King James Version · The united kingdom
1 Samuel 21
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
Then came to to the priest: and was afraid at the meeting of , and said unto him, Why art thou alone, and no man with thee? And said unto the priest, The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such a place. Now therefore what is under thine hand? give me five loaves of bread in mine hand, or what there is present. And the priest answered , and said, There is no common bread under mine hand, but there is hallowed bread; if the young men have kept themselves at least from women. And answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out, and the vessels of the young men are , and the bread is in a manner common, yea, though it were this day in the . So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was there but the , that was taken from before , to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away. Now a certain man of the servants of was there that day, detained before ; and his name was , an , the chiefest of the herdmen that belonged to . 8And said unto , And is there not here under thine hand spear or ? for I have neither brought my nor my weapons with me, because the king’s business required haste. And the priest said, of the , whom thou slewest in the valley of Elah, behold, it is here wrapped in a cloth behind the : if thou wilt take that, take it: for there is no other that here. And said, There is none like that; give it me. And arose, and fled that day for fear of , and went to the king of . And the servants of said unto him, Is not this the king of the land? did they not sing one to another of him in dances, saying, hath slain his thousands, and his ten thousands? And laid up these words in , and was sore afraid of the king of . And he changed his behaviour before them, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the , and let his spittle fall down upon his beard. Then said unto his servants, Lo, ye see the man is mad: wherefore then have ye brought him to me? 15Have I need of mad men, that ye have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my ? shall this fellow come into my house?
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The united kingdom, 1050 BC to 931 BC ›
Saul, David, and Solomon. A rare window when both Egypt and Mesopotamia are weak, which is how a small kingdom in the corridor between them could briefly become a regional power.
- The power vacuum
- This is the whole political explanation for the united kingdom. Egypt is fragmented, Assyria is recovering but still local, the Hittites are gone, and nobody is in a position to object to a strong state in the corridor. It lasts about a century, and Israel's golden age fits exactly inside it.
- Phoenicia
- Tyre under Hiram is the commercial power of the coast, and supplies the cedar, the craftsmen, and the shipping for Solomon's building programme. The alliance is trade, not charity: Israel had grain and a land route, Tyre had timber and ships.
- Egypt
- Weak enough that a pharaoh gives a daughter in marriage to an Israelite king, which is the opposite of Egyptian practice in stronger centuries. Late in the era it recovers under a new house, and Shishak will invade within five years of Solomon's death.
- Further afield
- Greece is still in its dark age but beginning to recover, and will adopt the Phoenician alphabet within a century or two. Carthage is founded by settlers from Tyre by tradition in 814 BC. In the Americas the Olmec centre shifts to La Venta.