The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (8 page)

In short, these sorts of small skirmishes fit perfectly not only with the historical situation, but with the biblical description of David as having been constantly successful—“in all his undertakings,” “every time the Philistines marched out.” David fought at the head of Saul’s troops for what would appear to be only a short time. It would be surprising if numerous major battles had occurred during those few months or perhaps years, but we would expect there to have been a constant series of border skirmishes. This would also account for what we already observed, namely, that after each one of David’s victories, the status quo seems to have been unchanged. Major battles, even Israelite defensive victories, would have affected the relative status of the two parties, but minor encounters in the middle of the wilderness would not.

We may also note that this description of David’s military role suggests that he was not, in fact, the head of all of Israel’s armed forces. In the ancient Near East, it was typically the king’s duty to lead the army into battle. In the Bible this notion is so taken for granted that it is even used to mark time: “At the turn of the year, the season when kings go out to battle . . .” (2 Sam. 11:1). But should the king be unable to go, that job would fall to the next in line for the throne. This was more than a matter of training; it had practical political benefits. Leadership in battle was a way a prince gained the respect and affiliation of the army and thus secured the backing of the military before he took the reins of leadership.
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And this seems, quite naturally, to have been the role of Saul’s son Jonathan before David arrived on the scene. The first time we hear of Jonathan in the Bible is in a military context. Saul chooses three thousand men to fight a battle. He takes two thousand of these men for himself and puts the remaining thousand under Jonathan (1 Sam. 13:2). Jonathan seems to have been a relatively good officer, winning in battle (13:3), taking on a dangerous solo mission (14:6–15), and gaining the admiration of his men (14:45).
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Given this situation, it seems unlikely that Saul should elevate David to a higher military position than his son Jonathan or his cousin Abner. Doing so flies in the face of both tradition and common sense. Indeed, as we have seen, David’s job seems to have been warding off minor incursions into Israelite territory—the role of a military officer, no doubt, but not necessarily of the highest officer in the land. There is some ambiguity in the biblical text as to what position David held. It says in one place that Saul put David in charge of all the soldiers (1 Sam. 18:5), but it says in another that he appointed David as “chief of a thousand” (18:13). “A thousand,” it should be noted, is not a precise numerical designation but rather a technical term for a military unit.
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Thus, according to at least one biblical passage, David was just one officer among many. This seems a more historically likely scenario.

Philistia and Judah
Key:
Philistine cities
(underlined); Israelite towns (not underlined)

We may better define David’s role by considering his homeland: the territory of Judah. As we have already noted, Judah was not officially part of Saul’s kingdom, yet it was a crucial part of Israel’s defense against the Philistines. The Philistine Pentapolis was on the southern coastal plain, and so it was Judah that directly bordered on Philistine territory. Since the Philistines would almost always have to cross Judah to reach the territory controlled by Saul, it was a buffer region for the north. When the Philistines tried to capture Samson in Judges 15, they “came up and encamped in Judah” (15:9). When they sent the captured ark back to Israel (1 Sam. 6), it went through Beth-Shemesh to Kiryath-jearim, both towns on the northern border of Judah. And the battle against Goliath took place in Judah: “The Philistines assembled their forces for battle and gathered at Socoh of Judah” (17:1).

Saul’s need to protect Judah, and Judah’s need for Saul’s military help, necessitated a mutually beneficial arrangement. As noted above, such arrangements were standard practice in early Israel. Even before the monarchy, the individual tribes would unite in ad hoc military collectives to fight off external enemies. Although the tribes would fight under a single general, each would send its own military leadership. This, it may be suggested, is a good parallel to what happened under Saul. Though Saul as king would be the commander in chief, Judah, still an independent territory, may well have had its own military officer: David. Presumably, David rose to this position by proving himself capable or intelligent enough to hold it.
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It is not unlikely that Saul would have been the one to appoint him; Judah, though descriptive of a region, was not yet a self-standing political unit. David would have been responsible for warding off the constant minor incursions of Philistines into his territory. As part of the larger Israelite defense strategy, he would have reported to Saul and been considered an arm of Saul’s royal forces.

The best historical description of David’s military career under Saul, then, is that of an officer—not a general—who had some minor successes in battle. David probably was responsible for defending the porous Judahite frontier region against minor incursions by Philistine raiding parties. For a small nation in constant fear of the mighty Philistine city-states to the west, even the defensive successes of repelling small bands of Philistines along the border might well have been seen as worthy of praise. Judah was the front line, and David was the one holding it, protecting Israel at large from the Philistine threat. At least, it is easy enough to see how David’s role could be presented that way to the populace.

It is very much part of the biblical authors’ program to exaggerate David’s successes. As we saw in the previous chapter, they are even willing to take the semimythical victories of lesser-known warriors and attribute them to David. It should not surprise us, then, that these authors may take minor victories and ascribe great significance to them, for in this way David’s military exploits can be held up against those of Saul. David is shown to be worthy of the kingship in the terms most important to the fledgling Israelite state.

