Page 455 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

haul s successes and his assumption of royal titles. And they cer­
tainly paid little attention to a clash between another of their
expeditions and the army of Saul, in which the only encounter of
note was a single combat between a tall swordsman of Gath

called Goliath and the armor-bearer of Saul, a young warrior
called David. Admittedly they suffered a trifling loss of prestige
when their champion fell, but they were confident that in the long

run their superior weapons, swords and spears of iron and iron-
tired chariots, would prevail against the old-fashioned bronze
weapons of the Israelites. It seemed, in fact, as though Goliath’s

death had resulted in an unexpected advantage to the Philistines.
For David became at a stroke a popular hero among the Israelis,
and the priests began to build him up as a rival to King Saul.

The internal dissension that so often before had prevented the
hillmen from combining against the coastal cities appeared to be
breaking out again.

And indeed during the following years much of the energy of
the turbulent hillmen was dissipated in internal strife between
the two parties. The Philistines, in the cities of the coast, digest­

ing the reports of their agents in the hills, could never really make
out whether David was in active rebellion against Saul. His

friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan was proverbial, and several
times Jonathan succeeded in reconciling the two leaders. But
though Samuel by now was dead, the open support given by the

priests to David time and again provoked quarrels between the
king and the popular guerrilla captain, and David was again
forced to withdraw with his companions from the court and go

into hiding in the hills.
Then one day (it was in the final year of the millennium)
David appeared with six hundred followers at the gates of the

Philistine outpost city of Gath and requested sanctuary. King
Achish of Gath gave him permission to settle in the town of

Ziklag close by, and sent word to the kings of the Five Cities that
the Israelites were now seriously at odds with each other and
that the time had come to crush them once and for all.

The winter passed in preparation, for not merely the Five
Cities of the Philistine League but all the towns of the coast as
far as the lands of Phoenicia were to combine to provide an