A shepherd defeating a giant is a trope for all time. But David wasn’t the first to bring this simple weapon to war.
In the past couple of weeks, while researching my historical fiction version of the Exodus, I’ve discovered a lovely podcast that deconstructs the Hebrew Bible as a literary work written and edited over the course of centuries. It’s called A Podcast of Biblical Proportions, and in one of the early episodes host Gil Kidron talks about how even very knowledgeable Bible readers can miss evidence of social and historical context within the text. Sometimes tales that were quite common during a certain time period seem unique today because most people only know about them through a Bible story. Noah’s Ark is a famous example: Catastrophic flood narratives abound not only throughout the Middle East, but as far afield as the Americas and China.
But even though I try to be as aware of context as possible, I’ve also fallen into this cognitive trap. Recently I was searching for ways people could get hurt in war games during the Ramesside era (so titled for the spate of pharaohs named Ramses), and remembered the story of David killing Goliath with a simple slingshot. This biblical episode takes place centuries after the Exodus, which led me to wonder exactly when the slingshot had been adopted as a weapon of war. I already knew that slingers had fought against Julius Caesar, but that was much later than Davidic times — and, like most people, I had kind of assumed in the back of my mind that David was the first person to use a shepherd’s tactic on the field of battle.
So imagine my surprise when I saw this relief, which is about 2,700 years old, from the ancient Assyrian city of Lachish:
This wall fragment, now in the British Museum, was made about three hundred years after King David (who, evidence strongly suggests, was a real person ruling the Kingdom of Israel during a golden age at around 1,000 BCE). So it could plausibly be a development stemming from Goliath’s death by slingshot; David’s success might have sparked the idea to build up slinger units in the armies of yore. But then I read this article about how old slingshots truly are. A 4,000 year-old woven sling, found together with manufactured shots (called “bullets”), is part of the Manchester Museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. David Morningstar, a moderator on Slinging.org, has written about weaving an accurate replica of this sling and donating it to the museum so that the public could see how deadly it could be — and at what distances. A reply to his post quotes a letter to Pharaoh: “‘May God protect you [from] arrows, spears and stones.’ This was evidently intended [to mean] slingstones.”
That was good enough for me, so I (ahem) shot it directly into my narrative. The idea that David had used a boy’s attack meant for wolves against a giant warrior is most likely a later gloss on the story. Goliath was the one who might have feared for his life when he had to go up against a champion slinger.
And while we’re off the subject of the Exodus, there was an interesting tidbit I found when researching how fortification walls were built in the ancient Levant. The deceased French historian and archaeologist Ernest-Marie Laperrousaz, who worked on both the southern Israeli fortress of Masada and the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed that it is still possible to see a wall in Jerusalem built during the reign of King Solomon despite the supposed double destruction of the entire city. Laperrousaz argued in the pages of Biblical Archaeology Review that this wall supports the Temple Mount, home to the golden-domed Al-Aqsa mosque that is the city’s most iconic building.
The original Temple built by Solomon was razed to the ground in 587 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, rebuilt by King Zerubbabel once the Jews returned from their Babylonian exile about 50 years later, expanded by Herod the Great a little before the time of Jesus, and finally ravaged by the Romans in 70 CE. But Laperrousaz says that the bottom part of the fortifications, which were filled in to provide the mountaintop platform on which the Temple stood, were unlikely to have been demolished. According to Laperrousaz, there was “no military reason” for Nebuchadnezzar, leading the Babylonian army, to attempt the dangerous and difficult task of pulling down a wall built into a cliff so as to create a flat platform for the Temple. And Laperrousaz also points out that Zerubbabel would never have been able to build another Temple on the site of the first if the original retaining wall — which had taken decades to complete — was gone.
Laperrousaz’s article gets pretty technical, but the upshot is that he believes any Jerusalem tourist can still see the original, Solomonic temple enclosure wall completed in 931 BCE. That’s almost exactly three thousand years ago. It’s not as old as the pyramids, the first of which were built around 2600 BCE, but it’s an extraordinary feat of engineering for the time that should rank higher in our modern imaginations.
And it’s not the accomplishment of a man (King Solomon) whose father (King David) was the first person ever to come up with the idea of using a slingshot as a weapon of war. Solomon’s vision for the Temple was epic, but his father apparently did not match his own creative genius.
Love the information regarding a band of ‘slingers’ ….
Crazy, right? Some researchers think that the slinger battalions had a greater range and were more lethal overall than archers. That’s probably why Shakespeare talked about “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”