WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) Read Free Page A

occurring, at the earliest, in 1018 bc but no later than c .970 bc. As many records from this period do not mention him at all, it is impossible to assign any more definite dates than these to him. Modern historians agree that around 1003 bc, a strong and warlike man called David did combine the states of Israel and Judah to create a kingdom whose size was unmatched by anything else in the history of Israel. He seems to have built the kingdom by using ferocious military energy to overcome the states and tribes that surrounded and threatened Israel.
    King David entered biblical history as a simple shepherd boy, whom God directed the prophet Samuel to seek out and anoint as the Lord’s chosen one. He was taken into the court of Saul, the first king of Israel, initially as a musician. David became the beloved of Saul’s son Jonathan and was raised to a position of military command after his spectacular slaying of the giant Philistine champion Goliath.
    David married Saul’s daughter, Michal, whose wedding gift from her husband was the foreskins of 200 Philistines David had slaughtered in an encounter with Israel’s foremost enemy at the time. However, David’s increasing power and popularity in Israel attracted Saul’s jealous displeasure, so much so that David fled Saul’s court and became an outlaw.
    With a force of 400 warriors at his command, David established himself as a free-ranging warrior, moving from valley to valley and camp to camp in the wilderness of Judah, where he acted with murderous cruelty when occasion demanded. A base in this early period of his wanderings was the cave of Adullam, near Gath, a city-state whose king was a Philistine vassal. David thus operated as an ally of the Philistines, whose confederation of city-states on the coastal land of Canaan lay to the west of Israel, and who were perpetually at war with Saul and Israel. Eventually, David established himself and his forces in the city of Ziklag.
     
    DAVID’S REVENGE
     
    It was the destruction of Ziklag by the Amalekites that first allowed David to demonstrate just how ruthless he could be. Amalek and his descendents had long been an unrelenting enemy of Israel, and Saul had recently made an unsuccessful attempt to deal with them. David was away from Ziklag, intending to ally himself alongside the Philistines in their last struggle with Saul. However, the Philistines, apparently considered David to be a treacherous ally and refused his help. Returning to Ziklag, David and his men found the city reduced to smouldering ruins, and their wives, including two of David’s, their daughters and their sons taken away as captives of the Amalekites.
    At first, the distraught people of Ziklag threatened to stone David, but he persuaded them to visit their vengence on the Amalekites instead and to accompany him in pursuit of their lost wives and children. Eventually David caught up with the Amalekites, ‘spread abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking, and dancing, because of all the great spoil they had taken out of the land of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah’.
    David descended on this drunken hoard and slaughtered them, the work lasting from twilight on the day he caught up with them until the evening of the next day. David rescued his wives and the wives and children of his followers, and everything else that had been looted from Ziklag by the Amalekites. He also took all their flocks and herds and drove them back to Ziklag. The Amalekites were wiped out, except for ‘four hundred young men, which rode upon camels and fled’, and the Amalekite state was never again a threat to Israel.
     
    THE CONQUERING KING
     
    Saul and his three sons, including Jonathan, were killed in battle with the Philistines, and their bodies, stripped of their armour and their heads cut off, were fastened to the wall of Beth-shan. ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen . . . and the weapons of war