Anonymous · 600 BCE · survival
1 Samuel 19 to 2 Samuel 5. The king's armour-bearer and son-in-law becomes the man the king is hunting, and spends several years moving between caves, border towns and the courts of his own enemies. Twice he gets close enough to kill Saul and does not, which is the point the book keeps making.
- 1Gibeah
Saul throws a spear at him twice while he is playing the harp, and Michal lets him down through a window and puts a household idol in the bed with goats' hair at its head - and he does not come back to court.
- 2Nob
He gets bread and Goliath's sword out of the priests by telling them the king has sent him on an urgent errand - and Saul later has eighty-five priests and the whole town killed for it, which David says is his fault.
- 3Gath
He runs to the Philistine city whose champion he killed, is recognised at once, and escapes by pretending to be mad - scrabbling at the gate and letting saliva run into his beard until the king throws him out.
- 4Adullam
A cave, and everyone in distress or in debt or discontented gathers to him - four hundred men, which is the beginning of an army and the point at which he stops running and starts governing.
- 5En-Gedi
Saul comes into a cave in the wilderness of the wild goats to relieve himself, not knowing David is at the back of it - and David cuts off the corner of his robe and is stricken about even that.
- 6Ziklag
He takes service with the Philistines and is given a town on the border, raiding in one direction and reporting the opposite - and comes home once to find it burned and every wife and child taken.
- 7Hebron
Saul dies on Gilboa and David mourns him properly, and is anointed king over Judah at Hebron - seven and a half years of civil war before the north will have him too.
- 8Jerusalem
He takes a Jebusite fortress that had held out since Joshua, up the water shaft, and makes it the capital - a city belonging to neither the north nor the south, which is exactly why he chooses it.