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To Dawn

And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice and spoke to Saul, saying, why have you deceived me? For you are Saul. And the king said to her, be not afraid: what did you see? And the woman said, I saw gods ascending out of the earth. I Sam. 28: 12-13

ing David made his enemies pass under saws and harrows of iron, and under axes, before incinerating them in the brick-kilns alive (II Sam. 12: 31). He was a serial philanderer going after the skirts of other mens wives and if he could not get what he wanted he had their husbands murdered (II Sam. 11: 1-15). He was the armor bearer of Saul and betrayed his king. I am a child of the cold war; propaganda was the air we were breathing on both sides of the iron curtain. I always had a hard time to buy into the vilification of King Saul. Posterity now remembers only the iconic image of David, the man after the heart of God, but this is a bit of an irony. In the fifth century BC an increasing number of Jews in Babylon and the Diaspora began clamoring for the abolition of the House of David so not to take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ever again (Jeremiah 33: 24-26). It would lead to a rather critical reception of the four Books of Kings. We cannot be sure whether these texts had been created from scratch, or whether it was a matter of editorial interventions by a particularly bigoted rabbi into an already existing artifact rescued from the conflagration that had destroyed Jerusalem and Solomons temple in 588 BC, or

whether most likely according to the 4th Ezdras, the original chronicle had been destroyed in the fire and was reconstructed from memory by the exiled custodians of tradition either in Babylon or under the supervision of Ezra (480 440 BC). We just dont know. But we do know that especially Ezra had no reason to promote a cause for the House of David. On the contrary! He made sure that not just King David but all the royals of the past were painted in the darkest of colors with few and not altogether unambiguous exceptions. The story begins when a body of tribal chiefs, the so-called judges presided over the fortunes of a loose confederacy of half-domesticated tribes. The coalition was so loose in fact it didnt stop at blood feuds and sometimes erupted in downright genocidal killing-sprees among members (Judges 21: 17-21). Yet under the pressures of warfare, the elders and chiefs of a conquered people, worried to see their heartlands occupied, gathered in council at the national cult center of Shiloh, the place where Yahweh had set his name at first (Jeremiah 7: 12). The belief was, that at Shiloh Yahweh, in a kind of symmetry to the tribal council convened with his seventy siblings (I Kings 22: 19-22; Psalms 82: 1-6). Initially just a late arrival to his father El, the creator of the world, Yahweh rose from the obscurity of a tribal idol, perhaps not even indigenous to the Hebrews (Numbers 31: 7-11), and gradually assumed a profile comparable to the Nordic Thor, and then, in blatant violation of a whole wad of his own commandments married his own mother Asherah, she who gives birth to the gods (Zeev Herzog, Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho: biblical myth and archaeological reality.

2001, Prometheus 4: 72-93).

Over time the neutral ground and the prestige of Shiloh created some degree of national coherence between the tribal cousins. The gestating spirit of national identity, however, was to embarrass their creators, when this body of elders and clan chiefs began making it a habit to pass on their privileges only to club members. So, when it became Samuels turn to name a successor, he, too, found nothing wrong in making his own sons judges over Israel. It was a poor choice. They turned aside after lucre, took bribes, and perverted the law. Things became so bad that the elders of Israel gathered and gave Old Shmul an earful about this kind of taxation without representation. And they said, behold, you are old, and your sons walk not in your ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. Not surprisingly the thing displeased Samuel (I Sam. 8: 1-6), but what could he do? Reluctantly he grabbed a vial of olive oil from his wifes larder and in 1025 BC Samuel singled out a man from the smallest of the twelve tribes, the tribe that looked as the least likely ever to dominate the confederacy. He anointed Saul as prince of the people. It was the choice of a tribal politician, streetwise enough but with a singular lack of vision. The Philistines ruled the land and the Hebrew tribes were not even allowed to have their own blacksmiths, lest they make the Hebrew swords or spears, instead they traded their entire supply of nails, hoes and plows from the Philistines trading posts (I Sam. 13: 19).

