David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (6 page)

The British social historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his examination of the worldwide phenomenon of social banditry, showed that bandits and rebels have always been attracted to marginal mountainous environments, and that mountain villages and pastoral communities have often been the scene of their most famous exploits. Hobsbawm also demonstrated that the characteristic bandit unit in a highland area is likely to consist of young herdsmen, landless laborers, and sometimes ex-soldiers. Tracing the phenomenon in the Balkans, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Hungary, and China, he noted that mountainous regions are most susceptible to this type of activity, since governments are always hesitant to act in these rugged and remote regions and the bandit groups can become a law unto themselves. This was certainly the case in Canaan, where the Apiru operated outside the system, unwilling to be docile peasants and shepherds. To the local rulers, they were a turbulent underclass who had to be bought off, killed off, or somehow controlled.

The Apiru continue to be mentioned as late as 1000
BCE
. They help explain David’s rise to power in a quite down-to-earth way.

DAVID AS APIRU?

Put simply, the description of the rise of David in the first book of Samuel contains many distinctive parallels to the activity of a typical Apiru chieftain and his rebel gang. David and his “mighty men” make their own rules and cynically form shifting political alliances for the interest of survival alone. They live and act in remote villages and on the fringe of the desert—in the rugged Judean wilderness and across the arid steppe land in the south—far from the easy reach of the central authority. Forced by expedience to find shelter with a neighboring Philistine ruler, they become his willing agents and mercenaries. Yet they are always conscious of their base of support and protection among the villagers and herders from whom they originated—making great demonstrations of protection against outside invaders and sharing their booty with them in order to gain more support. Such social bandits are always viewed with a mixture of contempt and admiration. While the Amarna letters depict the Apiru as treasonous, dangerous cutthroats, the Bible depicts David as a daring, sometimes mercurial figure who wins adulation from the people of the highlands as a protector and leader they can call their own.

On closer comparison, some details of the biblical narrative are almost identical to descriptions of the Apiru bands in the Amarna letters. One of the most revealing is the description, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, of how a wide range of marginal elements in Judahite society flocked to David’s band:

The same holds true for the description of David’s tactics as he rescued the villagers of Keilah from the hands of the Philistines. David and his private army—fast, maneuverable, and deadly—smash an outside threat to the rural population, which the central administration was either too fearful or too weak to confront. David takes matters into his own hands and emerges as a local savior. Once the lightning victory is achieved and the booty carried off, the bandit gang withdraws to the safety of its wilderness hideouts again.

In fact, we possess a direct geographical correspondence to this situation in the Amarna age. The village of Keilah, identified with the site of Khirbet Qeila, is located at the very eastern edge of the upper Shephelah—isolated and vulnerable to attacks from the rulers of the lower Shephelah and the coastal plain below. The Philistines had assumed control of this area after the retreat of the Egyptian regime from Canaan. Attacks by the powerful Philistine city-states upon the border of the hill country—to loot crops or terrorize the sparse rural population—could therefore have been expected in this period. But the biblical Keilah story also seems to reflect a long pattern of raids and counterattacks that had been going in this area at least since the Late Bronze Age.

Indeed, it is significant that Keilah is explicitly mentioned in the Amarna archive as a town whose possession was hotly disputed, in this case between Shuwardata of Gath and Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem. Shuwardata attacked the village (called Qiltu or Qeltu in the Amarna letters), which he considered as belonging to him. A sentence in one of the Shuwardata letters, stating that “I must go fo[rt]h to Qeltu [again]st the t[raitors],” may hint that local Apiru forces were also involved, this time on the side of Abdi-Heba. The David story, taking place in the same region under the same conditions some four hundred years later, is reported by the Bible in a similar way: the defense of Keilah is accomplished by a gang of armed men who repel the invaders, acting independently in place of an impotent central government.

The frequent employment of Apiru as mercenaries underlined their rejection of conventional political loyalty. In the case of David, this could hardly be clearer. The Philistine city of Gath was a powerful, aggressive threat to the people of the highlands; its ruler, Achish, was a deadly enemy. Nonetheless, on two occasions David is described as taking shelter in Philistine territory. On the first (1 Samuel 21:10–15), he appeared alone in Gath and unsuccessfully sought asylum. But on the second occasion, David became a Philistine ally and was given a territorial fiefdom, from which he was free to raid non-Philistine territories:

In other circumstances, David and his gang do not shrink from an occasional attempt at extortion among their own people. David sends ten of his men to Nabal, a rich Judahite sheep owner in the village of Carmel, to “remind” him of the protection that his men had provided to Nabal’s shepherds and shearers, and to demand in return “whatever you have at hand.” Nabal’s angry retort to David could hardly have been more dismissive—or more revealing of the parallel to the Apiru phenomenon.

