(around 830 BCE ), Hazael, the king of Damascus, campaigned in the Shephelah and conquered the city of Gath. * This biblical report has now been confirmed by archaeological excavations at Tell es-Safi, the site of ancient Gath, which show that the city suffered a major destruction toward the end of the ninth century BCE . Though it had previously been the most important city in the Shephelah and possibly the largest in the entire country, Gath dramatically declined in size and importance in the following centuries. We know from Assyrian records that a century later it was no more than a small town under the control of the coastal city of Ashdod. It is unlikely, therefore, that anyone living after the late ninth century BCE would have chosen Gath to be such an important locale in the stories of David if there had not at least been a memory or a folk tradition of its lost greatness.
Indeed, when we attempt to reconstruct the demographic conditions much closer to the time of the historical David, the general setting of the biblical narrative meshes closely with the archaeological evidence. In the tenth century BCE , Philistine Gath seems to have been the most important regional power. The Judahite hill country, especially to the south of Hebron, was sparsely settled, with only a few small villages in the entire area. It was a wild and untamed fringe area, effectively outside government control. Could this be just a coincidence? Or are there additional indications that at least some parts of the story of David’s rise to power reflect a shared communal memory of actual historical events?
IN THE REALM OF ABDI-HEBA
Settlement patterns provide only the physical template. They may offer us a date and spatial distribution of sites in a given period, but they give only indirect evidence of political, social, and economic context. Archaeologists working in various parts of the world, however, have attempted to link certain settlement patterns with particular social formations and modes of existence. In the case of the Judean highlands in the period before the rise of the kingdom of Judah, we can indeed recognize a characteristic way of life. Because of the limitations to agriculture, due to the rocky, wooded terrain and the limited rainfall, the number of sedentary communities was relatively small. Only a handful of permanent sites, including Jerusalem, have been recorded in archaeological surveys of the entire territory throughout the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (c. 1550–900 BCE ). Most were tiny villages. There was no real urban center, and not even a single fortified town. In fact, the small sedentary population of the southern highlands can be estimated, on the basis of settlement size, at no more than a few thousand. This contrasts sharply with the lowland territories to the west; there, the major Canaanite and later Philistine city-states each contained dozens of towns and villages, with a large settled population in the main centers and outlying agricultural lands.
Since the primeval landscape of rocky terrain and a thick cover of woods in the Judean highlands could accommodate only limited cultivation, it appears that the proportion of the nonsedentary groups—shepherds and stock raisers—in the overall population was relatively high. Extensive archaeological surveys in the southern highlands have identified evidence for this mobile population of herders in the form of several Late Bronze Age cemeteries, located far from permanent settlements, that probably served as tribal burial grounds.
The Judean hill country was hospitable to this special mix of settled and pastoral groups because of the variety of landscapes and opportunities it offered. The marginal lands of the Judean Desert and the Beer-sheba Valley could be used for winter pasture and seasonal dry farming, while the central ridge offered land for fields and orchards, and pastureland for the flocks in the summer when the other areas were parched.
Sparsely