Inevitably this became the cause for a gnawing resentment, the kind of resentment that forges nations. All it takes is a people feeling oppressed, be it by the Philistines or by the Inquisition, and if a genocidal psychopath like the Duke of Alba continues pouring fuel on the fire, the oppressed look up to a national hero. And if this hero is of the right fiber, like Prince Wilhelm of Orange, the silent (1533 1584), he will shoulder the burden of excruciating disappointments and remain indomitable in defeat, even give his own life. And the world is made to marvel with envy at the ultimate triumph, the birth and prosperity of a new nation, the people of the Netherlands. And what would our world be like without the example they had set, without the liberality of their institutions and laws and the work of their scientists? Not to mention their hygiene the grandees in far away Russia used to send their clothing to be laundered in Holland. If any one nation deserves to be remembered as mothering the modern world it is the Dutch. Yet when a little later the slogan of no taxation without representation roused disgruntled colonials in distant America to secede from the British Empire, it was not quite the same story. George Washington probably knew whom he attempted to impersonate when he shouldered the burden of excruciating disappointments and remained indomitable in defeat before the ultimate triumph, but he was neither a Prince Wilhelm nor a King Saul. George Washington is remembered as a nation builder, but it was a nation where the rich, the freeholders and their bankers wrote it into the constitution that only they had the

right to vote between 4 to 10% of the total population. This was later amended, much later, in 1831 James Monroe was still adamantly against the universal franchise, but the campaign costs for the presidency began to become ruinous even for the better off and only intensive fund raising could secure a sufficient war chest for the campaigning candidate. At present the going price for the American presidency is in the range of six hundred million dollars and rising. Like everything in America, it is for sale. The presidencies of other countries come cheaper and if considered good business the indispensible nation (TIN) in her generosity has been more than willing to bankroll a budding dictators rise such as Adolf Hitlers. The slogan of a government of the people, by the people, for the people is the most ludicrous lie ever told by an honest man. No matter how you dip and turn it, the American constitution was the product of a coup dtat, neither democratic nor even legal according to the historian J. Allan Smith: the fifty-five signatories whod put their names to the document did so without a public mandate, nor was the new constitution ratified in a referendum. Hence the old adage fully applies: Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should by no means be allowed to do the job (Douglas Adams), and that includes aforesaid honest man, who became the cause for more American fatalities of war than nearly all the other presidents together. It should not really surprise, considering how it all began. With incessant deceit, with bullets and smallpox infested blankets, the indispensible nation (TIN) had wrenched from

the cold hands of their rightful owners a second Canaan, genocide with divine approval of course, one nation under God, take away what is not yours just as in the Bible, when Joshua brought the holocaust to the original owners of the promised land. Except, of course, that the biblical records are sheer fantasies of a nasty imagination. The alleged nation of outcasts under an alleged Moses and the fictional Joshua, who allegedly had set out to rob the people in Canaan of their land never existed; not at that time, and not before King Saul was creating such nation (I Sam. 11: 7). King Saul entered the stage as a flamboyant and charismatic leader, even acted the role of a shaman (I Sam. 19: 24). He was the anointed, the Messiah, the last of the judges and the first of the princes, the rock against the Philistines. If the record of his sudden fits of exuberance and deep depression is anything to go by, King Saul also was a tad bipolar. Not surprising, the old establishment of tribal elders developed a dim view of the man cutting into their privileges: He will take our sons, and appoint them for his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will take our daughters, our fields, and our vineyards, and give them to his servants they complained (I Sam. 8: 11-18). The wily Samuels idea was of course to use Saul as a puppet with himself pulling the strings, but the young prince soon followed his own counsel instead of playing the game of a bygone age and refused to commit senseless slaughter to no purpose (I Sam. 15: 14). So, Samuel resorted to scare tactics and proclaimed the

