Free King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Jonathan Kirsch

every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.
    (1 Sam. 22:2)
     
    “Flotsam, ruffians, and desperadoes” is how John Bright describes the men who rallied to David, and “bandit chief” is thetitle he bestows upon David himself. Indeed, the blunt text of the Book of Samuel provokes the suspicion that the real David may have been someone far less exalted than the man we find in the pages of Chronicles or the Psalms. 11 About the best case that can be made for David during his fugitive years is that he was a soldier of fortune who relied on guerrilla tactics to survive and prevail against the reigning king of Israel.

TRIBES
    One member of David's outlaw band was a man who is identified in the Bible as a prophet but seems to have been a master of guerrilla warfare. Like Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, the prophet Gad understood that even the strongest urban fortress is always at risk of being surrounded and cut off by a superior force, and thus a guerrilla army is always safest when it is on the move through the countryside.
    “Abide thee not in the stronghold—depart and get thee into the land of Judah,” Gad counseled. (1 Sam. 22:5)
    David followed Gad's advice, moving himself and his band of partisans into the traditional homeland of the tribe of Judah, where he hoped to find support among his own people. Saul may have been elected to reign as the first king of the tribal confederation called Israel, but the Bible suggests that the loyalties to family, clan, and tribe were far older and far stronger than any sense of citizenship in the newfangled monarchy.
    Saul himself played on the old tribal loyalties in his pursuit of David. As he presided over a council of war at his stronghold in Gibeah—sitting, spear in hand, under a tamarisk tree—Saul sought to convince his counselors and captains, all of them Benjaminites, that David, a man from the tribe of Judah, was their enemy, too. Surely, Saul suggested, David would favor Judah over Benjamin if he succeeded in defeating Saul and seizing the kingship.
    “Hear now, ye Benjaminites, will the son of Jesse give everyone of you fields and vineyards?” Saul demanded, still unable to speak David's name aloud and using only his patronymic. “Will he make you all captains?” (1 Sam. 22:7)
    Even now, when he so desperately needed his clansmen's solidarity, Saul could not control his raging paranoia. Somewhere out there, at this very moment, David lay in wait for him—or so the king complained—but Saul would be forced to face him alone. “All of you have conspired against me,” Saul railed. “There was none that disclosed it to me when my son made a league with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you that is sorry for me, or disclosed to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me.” (1 Sam. 22:8)
    Only one man spoke up—Doeg the Edomite, the man who had spotted David in conversation with the priest Ahimelech in the shrine of Yahweh at Nob. Perhaps glancing at the spear in Saul's hand, he sought to prove his loyalty to the king.
    “I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech,” the man reported, using the king's oblique term of reference for David. “And he inquired of Yahweh for him, and gave him victuals, and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine.” (1 Sam. 22:10) 12
    Doeg, of course, was embellishing the truth. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the priest of Nob “inquired of Yahweh”—a phrase that refers to the practice of using tools of divination to seek guidance from on high and suggests that Ahimelech had assisted David by appealing to God on his behalf. 13 Perhaps Doeg was seeking to make Ahimelech appear as guilty as possible in order to distract Saul from the fact that Doeg had not disclosed a vital bit of intelligence sooner. If so, it worked. Saul was swept up in a new