Box:
David’s Dash through an Empty Shephelah: Another Historical Kernal to the
Stories
The geography of David’s escape from Saul also supports
the existence of a historical core to the narrative. The story, which exists in
parallel versions in both Saul-and-David sagas, contains a subtle clue to the
ancient setting in which it must have been composed.
In one of the sagas, David runs away from Saul’s service,
leaving the region of Benjamin and heading south into his home territory. After
a failed attempt to find refuge in Gath, David heads to a cave near the town
(village?) of Adullam in the Shephelah, so He then moves to the territory of
Judah proper, and, with the exception of the battle near Keilah—another village
on the border of the highlands and the Shephelah—all the wandering is in the
highlands. In the other saga, after David becomes a vassal of Gath, he is given
a fiefdom in the town (village?) of Ziklag, a border settlement far to the
south and apparently not in the Shephelah.
Notably, the description of the Shephelah here contains
only a couple of small towns (Keilah and Adullam, about four kilometers apart),
and a cave, all located near the meeting place between the highlands and the
Shephelah (in or near the region known as the trough valley). From the
easternmost part of the Shephelah, all the way to Gath, on the border of the
coastal plain, no settlements are mentioned, including the major cities that would
become dominant in the Judean Shephelah in the Iron IIA, such as Lachish,
Libnah, Azekah, Maresha, and others. Instead, David moves freely from the
highland’s slopes to the coastal plain (Gath) through ostensibly empty tracts
of land.
In the core of the David-running-from-Saul stories dates
back to the time of David or shortly thereafter, then this empty Shephelah fits
perfectly. But if the story was first written centuries later, it is strange
that the authors of both sagas mention only small unimportant villages in the
east (Keilah and Adullam) and leave out any reference to sites in the main part
of the Shephelah, especially the large major cities that would have existed in
the time of the author, like Lachish or Azekah. The simple explanation is that
when the core of the story was composed, the Shephelah had no such cities. This
is yet another indication for the early date of the initial story. (Avraham
Faust and Zev I. Farber, The Bible’s First Kings: Uncovering the Story of
Saul, David, and Solomon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025], 315-17)
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