When it comes to ethics in wartime, timeless questions matter, and today’s chapter raises several. How are an army’s obligations to treating wounded enemy soldiers? What are the most honorable ways to handle the rights of civilians who end up on a battleground? Can there still be any level of equity and justice when it comes to the spoils of war?
David and his 600 men, sent away from the Philistine front, make their way back to Ziklag, the border town where they and their families have been granted asylum - only to find their homes burned to the ground and their loved ones missing.
In their absence, the warriors of Amalek, previously attacked by David, activated their revenge.
The men burst out crying until ‘they had no breath left’. David cries along with them, his two wives, Abigail and Ahinoam, among the missing. But soon the men turn on him with fury and try to kill him - it’s all his fault.
After consulting the oracle he leads the men on a counter raid, determined to find their captive families and fight back. 400 of the men ride on with gusto. 200 are too tired and ask to stay behind.
They find a starving ill Egyptian slave, left to die by the Amalekite army, and after they resuscitate him with a mix of figs, he directs them in the right direction. They discover the Amalakites dancing and drunk, and they quickly advance and kill most of them - and retrieve every single one of their wives and children. They also take a lot of loot and head back to Zigklag, victorious:
וַיִּקַּ֣ח דָּוִ֔ד אֶת־כׇּל־הַצֹּ֖אן וְהַבָּקָ֑ר נָהֲג֗וּ לִפְנֵי֙ הַמִּקְנֶ֣ה הַה֔וּא וַיֹּ֣אמְר֔וּ זֶ֖ה שְׁלַ֥ל דָּוִֽד׃
“David took all the flocks and herds, which the troops drove along with the other livestock; and the people declared, “This is David’s loot”
The narrative doesn’t tell us anything about the harrowing experience of the wives and children who were taken from their homes and now head back. The focus is on the war spoils. Who gets to keep the stuff.
David wants the spoils of war to be shared between all 600 fighters, even though 200 of them stayed behind. The fighters fight among them - until David comes out with what is in effect his first lega/regal ruling - preserved for the ages: Those who fight and those who stay behind deserve an equal share of the war spoils.
The chapter goes on to describe the diplomatic gesture that David deploys next: He sends shares of the spoils to the elders of the cities and villages of Judah, named one by one, returning to them what Amalek has stolen as an act of reparation. But he’s also likely paving his way into their good graces - two steps ahead of the game.
The last city on the list is Hebron. Of which we shall hear more soon.
David is depicted here as both victim and hero, vindicated as the just leader and compassionate caretaker of his men’s families, property and pride. Even the anecdote of the /Egyptian slave whose life is spared in exchange for valuable intel is highlighted as a way to celebrate the future king’s magnanimous kindness during his last days of political exile in Ziklag.
But the questions of morality in wartime persist and spill over into future battles on the very same land.
In 1958, one of modern Hebrew literature’s most celebrated and lengthy novels was published in two volumes, titled “Days of Ziklag”. Its author S. Yizhar was rewarded with the prestigious Israel Prize the following year.
The novel, that has not yet been translated into English, describes 48 days of fighting during the
1947–1949 War of Independence - known also as the Palestinian Nakba - The Disaster. The plot follows a squad of young Israeli soldiers trying to defend a desolate post in the Negev desert. Through a stream of consciousness the plot focuses on the inner worlds of the soldiers, loosely based on an actual battle fought by the Yiftah Brigade in October 1948. Halfway through the book, one of the soldiers identifies the hill they are defending with the biblical town of Ziklag, and though he and the others quickly realize this identification is incorrect, the name Ziklag sticks. Shortly after the book’s publication, Robert Alter described it as ‘A strikingly revealing moral document.. Many younger Israeli intellectuals at the time regarded Days of Ziklag as the definitive reckoning for their generation … The kind of novel that is a searing document of its time.”
When it comes to the politics of war and conquest, loot and pillaging, survival and sovereignty, the legacy of David, with all its complicated mythic and moral layers, for better or for worse, persists.
The war drums continue to beat, bringing us to the bitter end of the first book of Samuel, just across the ridge.
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Dr. Jonathan Shay in his book, "Achilles in Vietnam" coined the term "moral injury" to refer to those wounds of war that result not from physical trauma or even the trauma of war horror, but those wounds to the soul experienced by a soldier who, for example, kills a child. But it is a more far-reaching term, for the ideal of the sacredness of life and the demands of war to take human life clash in wartime; the soldier's training rewires the ethical system, and on the battlefield he or she crosses over into a world in which the ethical is always sacrificed to the necessity of survival and victory . My best friend is a Vietnam veteran who has suffered this "moral injury," the result of which, among other things, is a life-long search for atoning with his own acts.