Free The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero by Joel S. Baden

advantage was speed and mobility. Relatively few in number, relatively lightly armed, they had the capacity to move from place to place with ease. Facing the Philistines head-on was out of the question, but going to Keilah directly after the Philistines had finished plundering it would be no problem. Such an arrival would make sense on two fronts. First, David could, with some imagination, position himself as the one who drove the Philistines away. Keilah was a fortified town—“a town with gates and bars” (1 Sam. 23:7)—and the Philistines seem not to have actually entered it: they were only “plundering the threshing floors” (23:1). Threshing was an activity done in an open space, where the wind could blow away the chaff as it was tossed into the air. For a fortified city, this almost certainly meant that the threshing area was outside the city walls. 6 The arrival of the Philistine raiding party would have driven inside the city walls for protection those in the fields and at the threshing floor, leaving the Philistines free to plunder the agricultural produce left behind. As the people of Keilah watched, the Philistines finished the job and left of their own accord, at which point David and his men could have appeared and claimed responsibility for scaring off the enemy—driving away their cattle, securing provisions for which may have been the Philistines’ primary goal. 7
    Second, David may have seen in the freshly attacked Keilah an opportunity. The town was vulnerable, as the Philistines had demonstrated. David and his men could provide a measure of security in case of future raids—in exchange for some security of their own. It seems that David did in fact enter the town with his men, for otherwise Keilah would not have had the chance to give him up to Saul. But it is hard to imagine the circumstances under which a settled community would willingly let a band of ne’er-do-wells into its walls. Such a group would be outside the usual kinship bonds and therefore accountable to no one in the town. They would have to be fed from the town’s supplies—supplies that, given the landscape, hardly could have been abundant. They would have to be housed somewhere—either with resident families or in public spaces, neither of which would be desirable. This, of course, is just what David and his men needed: food and shelter, the very basics that were hard to come by in the wilderness. If after an attack by the Philistines this second armed band showed up at the gates of Keilah, perhaps a polite but forceful request for entrance would have been difficult to decline.
    But it is unlikely that the inhabitants would have seen David as a hero. Indeed, the moment that a greater power threatened to arrive on the scene, the people of Keilah were more than ready to turn David in—not only because his men were sapping their resources, but perhaps out of fear that sheltering him would lead to retribution against the town by Saul. Sheltering a rebel was a crime not taken lightly. In Judges 9 we read of a rebellion against the local ruler Abimelech. The leader of the rebels takes refuge in the city of Shechem, where the people are in league with him. Abimelech’s response is to destroy the city: “he razed the city and sowed it with salt” (9:45). Whether this story is true or not, it reflects a common understanding of how rebellious towns are to be treated (and one that will recur later in the David story). The inhabitants of Keilah wanted none of this. It was in their best interest to make clear that they were not aligned with David. And David, it is clear, was not in any position to take on Saul’s forces. His only choice was to leave. 8
    The western part of the wilderness having proved inhospitable, David and his men traveled southeast, toward the Dead Sea, into the wilderness of Ziph, named for its most prominent town. This place, however, was even less welcoming than Keilah had been. Saul did not even need to threaten