will of [the] God[s] from his shrine at Shiloh (I Sam. 9: 9; 14: 3546, 15: 11, 23). Still not satisfied with the effect on the brave but superstitious prince, he then approached in secret what seemed an inexperienced but willing young man, carefully chosen for his handsome looks (I Sam. 16: 2-4; 12). Under Samuels approving eye the young man was introduced to Saul as a harp player (I Sam. 16: 23) and somewhat illogically advanced from the position of a musician to the office of the kings armor bearer. The kings oldest son, Prince Jonathan, immediately fell under the spell of Davids handsome looks and stripped himself bare the very first time he laid eyes on him (I Sam. 18: 4). David, although he preferred women, played along, even commemorated this relationship in one of his songs very pleasant have you been unto me: your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women (II Sam. 1: 26) and so recruited the infatuated prince as the unwitting accessory to his conspiracy. (Apparently Moses interdictions against homosexuality (Lev. 18: 22-23 and 20: 13) didnt carry much weight; presumably because nobody at the time knew they existed. But then again: the narrator, coming from a very different epoch most certainly knew the prohibition and one must ask why he couldnt resist to give us details details that his orthodox audience could only perceive as scandalous.) It seems, Old Shmul with all his guile was a particularly poor judge of character. This new protg of his as well began developing his own ideas.

We all know the story how David slew Goliath, although a little later the narrator feels obliged to set the facts straight and give us the name of the real giant slayer: Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite (II Sam. 21: 19 and Chron. 20: 5). Nevertheless the young Davids charisma and exploits soon commanded a following in King Sauls army (I Sam. 17, 18: 7). Yet just when all his pieces fell into place the plot was discovered and David had no choice but run for dear life. He escaped not without companions; the young thug became a highwayman and leader over six hundred malcontents (I Sam. 25: 10 27: 5). The Philistines, who should have been his archenemy, needed good soldiers and David and his band had no compunctions of going as mercenaries on the Philistines payroll (I Sam. 27: 1-7). Encircled and betrayed, King Saul and Prince Jonathan were left to the prospect of facing an overwhelming force against hopeless odds. To leave it by that and fight another day was apparently no longer an option. The biblical narrator alleges that in his heydays King Saul had been prosecuting sorcery and witchcraft, which is not likely in a period where witchcraft and sorcery was the religious mode of operation. The term prophet is just another name for a sorcerer casting spells and pronounce blessings (Numbers 22: 21-38). So it seems very unfair to censor the prince for asking an omen from a sorceress the Witch of Endor. Her sance confirms his impending doom; the only comfort she can offer to King Saul is a meal.

Sore in his soul but unflinching, the King rises and goes out into the long night (I Sam. 28), a true hero all the way. The Good Book doesnt approve of nobility and tragedy. What seems to annoy the bigoted editor is the fact that a man can live by his own honor and choose his own destiny. Tragedy is neither a sob story, nor the story of a man getting himself inadvertently into deep waters. Tragedy is the story of a considered choice in the face of unfavorable odds, and King Saul chose not to do what is easy. In 1011 BC, it came to the final showdown with the Philistines. King Saul fell on his own sword, Jonathan was slain and the Philistines hung their corpses from a gibbet. The narrator alleges that David took no part in this. The Philistines had their suspicions about this potentially treasonous ally (I Sam. 27: 11). With their main forces engaged, they rather not risked a tactical surprise (I Sam. 29: 3-7); it was not uncommon to have allies defect in the heat of battle. Yet a nagging doubt remains: King Saul may not have fallen on his own sword after all a mysterious young man, an assassin conveniently recruited from a foreign tribe, gave him a helping hand with his sword, then stripped the royal corpse of the regalia and delivered them to guess who, guess again David his lord (II Sam. 1: 610). In and by itself that would already be suspicious enough, but when David followed suit with one of his trademark murders after a histrionic display of sudden rage killing the assassin foul play seems certain; David was covering his tracks (II Sam. 1: 15-16), no matter what

