites whom the Israelites were in the process of dispossessing or turning into helots. Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites’ land,147 a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is ‘because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you’.148 The Philistines, by contrast, were themselves aggressors; no room for doubts there. They formed part of the most predatory race of the Late Bronze Age, the so-called Peoples of the Sea, who wrecked what was left of Minoan civilization in Crete and came close to taking over Egypt. When the great nineteenth-dynasty pharaoh, Rameses III, drove them out of the Nile area, in the battles magnificently portrayed at Karnak, these Pulesti turned north-east and established themselves on the coast which still carries their name, Palestine. The five great cities they built there, Ascalon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath and Gaza, have not been systematically excavated and there is still a lot to be learned about their culture. But they were unquestionably warlike. They already had iron weapons. They were organized with great discipline under a feudal-military aristocracy. Around 1050 BC, having exterminated the coastal Canaanites, they began a large-scale movement against the interior hill-lands, now mainly occupied by Israelites. They seem to have conquered most of Judah, in the south, but nothing east of Jordan or in the northern Galilee. The tribe of Benjamin suffered most from them, and spearheaded the resistance.149
The period beginning with the national campaign against the Philistines is exceptionally rich in documentation. By this time the Israelites had developed a passion for writing history. Most of this material has disappeared for ever. The Book of Judges gives tantalizing references to lost chronicles. We also hear of the ‘Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel’, the ‘Books of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’, ‘The Book of the Acts of Solomon’ and many other works. But those that survive, especially the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings, are history on the grand scale, among the greatest works of all antiquity. They incorporate in places material from the royal archives, such as lists of government officials, provincial governors and even the menus of the royal kitchens.150 From these times it is possible to establish synchronisms between the king-lists given in the Bible and non-Biblical sources such as the Egyptian pharaoh canons and Assyrian limmu or eponym lists. These enable us to make accurate datings. In the early monarchical period the margin of error may be ten years or so, but later we get virtually absolute dates. Thus we can be fairly sure that Saul was killed about 1005 BC, that David reigned until c. 966, and that Solomon died in either 926 or 925 BC.
Moreover, the Biblical records give us astonishingly vivid portraits of the principal actors in the national drama, portraits which rival and even surpass those we find in the finest Greek historians more than half a millennium later. These characters are placed firmly in a consistent ethical setting. But there is not merely good and evil in these historical moralities; there is every shade of conduct, and above all pathos, intense sadness, human love in all its complexity—emotions never before set down in words by man. There is too a veneration for abstract institutions, a sense of national choices and constitutional issues.
What emerges from the record is that though the Israelites turned to kingship in response to the threat of annihilation by Philistine power, they did so with great reluctance, and through the medium of an earlier institution, the prophetship. Abraham had been a prophet; Moses was the greatest of the prophets. It was the oldest office the Israelites had, and in their eyes an essential one since in a theocracy like theirs the medium through whom God issues his commands, the prophet, held a central place in society. The origins of the word, nabhi, are obscure; it may have meant ‘one who is called’ or ‘one who bubbles forth’. An important text in Samuel says, ‘He that is now called a nabhi was previously called a roeh’ (seer). Prophets were certainly judged by their ability to predict. Such men were found everywhere in the ancient Near East. One of the great strands of ancient Egyptian history, from the early third millennium onward, is the role of oracles and prophecies. From Egypt it spread to the Phoenicians and thus to the Greeks. According to Plato’s Phaedrus, human reasoning was not necessary for prophecy since a man possessed by a god was a mere agent: his state was known as ‘enthusiasm’ or divine madness. The Israelite prophets likewise acted as mediums. In a state of trance or frenzy they related their divine visions in a sing-song chant, at times a scream. These states could be induced by music. Samuel describes the process himself: ‘thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy’.151 Elisha, too, asked for music: ‘But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him.’152 But the prophets also used, and sometimes abused, incense, narcotics and alcohol, as Isaiah points out: ‘The priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they have swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment.’153
In Israelite society, however, the prophet was much more than a man who went into ecstasy and tried to predict the future. They performed all kinds of spiritual functions. They were religious judges, like Moses and Deborah. They formed colleges attached to shrines, like the one at Shiloh, where the tiny Samuel was deposited by his mother Hannah. There, he ‘ministered before the Lord, being a child, girded with a linen ephod’—just like a priest, in fact. His mother brought him a new little priestly coat every year, ‘when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice’.154 So at many shrines priests and guilds of prophets worked side by side, and there was no necessary conflict between them. But almost from the beginning the prophets set more store on the content as opposed to the forms of religion, thus inaugurating one of the great themes of Jewish, and indeed world, history. As Samuel put it himself: ‘Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.’155 They stood for the puritanical and fundamentalist elements in the religion, as opposed to the empty ceremonies and endless sacrifices of the priests. But just as the priests tended to slip into mechanistic religion, so the prophets might drift into sectarianism. Indeed Samuel, like Samson, belonged to the sect of the Nazarites, wild-looking men with uncut hair and few clothes. These sects might diverge into heresy or even into an entirely new religion. The Nazarites had much in common with the ultra-strict and ferocious Rechabites, who engaged in massacres of backsliders when opportunity offered. Such sects were the most extreme monotheists and iconoclasts. They tended to drift into semi-nomad life on the fringe of the desert, a featureless place conducive to strict monotheism. It was from such a background that the greatest of all Jewish sectarian heresies was to spring—Islam.156
There were, then, multitudes of prophets, many of them false ones as the Bible frequently stresses. To be influential, a prophet had to avoid the extremes of sectarianism and remain in touch with the mainstream of Israelite life. His greatest single function was to act as intermediary between God and people, and to do that he must mingle with the masses. When Samuel matured, he acted as a judge, travelling all over the country.157 When the powerful Philistine forces struck at the heart of the Israelite settlements, inflicting humiliating defeats, even capturing the Ark itself and (it seems) destroying the Shiloh shrine, it was natural that the people should turn to Samuel and that he should play the critical role in deciding whether, and if so how, the Israelites in their desperation should embrace kingship.
