Kavanot: Days of Ziklag

We were dealing with David in his time in Ziklag, as a petty king under Philistine rule, and realized that he was supporting a large army at that point: (דברי הימים א יב:כג)‎ כי לעת יום ביום יבאו על דויד לעזרו עד למחנה גדול כמחנה אלקים. The question came up, how did they support themselves? The text explains:

Now, while David claims to be raiding Southern Judah (ירחמאל is one of יהודה's descendents, and the קיני were the family of יתרו who settled in the נגב), where was he actually raiding? It was the territory of עמלק:

But they were nomadic raiders. The territory was actually that of ישמעאל (what my Wikipedia map calls “Arabu Tribes”):

It was the area between Egypt and Israel, the first place that בני ישראל came to after they left Egypt:

Note that the text describes them as ישבות הארץ אשר מעולם, since they were not part of the cycle of wars that engulfed the Middle East, living in the shadow of the power of Egypt. The Philistines fought east and north, the Israelites came from the south and east into the land (avoiding the straight route, דרך ארץ פלשתים), and the other nations were further away. But one of the nations, the גשורי, seems to live somewhere else:

However, it is hard to see how David could have been raiding that far north, if he is trying to avoid any entanglements with Saul and his army. It is possible that there are two different גשורים, but it will become clear when we deal with Avshalom and Tamar that David has had some conflict with the Northern גשורי. I am going to assume that they in fact were two territories of the same people.

So David’s incursions are against people who have never been at war with Israel, for whom these attacks are completely unexpected:

Moral Boundaries and Moral Quandaries

It’s very clever of David to be fooling the Philistines, and not attacking his own countrymen, and I have no problem with David lying to Achish, who is a sworn enemy of Israel. But what are we to make of his despoiling and killing the הגשורי and הגרזי (I will grant him the moral right to attack עמלק). As the Malbim says:

I named this shiur “Days of Ziklag” after the 1958 novel by S. Izhar. Yizhar Smilansky (who wrote under the pen name of ס. יצהר) was the first major native Israeli Hebrew writer; earlier Hebrew writers like Agnon and Bialik were Eastern European-born and moved to Palestine, and their writing reflects the sentiments of their ideological journey. Izhar was a Sabra, born in Rechovot in 1916, and his writing reflects the conflict between the first generation of settlers and the next generation who were born in the land, for whom Zionism wasn’t a movement as much as a fact of their upbringing. His first stories published in the 1930’s reflected this conflict in the Kibbutz movement and its socialism, but his later works including ימי צאלג dealt more with the morality of war and displacing the Arab population from Israel.

ימי צאלג was published in 1958. It is a 1,134-page stream-of-consciousness novel about a company of Israeli soldiers in the Negev in the 1948 War of Independence. I haven’t read it; I don’t know if anyone has.

It deals with the internal lives of the soldiers including the brutality of the war and the destruction of Arab villages. It is named ימי צאלג because one of the characters becomes convinced that the hill they are fighting over is in fact the historical Ziklag of David’s nascent kingdom. It is not clear why this is significant enough to name the novel after it, especially when that character realizes that he was mistaken. None of the reviews I read have a good reason, and it doesn’t seem that Izhar ever explained himself. ויקיפדיה hypothesizes:

I suspect that Izhar was more aware than people give him credit for, about the implications of Ziklag and David’s behavior, and saw in the actions of the Palmach a reflection of what happened in our story. Izhar’s characters seem to act like David, ואיש ואשה לא יחיה דוד.

However we look at Israeli soldiers in recent times, David’s actions in תנ״ך need to be explained. The midrash brings it as one of Haman’s arguments that the Jews must be destroyed:

I’m not claiming that Haman is the model of moral rectitude, but the point stands. Killing איש ואשה to cover his tracks shocks us with its brutality, not what we expect from דוד מלך ישראל. Malbim justifies it as part of the מצוה of conquering the land:

I have dealt with the morality of the “genocide” against the Canaanites before, but this answer is not satisfying here. The nations to the southwest were not on the list in Joshua of areas that remained to be conquered. Canaanites not living in the land are not part of this מצוה:

The Abarbanel justifies it as an act of war; David, after all, is a Philistine general:

But this is still morally problematic. Achish didn’t order him to attack the nations of the Southwest; that seems to be his own decision, to cover his tracks in not attacking Judah. And David himself saw it as a problem, as we mentioned in looking at תהילים פרק ז,‎ שגיון לדוד:

I don’t think the the נביא approves of David’s action; I this Radak sums it up best:

But it is still very difficult. I do not have an answer, and I do not think the נביא tries to justify David’s actions. He is punished מדה כנגד מדה for this: he is described as ויפשטו אל הגשורי והגרזי והעמלקי, and soon that ויפשטו will turn on him: