"The young warrior who slew a giant." "David, the celebrated founder of modern Israel." "At least that's the David of tradition." "But new evidence is changing the picture of this legendary character." "This man was a master of politics he was an art, a saint." "Now, historians and archaeologists are stripping away centuries of myth making about this Biblical hero." "Blood, guts, deceit, treachery - they're all part of the David story." "The man they reveal is so different that it begs the question" " who was the real David?" "According to tradition, David lived in the tenth century BC, about three thousand years ago." "He is said to come from Bethlehem." "The same village where a thousand years later, Jesus was born." "The events of his life have become the stuff of legend." "When people think of David based on the Bible the thing that leaps to mind is his battle with Goliath." "His crack troops are said to have crawled through an underground water system to take over Jerusalem and make it their capital." "One of the things we remember most about David is that he was the character..." "who brought together the northern part of Israel, the southern part called Judah and firmly under his control, united them into a single powerful state." "The state of Israel..." "His story is famous, but archaeologists have found little concrete evidence that David ever existed" "if it weren't for the Bible few would even know his name." "Without the Bible we might not know that there was such a figure as David." "We certainly wouldn't know the name and would know almost nothing about his life." "But that all changed in 1993, when an archaeological dig in the ancient city of Dan in northern Israel, ended for that year." "Gila Cook was the surveyor." "On that particular day I had some measurements to finish off and I'd been working about an hour and a half, and then from the bottom of the hill came this booming voice saying," ""Gila, time to go."" "Gila packed her bags for the day and was coming down the hillside when she stopped to rest." "I finally get to this very low wall and I drop the stuff out of my left hand and then I went like this as I put it down and I looked again and there was a stone I really hadn't noticed before... and I do a double take." "On closer inspection, Gila found something remarkable... and I say -well that's a kouf... one of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Aramaic alphabet, one of the few I can identify just like this..." "So I knew that this was an inscription." "I couldn't read it, I didn't know what it said, but inscriptions of this kind are very, very rare." "What Gila had found was one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century" "The moment of finding this thing it was phenomenal." "It was part of a monument recording a victory over the Israelites." "It said the defeated king was from the 'House of David'," "a descendent of David's royal family." "Well here we have 'byt dwd'." "The House of David" "And here we have 'mele israel', the King of Israel..." "Critics have long claimed that the Bible's story of David is a legend made up by Hebrew scribes." "But for Biblical Scholar Steve McKenzie this inscription changes everything." "I think it's important..." "as a way of indicating that the probability is that there was actually a figure named David..." "Now it doesn't tell us anything about the details of his life but it does kind of tip the scales in favour of David's historical existence" "But if a King like David did exist, what kind of man was he?" "The Bible portrays him as a shepherd boy who rose to become King of all Israel." "A young warrior who made his name in combat with a giant." "It's one of the most famous battles of all time:" "the young Israelite shepherd against Goliath, the champion of their sworn enemies, the Philistines..." "But how well does the biblical image match the historical reality?" "Military historians accept that 'one-to-one' combat between warriors was a recognized battle tactic." "Single combat in ancient warfare was quite common, especially before 2 armies joined battle." "Champions from one side would come forward and the sort of the heavyweight champion of X would go out and challenge the champion of Y..." "The Philistine Champion Goliath is described as heavily armoured." "A claim that's consistent with the archaeological evidence." "Ross Voss has spent the last 20 years excavating the Philistine city of Ashkelon in Southern Palestine." "In our excavations we actually found some fragments of scale armour which gives us a perfect example of what this protective element was like." "And the scales we have here for example can show you that they're individual plates of metal with little holes that can be sewed on and over lap one another that would then be sewed onto a leatherjerkin orjacket to provide extra protection." "With all that armour no wonder this confrontation has gone down in history as the ultimate mismatch." "But now there's evidence that" "David may not have been as vulnerable and inexperienced as the story suggests." "David, the Bible says, refused to wear armour to battle." "This would have allowed him to be more mobile than his opponent" " especially since Goliath's armour is thought to have weighed over 120 pounds." "David is wearing no armour." "Goliath is weighed down under a tonne of it" "Goliath keeps saying to David, "come on, come on, come on."" "Why does he keep saying come on get near, get near?" "Because David can't be caught." "He is dancing around Goliath..." "He Is uncatchable..." "In fact, Goliath's size may have worked against him." "He is described as a giant - a man about 9 or 10 ft tall." "Now modern medicine can explain that what may have caused Goliath's great height," "could have hidden a great weakness." "Chris Greener is one of the tallest men in Europe." "He stands at more than 7 and a half feet tall." "When I left primary school at the age of ten," "I was taller than most of the teachers." "I was certainly the tallest pupil, no two ways about it when I left school I was about six foot seven and seven years later, when I was named "Tallest Man in Britain" I was seven foot five," "so in seven years I grew ten inches." "Doctors have a name for Chris's condition acromegalic gigantism." "Chris has travelled to Oxford in England to meet up with one of his former doctors" "Hello Chris." "Hello John, how are you?" "How are you?" "I am well." "It's jolly nice to see you." "It's been a few years, hasn't it?" "It has, it has." "Come in." "Gigantism is caused by