Nabal’s answer may have been heartfelt, but it was certainly not effective.

According to the Bible, David received his tribute, Nabal dropped dead, and David claimed his widow—the beautiful Abigail—as a new wife for himself. These events may have actually happened as described in the Bible, or they may express in a vivid and colorful way a familiar situation in the southern highlands between village nobles and bandits. Either way, the situation is illuminating.

So too is the hint that David had a larger strategy than just isolated acts of violence and plunder. After Keilah, he was recognized by the local population as a welcome protector and avenger. After his great victory over the Amalekites, he offered a generous share of his booty to all the local elders of the highlands of Judah who had supported or sheltered him (1 Samuel 30: 26–31).
*
It is not surprising that a short while later the same elders pronounce David “king” of Judah in their assembly at Hebron. From a nobody and a bandit, David rose to be recognized as a popular leader over the sparsely settled southern hills. But Hebron had always been only the second most important town in Judah. No wonder the biblical narrative describes David soon setting his sights on Jerusalem—the key to control over the entire southern highlands.

FROM BANDIT TO CHIEFTAIN

The rise of an Apiru leader to political power was not unprecedented. The Amarna letters provide many indications that local rulers—especially in the highlands—may have come from Apiru backgrounds themselves. Although Abdi-Heba’s letters used the term “Apiru” in angry denunciation, it is likely that he himself cooperated with these groups against the lowland cities when it served his interests. It is not out of the question that Abdi-Heba may have risen to power from an Apiru background himself.

That is certainly what occurred in neighboring regions. In the northern part of Mount Lebanon, near the present-day border between Lebanon and Syria, two chiefs, named Abdi-ashirta and Aziru—a father and a son—expanded their influence from their small and remote highland village down to the hilly area at the foot of the mountains and then into the coastal plain in the vicinity of the modern city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon. They first conquered a local city-state and then took over an Egyptian administrative center. They established the influential state of Amurru, which stretched over a large territory, including both coastal and mountainous areas. A few generations later, in the thirteenth century
BCE
, this state was strong enough to shift the balance of power between the Egyptian and Hittite empires.

Another example—closer to Judah—is that of Labayu, the ruler of the northern highland city of Shechem. The conspiracies and maneuvers of Labayu, originating in the hill country, eventually expanded to cover large parts of the country—from Gezer and Jerusalem in the south to the Jezreel Valley and beyond in the north. The Amarna letters describe his attempts—possibly in cooperation with groups of Apiru—to expand into the Jezreel Valley and to gain territories from the city-states of that region, including Megiddo. His strategy failed. Condemned as a criminal, he was captured and killed by his neighbors, who acted in the service of the Egyptian authorities.

Unfortunately, we cannot closely follow the political situation in the southern highlands over the four hundred years, between the time of Abdi-Heba in the fourteenth century
BCE
and David’s presumed activities in the tenth century
BCE
. Egyptian texts are few and highly fragmentary. The biblical narrative indicates that a people called Jebusites were the rulers of Jerusalem at the time of David’s conquest. We have no information about them and their time, or how they came to power, but from the archaeological indications, the general settlement patterns of the Amarna age seem to have persisted.

In Jerusalem, remains from the Early Iron Age (the late twelfth century to about 900
BCE
) are a bit more substantial than those of the Late Bronze Age, probably indicating that the small hamlet of Abdi-Heba gradually grew in size. Excavations on the eastern slope of the City of David, above the Gihon spring, exposed a system of stone terraces that were probably built to support a fort or even a palace, but we cannot tell if this occurred under the rule of Abdi-Heba’s dynasty, or if new leaders emerged to wrest power from his heirs. Nor do we know what relation the Early Iron Age rulers of Jerusalem might have to the biblical descriptions of the Jebusites.

Outside Jerusalem in any case, little was changed. The hill country to the south was still sparsely inhabited, even though the number of settled sites grew modestly. All in all, surveys recorded the remains of only about twenty permanent Early Iron Age settlements in the southern highlands. Their population can be estimated at a few thousand people, to which must be added the roving bandit groups and the large herding communities.

What can we say about the role of David in all this?

The traditional system of banditry was a makeshift way of life, dealing in a haphazard and brutal way with the society’s inner stresses and inequalities. But sometimes the growing power and support for Apiru leaders resulted in a permanent change of regime—with some influential or successful bandit chieftains taking the reins of highland rule themselves. Whether we can perceive a historical kernel in the biblical account of David’s conquest of Jebusite Jerusalem through a daring assault, we can recognize a familiar pattern of ancient regime change. Throughout the centuries Jerusalem was not merely the southern highlands’ most prominent stronghold; it was the ceremonial focus and political anchor for the traditional form of dimorphic chiefdom that encompassed the entire southern highlands area.