After the death of Saul, David first became king over Judah in the south, then over Israel in the north. Thus, he became king over ‘all Israel’. He did not stop there. A series of aggressive wars against neighbouring states and tribes, all of which involved the massacre of thousands of men, women and children, as well as looting and pillaging in a grand scale, extended the boundaries of Israel far to the north and south.
One of David’s earliest moves was the conquest of the city of Jerusalem, wrested from the Jebusites and made the capital of his kingdom. David brought the sacred Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and, at God’s command, built a temple there to house it. (Jerusalem’s great Temple was built by Solomon, David’s son by Bathsheba.) It seems that David neither killed nor drove out all the Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem, as the Bible records that he bought land from a local landowner to build an altar in Jerusalem.
David did not treat his later conquests so lightly. Philistines, Syrians, Moabites and Ammonites were slaughtered in great numbers, their lands were pillaged and their wealth looted. Most of the gold that adorned the Temple in Jerusalem was looted from neighbouring states.
The tribal state of Ammon and the kingdom of Edom were both overcome by David and incorporated into his kingdom. The people of Edom suffered particularly dreadfully at David’s hands: 18,000 of them were slaughtered in the Valley of Salt (the valley of the Dead Sea) and the rest of them enslaved. David ensured his position by installing garrisons throughout the conquered kingdom.
Hadadezer, king of Zobah, was smote by David as he tried to recover his borderland on the Euphrates. David took from him 1,000 chariots, 700 horsemen and 20,000 men on foot but generously left Hadadezer the horses for 100 chariots. He was not so forgiving towards the Syrians who came from Damascus to aid Hadadezer; David slew 22,000 of them. According to the Bible, 47,000 Syrians were slaughtered in all by King David of Israel, who extended his kingdom almost to the gates of Damascus.
As for the Moabites, the Second Book of Samuel does not give numbers of those slaughtered, telling us only that David used three lines to measure the Moabites, put to death those measured with two lines and chose ‘one full line to keep alive’. David subjugated Moab and turned it into a vassal state of his kingdom.
David’s great ‘empire’ did not last long after the death of his son, Solomon. Never again would Israel be so large or so powerful. And never again would Israel have a leader so strong and so contradictory in his nature. Most of our ‘knowledge’ of King David comes from the Bible, and most of what we know is myth and legend. However, the mythical story was built on fact. Israel did indeed have a strong leader in the tenth century, a man of forceful, contradictory character and undoubted abilities that put him head and shoulders above his contemporaries and ensured him such an enduring place in the history of Israel.
Alexander the Great Destroys Thebes
The origins of the Greek city of Thebes, which was capital of the district of Boeotia, form a thick strand in the web of myths and legends woven by the Ancient Greeks to explain their early history. Cadmus was the hero of the Thebes legends. He was the son of Agenor, king of Phoenicia and the brother of Europa, the princess carried off by Zeus to Crete.
As Cadmus searched for his sister involved seeking advice from the Oracle at Delphi, following a cow into Boeotia and building the Cadmea (the citadel of Thebes) on the spot where the cow sank to the ground. Near the Cadmea was a well guarded by a dragon. On the advice of the goddess Athena, Cadmus slew the dragon, and sowed its teeth in the ground. From these teeth grew fierce, armed men, five of whom became the ancestors of the Thebans. Thebes was reputed to be the birthplace of two great divinities, Dionysus and Heracles, the setting for the tragedy of Oedipus, and at the heart of the legendary wars of Adrastus. In two separate wars, Adrastus fought Thebes, and during the second series of attacks Thebes was razed. All this was to provide plenty of material for later Greek epic and tragic poets, including the Theban Pindar, who was born in 518 bc in the village of Cynoscephalae in the district of Thebes.
By the time Thebes appeared in recorded history, it was a flourishing city on the fertile plains of Boeotia, large enough to require seven gates in the wall that surrounded it. The Thebans had acquired a reputation for being dull-witted – despite the fact that, according to Herodotus, they were the first use of written letters in Western Europe, which were introduced from Phoenicia (by Cadmus). In classical times, the city was the leading state among the 14 independent states of Boeotia that came together in a league.
From the earliest years of the founding of their city, the Thebans lived up to their legendary origins in those fighting men sprung from dragon’s teeth. They were constantly at war with their near neighbours, the Athenians, and sided with the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, where they played a sizable part in the downfall of Athens. Later, the Thebans, like other Greek states, became anti-Spartan, and scored a great victory against them at the battle of Leuctra in 371 bc. For a time after this Thebes was the major power in Greece.
Within 40 years of this great victory, the story of Thebes had taken a dark turn indeed. The kingdom of Macedonia was north of Thebes, and it had been quietly flexing its muscles for centuries. It had acquired a new and ambitious king, known as Philip of Macedon. Philip, born in 382 bc, instilled a new sense of ambition and discipline into Macedonia and its army. Soon, Macedonia’s modest ambitions to exercise sovereignty over the Greek coastal states nearest to them had turned into an ambition to gain supremacy over the whole of Greece.
Faced with a common danger, Thebes set aside its centuries-old animosity towards Athens, and joined the Athenians in a league against Philip of Macedon. However, their combined forces proved no match for Philip and his reorganized army, and they were comprehensively defeated at the battle of Chaeronea in Boeotia in 338bc. The broken pieces of a marble lion that adorned the sepulchre built for the Thebans who fell in the battle can still be seen among the remains of this once-great Theban city. As for Thebes itself, just as Greece had lost its independence, so the city had lost its liberty.
In 336 bc, the 46-year-old Philip of Macedon was murdered by poisoning during his daughter’s wedding feast, possibly as the result of a plot in which his wife was implicated. The Thebans thought they saw the chance of regaining their liberty and rose up in revolt. Unfortunately for the Thebans, they did not understand the calibre of the young prince, Alexander, who succeeded Philip.
The 20-year-old Alexander was as unlikely as his father to allow any show of independence from the cities and states under his control. Showing all the ruthless strength and determination that was to gain him the title ‘Great’, Alexander descended on Thebes and destroyed the city. The city wall was part of the fortifications that legend said had been built by Amphion and Zethus, twin sons of Zeus. During Alexander’s attack, the wall was flattened.
Within the walls, Alexander destroyed houses, theatres, shops and the Acropolis, or Cadmea, and almost everything else. He left standing only the temples and the house in which the poet Pindar had lived. Pindar’s great fame had grown out of his ability to compose fine choral songs for special occasions, a skill that had given him employment by princes all over the Hellenic world. Alexander the Great is believed to have spared the house that Pindar had lived in at Thebes because of the fine poems he had written in praise of Alexander’s ancestor, King Alexander of Macedonia.