The death of Saul brought David to the throne. But David had previously gone through an adventurous experience, the story of which is intimately connected with localities that are mentioned, and requires a knowledge of the topography fully to appreciate. “The desert of Judah,” says Conder, “was no doubt as much a desert in David’s time as it is now. Here he wandered with his brigand companions as ‘a partridge on the mountains.’ Here he may have learned that the coney makes its dwelling in the hard rocks. Here, in earlier days, he tended the sheep, descending from Bethlehem, as the village shepherds of the present day still come down, by virtue of a compact with the lawless Nomads, and just as Nabal’s sheep came down from the highlands under agreement with the wild followers of the outlaw born to be a king. I do not know any part of the Old Testament more instinct with life than are the early chapters of Samuel which recount the wanderings of David. His life should only be written by one who has followed those wanderings on the spot; and the critic who would imbue himself with a right understanding of that ancient chronicle should first with his own eyes gaze on the ‘rocks of the wild goats’ and the ‘junipers’ of the desert.”
Conder declares that we have now so recovered the topography of David’s wanderings that the various scenes seem as vivid as if they had occurred only yesterday. First, we have the stronghold of Adullam, guarding the rich corn valley of Elah; then Keilah, a few miles south, perched on its steep hill above the same valley. The forest of Hareth lay close by, on the edge of the mountain chain where Kharas now stands, surrounded by the “thickets” which properly represent the Hebrew “Yar”--a word wrongly supposed to mean a woodland of timber trees.
Driven from all these lairs, David went yet further south to the neighbourhood of Ziph.... The treachery of the inhabitants of Ziph, like that of the men of Keilah, appears to have driven David to a yet more desolate district, that of the Jeshimon, or “Solitude,” by which is apparently intended the great desert above the western shores of the Dead Sea, on which the Ziph plateau looks down. As a shepherd-boy at Bethlehem, David may probably have been already familiar with this part of the country, and the caves, still used as sheep-cotes by the peasant herdsmen, extend all along the slopes at the edge of the desert.