The First Book of Samuel gives us exciting glimpses into the anxious constitutional debates which took place on the issue. There was an obvious candidate, the Benjaminite guerrilla captain Saul, typical of the charismatic Israelite leaders who sprang fro
m nothing by their own energy and divine favour. But Saul was a southerner and lacked the diplomatic skills to conciliate the northerners, whose wholehearted support he never obtained. His dark, saturnine character is brilliantly portrayed in the Bible: an unpredictable oriental potentate-bandit, alternating between sudden generosity and unbridled rage, a manic-depressive perhaps, always brave and clearly gifted but often hovering on the brink of madness and sometimes slipping over it. Samuel was right to hesitate before anointing this man. He also reminded the people that they had never had a king—one function of the prophets was to deliver popular history lectures-and that, being a theocracy, for Israel to choose rule by king was to reject rule by God, and thus sinful.158 He outlined the nation’s constitutional history ‘and wrote it in a book and laid it up before the Lord’—that is, deposited it at a shrine.159 He was willing to anoint Saul as a charismatic leader or nagid, by pouring oil on his head, but hesitated to make him melek or hereditary king, which implied the right to summon the tribal levy.160 He warned the people of all the disadvantages of monarchy—professional armies, punitive taxation, forced labour. He seems to have changed his mind several times about the precise powers Saul should have. But in the end Saul’s early victories and his striking appearance—he was exceptionally tall and handsome—made the popular will irresistible, and Samuel reluctantly complied, pleading divine guidance: ‘And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make him a King.’161
This early constitutional experiment in Kingship ended in disaster. A year after Saul’s coronation, the great Philistine army came up through the Plain of Esdraelon and destroyed the new royal army at Mount Gilboa, Saul and his son Jonathan being killed. Saul obviously lacked the temperament to unite the country behind him but the real reason for his failure was absence of the requisite military background. He was no more than a small-scale resistance-leader and though, as king, he began to recruit a mercenary army, it was clearly beyond his skill to handle large regular forces. But even before the final disaster Saul had lost the support of the clergy and the confidence of Samuel. In Chapter 15 of the First Book of Samuel there is a vivid and heartbreaking scene in which the old prophet turns on the king for acts of religious disobedience over the spoils of war; the king, abashed, admits his sin but begs Samuel to give him his public countenance in front of the people. Samuel does so, but in his anger and frustration he turns on a wretched royal prisoner, Agag King of the Amalekites, who ‘came unto him delicately’, pleading ‘Surely the bitterness of death is past?’ But Samuel ‘hewed Agag in pieces’ on the altar. There had always been a fanatical streak in Samuel, especially against the Amalekites, whose extermination he demanded.162 He refused to see King Saul again. Nevertheless, the record adds, when Saul was killed Samuel mourned for him; ‘and the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel’.
