DAVID’S CONQUESTS
David’s next task was to put down Saul’s successor, Eshbaal or Ishbosheth, and to conquer what remained to this weakling of Saul’s realm. That more blood was shed than our texts allow, may be assumed. The legend-makers idealised David, but the historian is bound to go behind the legend. The epithets hurled at David by Shimei, according to 2 Samuel xvi. 7, must have something more for their justification than the concession professedly made by David to the vengeance of the Gibeonites (2 Samuel xxi. 1-14); and the strange legend of the destruction of Benjamin in Judges xx., xxi., is probably a disguise of an historical fact which took place later than the period assumed in the legend. Both Benjamin and parts of the Negeb had to be won by force, and from the nature of the case, as well as from the fact that Saul’s general and relative, Abner, took the side of Eshbaal, we may assume that this war lasted for some time. What took place in the large part of Palestine, which did not, so far as we can be said to know, enter into the dominion of Saul, we would gladly be able to tell, but the traditions have faded away. That David had statecraft as well as great ability in war, may be accepted from the tradition, and the advantages of unity may have been patent to tribes which had a fertile territory, and were liable to be swept by Midianite and Aramæan invasions. Still, fear of David, as well as a regard for self-interest, may have contributed to the annexation, as we may fairly call it, of central and northern Israel to the empire of the adventurer from the Negeb. Probably, however, this event did not take place as soon as the present form of our texts suggests; probably, too, the union of north and south was never as close as that which came to exist between Judah, and part, at least, of Benjamin. Further investigation may throw some rays of light on this subject.
REVOLT FROM DAVID
Two revolts are recorded as having occurred in the latter part of David’s reign. In both cases the narratives have to be closely and critically examined. At the present stage of the inquiry it appears that the rebellion of Sheba is wrongly connected with the revolt of Absalom, and occurred at an earlier part of David’s reign. David had probably not as yet succeeded in crushing the independent spirit of the Benjamites, and Sheba, who was sheikh of the important clan (it was Saul’s clan) of the Bicrites, raised the standard of revolt supported not only by the Bicrites, but to some extent by the Israelitish inhabitants of Maacah in the Negeb (2 Samuel xx. 14). What he aimed at was probably a revival of the kingdom of Saul, and a definite renunciation of the ambitious scheme of a Palestinian empire. His attempt, however, failed. The revolt of Absalom was similar, but its chief supporters were not in Benjamin (which, indeed, had most probably by this time been subjugated), but in Judah. This tribe was, no doubt, the creation of David, but the elements which had been combined with the old clan of Judah, being Calebite or Jerahmeelite, still felt the keenest interest in the country to the south of Palestine called the Negeb, and when Absalom, the child of a northern Arabian mother, adopted their aspirations as his own, the whole Israelitish population of the Negeb flocked to his standard. This well-conceived plan, however, which probably presupposes further successful warfare of David against the southern Aram (i.e., the Jerahmeelites in and near the Negeb), was also doomed to failure.
SOLOMON AND JEROBOAM
David’s successor, Solomon, reached the throne by a coup d’état. His success was largely due to the energy of the Jerusalem priest, Zadok, who was devoted to the service of David’s new sanctuary on Mount Zion. The friendship of the priestly party had important results both for Solomon (whom the priests of Jerusalem naturally idealised in legend) and for the state, which now possessed a sanctuary officially recognised as supreme. The erection of a temple required a large supply both of timber and of stone, and our texts represent that the timber and the stone came from Lebanon by the friendly offices of the king of Tyre, to whose territory Lebanon is supposed to have belonged. Underneath the present texts, however, we can discern a different and much more probable form of text, in which the king whose help is requested is the king of Mizzur (the North Arabian land of Muzri), and it is also presumably the same king (called in this case the king of Muzri) whose daughter became Solomon’s wife.
SOLOMON AND HIRAM
Afterwards, however, the relations between the two kings, Solomon and Hiram, appear to have changed for the worse. Twenty cities are recorded to have been ceded by Solomon to Hiram, and (in the original text) a large sum of money to have been paid. We can hardly doubt that this was the price of peace; hostilities must have broken out between the two kings, whose territories adjoined each other. It is possible that the war was occasioned, not only by the memories of wrongs done to Mizrim by David, but also by the desire on Hiram’s part for commercial advantages. Solomon was bent on enriching himself by commercial voyages, and Hiram would not be behind him. Ezion-geber, at the head of the Gulf of Akabah, formed part of Solomon’s dominion. Hiram can have had no mariners of his own, but was resolved not to allow all the profits of the voyages which started from Ezion-geber to go to his rival. So he sent his own “servants,” i.e., probably commissioners and merchants, to carry on traffic for him at the different ports touched at, the chief of which was doubtless Ophir, the port of the great Arabian or East African gold-land. Nor was the King of Mizrim the only North Arabian prince who made Solomon’s position a difficult one. For a time the region adjoining the Negeb, called Cusham, had received Israelite garrisons, but an adventurer named Rezon expelled the Israelites, and founded a new line of kings of Cusham, which was destined to cause infinite trouble to future Israelite kings.
SOLOMON’S OPPONENTS
Another bitter opponent of Solomon was the once fugitive Edomite or rather Aramite prince, Hadad, who returned to his own country (the southern Aram or Jerahmeel) and distressed Israel. And a third was Jeroboam, son of Nebat, an Ephrathite of mixed parentage (his mother was a Mizrite). That he belonged to the northern tribe of Ephraim, cannot be safely argued; Ephrath was the name of a district in the Negeb, and it was the district to which Jeroboam belonged. His home was at Zeredah, otherwise called Tirzah, and seeing that he was “industrious” and specially interested in the Negeb, Solomon “put him in charge over all the burden of the house of Ishmael,” i.e., over the compulsory work (the corvée) of the northern Arabian subject population. This position of trust Jeroboam used for his own ambitious ends. Naturally, he incurred Solomon’s resentment, and had to flee for his life to his mother’s country, Mizrim.
The suppression of Jeroboam’s revolt left behind it angry feelings towards the Davidic family. When, therefore, the fugitive returned after Solomon’s death, the Israelites in the Negeb were prepared to espouse his claims to sovereignty. What line was taken by the Israelites of Ephraim and the other northern tribes, was not expressly stated in the original narrative. We may be sure, however, that they took no interest in Solomon’s temple, but the greatest possible interest in the sanctuaries of the Negeb. They had to support Jeroboam because they loved the land in which the patriarchs had dwelt. Its sanctuaries were to them the holiest spots upon earth; Canaan without the Negeb would have been like a temple without its altar. Consequently, whether the northern tribes sent representatives, or not, on the death of Solomon, to the national assembly at the venerable city of Cusham-Jerahmeel (later scribes, and hardly by mere accident, wrote “Shechem”), the voice of the nation was adequately expressed, and the doom pronounced on the house of David, in the name of the northern Israelites and the kindred clans in the Negeb, was final.