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

perished,’ mourned the poetical David. At the same time, according to Samuel, David taught the children of Judah the use of the bow: the practicalities of warfare would always come before poetry to David. (He had also slain the messenger who brought the news of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan.)
    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 neighbour-ing 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
    336bc

     
    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