King David Killed His Way to the Throne

Well, before we jump right into David, It occurs to me that David is not Israel's first king.

He's just Israel's most famous king.

So let's give his predecessor a brief spotlight for a moment.

Who was the first king of Israel?

Okay, I got to do one better than you.

I got to say not who the first king of Israel was, but which Israel we mean, right? And so this is, I got to start with this as like a, this is important stage setting for this and for just about everything else.

Because the term Israel is a confusing one because we use it to talk about like the entire nation of Israel.

Sure, right? Like, you know, Jacob's descendants, they are all Israel.

But historically, like Israel referred to what we call like the northern half, northern part of Israel.

And Judah is the name of the southern part.

And that's a division that like existed.

You know, it's in the Bible all over the place.

Certainly, you know, in the in the times like we have it in the Bible after Israel.

David and Solomon, but also like every empire that then controlled that place, right? You've heard of Judea and Samaria, right? Same places, right? Judah is Judea in the south and Samaria is what was used to be called Israel in the north.

And so with that in mind, David is the first king of one of the Israels and Saul is the first king of the other Israel.

And now you have to know which one is which.

So before David gets on the scene, at least according to the biblical story, and I think probably it's true, the Northern tribes of Israel, which is say basically everybody other than Judah and Reuben, which didn't really exist and Simeon, which didn't really exist.

But like all of these Northern tribes sort of were operating independently.

This is the sort of thing you have described in the book of Judges, right? Independent tribes, like, you know, working on their own, occasionally teaming up to fight off enemies, whatever.

At a certain point, this is the biblical story.

And again, I think it's like probably roughly true.

Those various tribes realized that actually for purposes, I think probably of self-defense, it'd be really useful for us to all like band together and like have one military leader who like helps us fight off primarily the Philistines who have arrived not so long ago on the coast and are a threat.

And so this military organization of these tribes is the first... group that we sort of call Northern Israel or the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

I don't think, no, that they called themselves that necessarily.

We can't tell, but they did a band together and they sort of like chose a leader who I think probably was this guy from the tribe of Benjamin named Saul, who seems to have been a successful military leader in terms of fighting off the Philistines.