Page 454 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1020-1000 B.C.] The End of an Era 39*

their full attention to building up the overseas trade, which in
now beginning to show signs of picking up again. And the
Israelis must forever keep a watchful eye on the desert to the
east and south, where the raiding Bedouin, on their swift camels,
are always ready to take advantage of an army engaged else­
where.
At the moment Israel is split into factions, while the Five
Towns of Philistia are in close alliance. Some thirty years earlier
the hillmen had been decisively defeated, after a battle at Eben-
ezer, where their rallying point, a sort of portable shrine called
the Ark of the Covenant, had been captured. The Ark had later
been restored, as a gesture of good will, but this may well have
been a mistake, for the good will had not been reciprocated.
Priests had always been powerful among the Israelis, ever
since the days of Moses, their almost legendary priest-king. And
now the archbishop in charge of the Ark, an old man called
Samuel, has long been preaching rebellion against the Philistine
dominion, which is anyway hardly more than nominal. But at
the same time a guerrilla leader called Saul has arisen, and a
struggle for power is going on between the priests and the
guerrillas. Saul had made his reputation recently by a brilliant
march to relieve the city of Jabesh, east of Jordan, which had
been attacked by Bedouin, and he had been anointed king by the
archbishop himself. A secular leader is something new for the
children of Israel, and the priests do not appear adequately to
have considered the implications of their appointment. For al­
most immediately Saul begins to act with complete disregard
for the wishes of the priests. From his camp in the Jordan valley,
not far from Jericho, he sends an army into the hills under his son
Jonathan, and the army attacks and cuts to pieces the Philistine
garrison in the town of Geba. The Philistines, of course, dispatch
a punitive expedition into the hills, which burns several villages
in reprisal. But Saul avoids battle and retires southward, to attack
and defeat the Amalekites in the northeast of the Sinai penin­
sula.
Local warfare of this sort was, of course, endemic in these
years all along the border between the desert and the farming
country, and the Philistine kings were not unduly troubled by