The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero by Joel S. Baden Page B

clear that David could not have had any hand in Saul’s death.
    What follows upon David’s return to Ziklag is equally improbable. According to the biblical account, David and his men take the prototypical three days to return to Ziklag. When they arrive, they find that some Amalekites have raided the town and captured all the women and children, including David’s two wives—but, we are told, they did not harm a single one of them. David and his men, after consulting with the priest Abiathar, take off in pursuit. As they come to the Wadi Besor, the unofficial border between Philistine territory and the wasteland to the south, they miraculously encounter an Egyptian youth who happens to be an abandoned slave of the very Amalekites who had raided Ziklag. The boy leads David to the Amalekites, and David attacks, rescuing his wives and everybody else. In another minor miracle, “nothing of theirs was missing—young or old, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that had been taken” (1 Sam. 30:19).
    Many features of this story testify to its improbability. The raiding Amalekites are understood as acting in revenge for David’s constant raids on their territory during his time with the Philistines—but, as we have seen, those raids are probably part of the biblical cover-up, and so this revenge should be read as a further stage of the same literary program. The chance encounter with the abandoned Egyptian slave boy who points the way forward is a typical literary flourish; it is strikingly similar to the episode in Genesis 37 where Joseph is sent to find his brothers and does so only by happening upon an unnamed man who overheard the brothers reveal their destination (37:14–17). And, most notably, the fact that David recovered everything the Amalekites are said to have taken is both unlikely on the face of it—not a single person dead? not a single woman raped? not a single sheep eaten?—and a remarkable stroke of evidentiary fortune. For, presented with the notion that David was not with the Philistines at Mount Gilboa because he was chasing the Amalekites, one might have wondered where the evidence of the Amalekite raid was to be found: who or what could be accounted as missing to stand as proof that such a raid really happened? Such evidence cannot be provided, however, for the Amalekites touched not a hair on a single person’s head—or because the raid never happened at all. Even the biblical account admits, and tries to explain, the fact that during the battle David was absent from his home in Ziklag. But its explanation is forced.
    Where was David while the Philistines were killing Saul and his sons? By all rights, he should have been right there with them. And—despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the Bible’s emphatic statements to the contrary—we may conclude that this is exactly where he was. Now, David’s simply being on the battlefield where Saul and his sons died does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he did the deed himself. After all, the Philistines would have wanted Saul dead just as much as David did. And it is only in the movies that the hero is able to track down his nemeses in the thick of a major battle and single-handedly do them in. But by the same token, one need not pull the trigger to be convicted of murder; David may well have been responsible for the deaths of Saul and his sons.
    The first chapter of 2 Samuel records the moment when David learns of Saul’s death. An unnamed Amalekite man from Saul’s army comes to David at Ziklag and announces the result of the battle, including the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. David asks how the man knows what he is reporting, and the man tells David that he was right there when it happened. What’s more, when Saul was about to die, the king asked this very man to be the one to finish him off, which the Amalekite, obligingly, did. Then, the man says, he took the crown and armlet off Saul, which he then produces for David, saying,