his dance and song proclaims: Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, you were slain in your own high places (II Sam. 1: 23-25). To maintain an appearance of legitimacy for his own claim to the vacant throne, David then collected King Sauls remains for a decent burial; a mere charade lets not kid ourselves, David had no claim whatsoever. But the lion had come to years and now did what lions do when they take over the pride: kill all the cubs from the predecessor. Between David and the throne stood the bloodline of the House of Saul. Abner, King Sauls old general, was Davids most dangerous adversary (II Sam. 3: 27) and therefore the first to be murdered. Next on the list was Prince Ishbaal, a man capable not only of restoring the fortunes of the House of Saul, but of going after the man responsible for Sauls fall (II Sam. 4: 6). After Ishbaals assassination we see the same pattern as after the death of King Saul himself: David, fainting outrage, murders his own hit men (II Sam. 4: 12), only to continue where the assassin had left a few loose ends: David had the remaining seven male descendants of King Saul rounded up and handed them over to the Gibeonites for execution (II Sam. 21: 8-9). Only one of the house of Saul, Mephibosheth, the son of

the late Prince Jonathan, a cripple afflicted with polio was allowed to live for old times sake or perhaps David couldnt find another assassin willing and stupid enough to get himself killed for his services, and this even after Mephibosheth had joined the rebellion of Prince Absalom. In the end nobody was left to stand between David and the throne. Albeit as a mere puppet of the Philistines, which his predecessor never had been, David became the new king. Although it ought to be acknowledged that King David, after decades of incessant warfare, eventually turned tables on the Philistines, even subdued the former overlord. It also got to be noted that throughout Davids rule, foreign mercenaries continued to hold key positions in the Hebrew military (II Sam. 11: 3ff), a sure sign how little trust David was putting in his own people (II Sam. 13-18). Even the able propagandist of the Books of Kings couldnt gloss over the fact of an endemic instability in King Davids regime, a rule of incest (II Sam. 13: 1) and rebellion in his own house (II Sam. 15: 1-12). In 969 BC the body-warmth of the maiden Abishag did no longer suffice to keep the king alive, and the days of David drew nigh that he should die. The prophet Nathan and Solomon, the son of a Hittite concubine, plotted against the legitimate contender Prince Adonijah and in a last minute coup Solomon was declared the designated successor, just in time to hear the final instructions of the dying David whispered to his ear: You know what Joab the son of Zeruiah did to me, show your-

self a man and let not his hoar head go to the grave in peace. And, you have with you Shimei the son of Gera, which cursed me with a grievous curse, but I swore to him, saying, I will not put you to death with the sword. Hold him not guiltless: bring his hoar head down with blood (I Kings 2). (A scene as if from Mario Puzos Godfather.) And So David slept with his fathers, and the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon (I Kings 2). The alleged popularity of Davids successor was a myth from the beginning. Following the example Solomon and his supporters had set, a freelancing prophet from the dregs of the population, a certain Ahijah was not at all afraid of standing up against the mighty Solomon. He pulled out from his bundle a vial of oil and anointed Jeroboam as king over the Hebrews. Immediately ten of the twelve tribes (I Kings 11: 29-37) associated with the new contender and seceded from Solomons dominions; Jeroboam established his kingdom in Israel and Samaria; the epigraph on an Assyrian stele still testifies for the prosperity of the House of Omri. King Solomon found himself reduced to the state of a petty prince; legend depicts him as a dirty old man dictating garrulous letters to his overlord in Egypt, while ogling the wobbly tits and pretty faces in his well-stocked harem. If we accept the revised Chronology of the ancient Near East by the English Egyptologist David Rohl, Professor Wolfgang Helck and Professor Jrgen von Beckerath (Becherath, J. von, in Helk, W. (ed.) Abstracts for the 'High, Middle or Low? International

Colloquium on Chronology, held at Schloss Haindorf (1990); David Rohl A Test of Time: The Bible - from Myth to History in 1995; Newgrosh, Bernard (2007). Chronology at the Crossroads: The Late Bronze Age in Western Asia. Leicester: Troubador Publishing),

