David Becomes King

The years of flight ended in catastrophe for Saul: on Mount Gilboa the Philistines broke Israel, Jonathan and his brothers fell, and the wounded king threw himself on his sword. David did not celebrate. He tore his clothes, fasted, and composed the lament "How the mighty have fallen," in which Saul and Jonathan are "beloved and pleasant in their lives, and in their death not parted."

Then he asked God whether to go up to a city of Judah, and was answered: go up to Hebron. There the men of Judah anointed him king. He was thirty. The other tribes held to Saul's house for another seven and a half years, with Abner making Ish-bosheth king. A long grinding war followed, in which "the house of David grew stronger and the house of Saul weaker," along with the murders of Abner and Ish-bosheth—from both of which David publicly dissociated himself.

At last all the tribes came to Hebron: we are your bone and your flesh. They made a covenant, and David was anointed a third time, over all Israel. He reigned forty years—seven and a half in Hebron, thirty-three in Jerusalem.

Here Israel's history changes genre: a stable kingdom, a capital, an army—and a promise that David's throne will not be cut off.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.