Among the mercenaries Saul had recruited was David; it was his policy: ‘When Saul saw any strong man, or any valiant man, he took him unto him.’163 But the Bible text, as it stands, confuses two distinct layers of David’s military career. He was originally a shepherd, descended from the humble and enchanting Ruth the Moabitess. When first picked to serve, he knew nothing of arms. He girded on sword and armour ‘and tried in vain to go for he was not used to them’.164 He used a more primitive weapon, the sling, to achieve his first great exploit, the killing of the Philistine strongman, Goliath. But another version has David brought to Saul’s attention because he is ‘cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person’.165 The truth seems to be that David served Saul at different periods but his professional military training came as a mercenary under the Philistines themselves. He learned their methods of warfare, including the use of their new iron weapons, and he flourished to the point where King Achish of Gath awarded him a feudal fiefdom. He might have identified himself wholly with the Philistines but in the end he chose the throne of Judah. Partly as a Philistine commander, partly as an opposition leader to the blundering Saul, he built up a group of professional knights and soldiers who swore fealty to him, were attached to him personally and expected to be rewarded with land. This was the force which enabled him to become King of Judah after Saul’s death. He then waited for dissensions to break out in the northern kingdom, Israel, and the murder of Saul’s successor there, Ishbaal. At this point the elders of Israel offered him the throne of the north by constitutional covenant. It is important to grasp that David’s kingdom was not, initially at least, a co-ordinated nation, but two separate national entities each of which had a separate contract with him personally.166
David became the most successful and popular king Israel ever had, the archetype king and ruler, so that for more than 2,000 years after his death Jews saw his reign as a golden age. At the time, however, his rule was always precarious. His most dependable forces were not Israelites at all but his personal guards of foreign mercenaries, the Cherethites and Pelethites. His power rested on a professional army, whose officers had to be rewarded by gifts of land they could turn into feudal fiefs to support their men. But to donate the land he had first to take it, and this could not always be done by conquest. Hence the series of revolts and conspiracies against his rule, the most serious of which was led by his own son Absalom. The tribes were still separatist by instinct. They resented the cost of David’s campaigns, perhaps still more the centralizing tendencies he accelerated, and the apparatus of oriental kingship he introduced—a chancellery and secretariat, a harem, the corvée, an elaborate court. These rural folk felt they had no share in the new-style state and echoed the anguished cry of Sheba, the Benjaminite who ‘blew a trumpet and said: We have no part in David, neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: every man to his tents, O Israel.’167 All these revolts were put down, thanks to David’s military machine; but the reign of forty years was never untroubled, and harem intrigues over the succession—inseparable from monarchical polygamy—continued to the end.168
David was none the less a great king, and for three reasons. First he conflated the regal and the sacerdotal role in a way which was never possible for Saul. Samuel had no immediate successor and much of his spiritual authority devolved on David. David, despite his occasional wickedness, was evidently a man of deep religious feeling. Like his son and heir, Solomon, he had many gifts, including a strong artistic imagination. The tradition that he was a musician, a poet and psalmist is too strong to be rejected. The Bible records that he took a personal part in ritual dancing. He seems to have transformed a throne created by brutal military necessity into a glittering institution which combined religious sanction, oriental luxury and new standards of culture. Conservative rustic chiefs might not like it but the popular masses found it exciting and satisfying.
Secondly, David’s position as king-priest seemed to have received divine blessing since his purely military achievements were unrivalled. He decisively defeated the Philistines and pinned them permanently into a narrow coastal strip. Saul had done much to reduce the remaining Canaanite enclaves within the area of Israelite settlement, but David completed the process. He then moved east, south and north, establishing his authority over Ammon, Moab, Edom, Aram-Zobar and even Aram-Damascus in the far north-east. His military successes were rounded off by diplomatic alliances and dynastic marriages. In a sense this burgeoning little Israelite empire was dependent on an accident of history. The empire to the south, Egypt, had receded; the empires to the east, of Assyria and Babylon, had not yet matured. In this vacuum, David’s kingdom flourished. But his own capacity and experience, his width of knowledge, his travels and his grasp of economic factors also made the expansions possible. He saw the significance of establishing his authority over the great regional trade-routes, and he opened up economic and cultural contacts with the rich city-kingdom of Tyre. He was an internationalist whereas earlier Israelite leaders had all been narrow regionalists.
Thirdly, David established a national and religious capital whi
ch was also his personal conquest. The Israelites had never been able to take Jerusalem in over 200 years, though it was the most strategically important city of the interior: ‘And as for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah unto this day.’ Jerusalem controlled the main north-south route in the interior; more, it was the natural junction between north and south. The failure to take it was one of the most important reasons why two separate groupings of the Israelites emerged—what later became known as the Kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. By taking Jerusalem, David believed he could weld the two halves into one, and it is clear that the siege was a deliberate political as well as a military act. Only ‘the King and his men’—the professional household troops, not the tribal levies—were used, thus ensuring that David could claim that the city was a personal conquest. It was, in fact, known forever after as ‘the City of David’. He took the place by a great stroke of daring, of which his general, Joab, was the hero. The Old City of Jerusalem which we know today is built on three valleys, the Hinnom (west), Kedron (east) and Tyropoeon (central), which merge to the south into the Brook of Kedron. The much smaller Jebusite city covered merely the eastern ridge, the only one which had a reliable water supply from the Gihon Spring. Thanks to the excavations of Kathleen Kenyon, and the Second Book of Samuel, we know exactly what happened at David’s siege. The Jebusites, like the citizens of other Palestine cities at this time, such as Gezer, Gibeon and Megiddo, had constructed a secret tunnel connecting the interior of the city to the spring, so that they were assured of water even in a siege. They thought this device their strength, and so confident were they of defying David that they staged a magic ritual-parade of the blind, lame and other deformed people, to enrage the Israelites. But it proved their weakness, for the king knew of the tunnel and called for volunteers: ‘And David said on that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind, that are hated of David’s soul, he shall be chief and captain.’169 Joab and his men performed this exploit, climbing up the water tunnel and so getting inside the walls and taking the city by surprise.170