the story seems to be affirmed by references in the Amarna Letters, the diplomatic correspondence of Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten. The New Chronology proposes a major revision of the conventional chronology of ancient Egypt, in particular of the dates of Egyptian kings of the 19th through 25th Dynasties, which if viable would lower the critical dates by up to 350 years. Rohl asserts that his new Chronology would identify characters in the Old Testament with people whose names appear in archaeological finds. Especially King Saul is assumed to be a character from the Amarna Letters, a certain Labaya, the Lion Man, who held sway over central Palestine and was active in fighting against the Philistines. The name Labaya is a hypocoristic, and not a proper name. In his correspondence with his Egyptian overlord his attitude is not exactly that of a demure subject. We read in Labayas letter: I was denigrated' in front of the king, my lord. Am I an ant, that bites the hand of the man who squashes it? (Amarna Letter EA 252) Accordingly an opponent of Labaya, the Egyptian governor of Meggido lodges a complaint against him: May the king know that since the archers have gone back, Labaya carries out acts of hostility against me, and that we cannot shear the wool, and that we cannot pass through the gate in the presence of Labaya, since he knows that you have not given (me) archers; and now he intends to take Meggido, but the king will protect his city so that Labaya does not seize her.

In truth, the city is destroyed by death as a result of pestilence and disease. Grant the king one hundred garrison troops to guard the city, lest Labaya take it. Certainly, Labaya tries to destroy Meggido (Amarna Letter EA 244). Incidentally Saul and his sons Jonathan, Abinadab and Malkishua were killed in battle with the Philistines near Mt. Gilboa in the Jezreel Valley, not too far from Meggido (I Sam. 31). In another letter a certain Addu-qarrad complains to pharaoh Why did you give into the hand of the lord Gitti-padalla, a city that Lab'aya our father had taken? Thus the two sons of Lab'aya said to me: "Make war against the men of Qina, because they killed our father! In the Bible, Qina is called En-Ganim (Amarna Letter EA 245, a). William Albright, the American archaeologist studied extensively the letters from Labaya in the early 1940s. He determined that the writer of the tablet knew little of the Akkadic language, at the time the lingua franca of diplomacy; instead Labayas letter indicates that it was first drafted in Hebrew before it was translated idiomatically into Akkadic. Essentially, says Albright, the letter was from an untutored or uneducated man from humble beginnings who grew into a powerful ruler. That is stretching it, I think: how does Mr. Albright know that the untutored voice in this letter wasnt the one of the local scribe writing under dictation in an idiom foreign to him? In Psalms the bodyguards of King Saul are referred to as lebaim, a Hebrew word meaning lions. David, as he is hiding

from Saul's posse in the cave of En-Gedi (I Sam. 24) says: I am in the midst of lions (Hebrew 'lebaim') I lie among ravenous beasts - men whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords." (Psalm 57: 4). In the Books of Kings, Jonathan smashed the Philistine pillar at Gibeah (I Sam. 13: 3-5), an event apparently also mentioned by Labaya (Amarna Letter EA 252). In the Book of Samuel Saul reprimands his son Jonathan for consorting with David; Labaya seems to do the same (Amarna Letter EA 254). Yet these parallels could be grossly misleading. To compare warriors with Lions is not an unusual metaphor and neither are squabbles between members of a local dynasty something unheard of. And why should a presumably Hebrew chief be referred to as if he were a foreigner to his own people: Are we to act like Labaya when he was giving the land of Shechem to the Habiru? (Amarna Letter EA 289) I am not an Egyptologist, but I do know this: in order for this New Chronology to work it has to be synchronized with half a dozen other chronologies of the Middle East, not to mention the extant correspondences and chronicles, and so far I dont see this having succeeded. It could force us to do Middle-eastern archaeology almost from scratch, but we are not there yet, not by a long shot. Also, we shouldnt underestimate the fact of editorial intervention. If Ezra and his team didnt make it all up, the materials they were using seem too far removed from their origin that the editors could give them full justice; Ezra was primarily an ideologue, although his period was the age of Herodotus (484 425 BC) and the beginnings of history proper. The editorial correction to young

Davids exploits and his alleged slaying of Goliath (II Sam. 21: 19 and Chron. 20: 5) is very much in the spirit of Ezras epoch. At least in some parts of the four Books of Kings one is getting the impression they had been composed with a genuine interest in the facts of the events and it makes a corking good story.