were plain enough. An external enemy brought the tribes together and Israel adopted a central system of command for war because it had no alternative.
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, werethemselves 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 consistentethical 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
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, werethemselves 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 consistentethical 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
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