In today’s world, exaggerating or embellishing one’s accomplishments is frowned upon—and it is fraught with peril, as we see in almost every election season. In the ancient world, however, such exaggeration was standard literary practice. Scholars have noted that something very similar occurs in the royal annals of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I, who reigned about a century before David. Tiglath-Pileser boldly proclaims that he conquered “the land of Kathmuhu in its entirety,” which would seem more impressive were it not that he evidently had to go back the next year and conquer it all over again—just as David seems to have had to repeatedly “defeat” the Philistines. Conquest is in the eye of the conqueror. In the case of Tiglath-Pileser, he counted as conquered everything from those territories he fully annexed to those he merely looted before withdrawing his troops. As one biblical scholar has put it, “in Assyrian royal inscriptions . . . the torching of a grain field is the conquest of a whole territory behind it.”
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We don’t have royal annals from ancient Israel, though they may well have existed. What we have instead, serving the same self-congratulatory function, are the biblical narratives. What Tiglath-Pileser does in his annals is what the biblical authors do in 1 Samuel: they credit David with great laudable victories for military encounters that failed to register on the larger political stage. This is not the case only with David, of course. We may note again the description of Saul’s own military successes: “he fought against all his enemies on every side: against the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, the kings of Zobah, and the Philistines; and wherever he turned he worsted them” (1 Sam. 14:47). Saul conquered none of these peoples; all of them would be Israel’s neighbors and occasional adversaries for centuries. At best, he maintained his incipient kingdom in the face of potential threats from the surrounding nations (though in fact we have no evidence of any of these wars from outside the Bible). From the Israelite perspective, that’s impressive enough to warrant high praise.
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The reports of David’s military victories may have some truth behind them, but they have been colored by the desire of the biblical authors to denigrate Saul and elevate David. As noted above, the primary purpose of this presentation of David is clear enough: David, the biblical hero, must have been a magnificent warrior. Moreover, he must have excelled in precisely the area where Saul himself was so prominent, in battles against the Philistine archenemy. At every turn, David must exceed Saul. David was undoubtedly an excellent military leader, as his later exploits will demonstrate. But we can say next to nothing about his actions in Saul’s service, because the victories ascribed to him in the Bible are free of detail and are exaggerated. At most, we may give David credit for successfully repelling minor Philistine advances in Judah.

The Biblical Portrayal of Saul

T
HE BIBLICAL DEPICTION OF
David as a mighty warrior for Saul dovetails with another part of the biblical authors’ agenda: the portrayal of Saul as unfit to rule. Speaking about David, Jonathan says to Saul, “His actions have been very much to your advantage” (1 Sam. 19:4)—and yet, according to the narrative, Saul seems to care about nothing so much as killing David. He is driven to extremes of rage and envy by David’s successes and the popular admiration for the young officer: “When Saul saw that he was successful, he dreaded him, but all Israel and Judah loved David, for he marched before them” (18:15–16). We can, however, conclude that the biblical account of David’s popularity is, if not entirely invented, at least exaggerated. The manner in which David is praised is part of the Bible’s rhetorical goal of downplaying Saul in favor of David. When the Israelite women famously proclaim that “Saul has slain his thousands, David his tens of thousands!” (18:7), the hyperbole is obvious. The entire Philistine population at its height numbered around thirty thousand; David could hardly have killed more than half of all the Philistines in one battle, or even in all of his battles combined.
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Even Saul’s “thousands” is undoubtedly false. But these are not supposed to be actual body counts. The numbers used here are, just as today, simply representative of “a lot”—which is defined by the speaker. “A lot” for Israel in a battle against the Philistines could be, from our perspective, a very small number indeed. Elsewhere in the Bible these same numbers are used similarly: “Our flocks number thousands, even tens of thousands, in our fields” (Ps. 144:13); “Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of streams of oil?” (Mic. 6:7). These numbers are self-conscious exaggerations.

As for the comparison between Saul and David, here it seems that the biblical authors are having some fun at Saul’s expense. Biblical poetry regularly uses increasing numbers in parallel clauses, which often are to be read not as a comparison, but as a distributive equation: “Saul has slain his thousands, David his tens of thousands” can be understood as “Saul and David have killed their thousands and ten thousands.”
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This would, in fact, be a logical reading of the verse in 1 Samuel 18, since we are told that “the women of all the towns of Israel came out singing and dancing to greet King Saul” (18:6)—Saul is the returning hero, and David his chief warrior. The women may very well have meant to praise both Saul and David as having defeated a great number of the Philistine enemy. If so, the authors make Saul out to be not only unjustifiably jealous, but even unfamiliar with the standards of his native language when he responds in anger that “to David they have given tens of thousands, but to me they have given thousands” (18:8). The women’s chant thus serves two purposes: to elevate David by the numerical exaggeration, and to make Saul out to be a fool by his response to it—the two essential goals of this section of the narrative.

In his jealousy, Saul is said to try just about every way possible to get rid of David. He throws a spear at David while David is playing the lyre for him—twice. He sends him to the front lines of battle in hopes of having him die at the hands of the Philistines. He offers him his daughter Michal in marriage, for the grotesque bride-price of a hundred Philistine foreskins, a price he is sure David will die trying to pay. He sends his men to David’s house to kill him in his sleep.