a pituitary tumour which makes too much growth hormone... and this circulates in the blood and causes the bones to grow to an excessive length." "Gigantism is very very rare and in the United Kingdom we have no accurate figures but I would have thought there were a couple of handfuls of people who were giants." "Experts have been aware of the condition since the late 19th century, but they believe it's been around a lot longer." "I think it's been around for time immemorial because we're going back a long way if we are talking about Goliath." "Goliath's height will almost certainly be a result of gigantism and a tumour making too much growth hormone." "There's really nothing else that causes that degree of enormity." "In the Bible, Goliath's size gives him an unfair advantage over David." "Doctors now believe that left untreated, Gigantism can cause handicaps." "When it started you had some problems with your vision?" "I had double vision, that's what kicked it all off 30 odd years ago." "You know why you get that don't you." "Can I show you some X-rays?" "Yes Sure." "As the pituitary tumour grows it starts to press on the optic nerve." "That is a pituitary which is normal in size and that pituitary is not touching their eye nerve as you can see." "Yes, yes." "Whereas this particular patient has a large pituitary tumour which you can see here and if it goes into the side you can get double vision but if it goes upwards like that you lose fields of vision so that you cannot see out of the sides of your eyes." "I want to ask you about your BMW." "Goliath had the psychological advantage because of his tall stature... but David actually had the advantage because Goliath unbeknown to David had visual field problems probably which will have not only impaired his vision but likely to have impaired his mobility as well." "David didn'tjust have mobility on his side against Goliath." "The Bible says he was the King's armour bearer." "Being an armour bearer to someone of importance" " the king or the King's son was a very, very privileged position and it meant that the person had some considerable military capability." "Not yet a fully fledged warrior but an apprentice warrior..." "No one denies that David faced Goliath with only a sling as his only weapon." "On the face of it hardly a match for the giant's sword and spear?" "But sling stones found on battle field sites across the Middle East show that slings could be extremely dangerous." "We know from the Biblical record that David just picked up a natural pebble from the valley floor in the area where he confronted Goliath." "But from our own excavations we discovered many, many stones that were of flint that was made into spheroids and used exclusively to be weapons of slings," "this is a flint, and you can see it's been chipped on all sides to produce the middle spherical shape and it has quite a weight" "and from the sling it could have a lot of velocity and a lot of impact." "In fact slings were one of the most lethal weapons in antiquity." "Alan Birkbeck is an expert in ballistics at Glasgow University." "He has acted as an expert witness in court on injuries inflicted by weapons" "He and his colleague Ron Thomson have designed an experiment to test the speed and power of the sling." "Using a high-speed camera, they can measure just how fast the sling stone travels." "Well we set it up using this small optical CCTV camera which is connected to the digital motion recorder system, which allows us to record at high speed the images between the two metre upright posts and calculate the damage that" "would be caused by the object arriving at the target." "Alan has to sling the stone between the two upright posts for the camera to capture its flight." "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight" "The final calculations show just how deadly the sling can be." "Ron found that the stone reached about 30 metres per second" " that's nearly 80 miles an hour." "Well the results are quite surprising given it's fairly heavy mass it would have a kinetic energy, an impact energy, on a par with a medieval longbow arrow or even a modern.22 bullet." "Now these are certainly killing devices, they would go through soft tissue, they would certainly crack bone, and they would possibly penetrate bone." "And if they hit the right spot they would certainly be lethal." "As David and Goliath met in battle, it was the shepherd boy, not the giant who had the upper hand." "With one blow, David is victorious." "Then a final act reveals him to be very knowledgeable of the battle traditions of his day." "David took the head of Goliath and Goliath's weapons as trophies of the defeat of the enemy." "A trophy is taken for display to terrify the enemy, to demonstrate the power of us who killed the other guy." "There's more to David's battle with Goliath than meets the eye." "And that's true of almost everything about this man." "The latest research shows that he was more ruthless and ambitious than the Bible portrait allows." "We look at David typically through the lens of a canonization that's taken place over millennia, and so David becomes a sort of a plaster saint." "But the historical David is a character who was willing to take chances, he didn't get to power without running through a lot of people on the way." "To find out what kind of person he really was, scholars are now looking at the stories in a revolutionary way." "They've found that modern politics can shed light on Biblical events." "The reputations of today's politicians are managed by spin-doctors who manipulate information to persuade us to accept their version of the truth." "Historian Steve McKenzie believes the same may be true of the Biblical writers." "The biblical writers are often compared to spin doctors." "Spin-doctors paint a picture, a portrait, of a politician, of a politicians words and ideas and motives and so on and also control to some degree the release of information." "That would have been true, even more so, in the ancient world which didn't have newspapers and so on." "In order to get to the David behind the spin, historians believe it's essential not to take the Bible's account at face value." "Why dig beneath the surface of the biblical account?" "Because the account that we read is an interpretation, a spin, on a series of events that occurred in the 10th century BC." "I'm a historian and a historian's job is to undo the spin." "Using this method, historians are now taking a closer look at the Biblical claims about David." "One of the most famous is that he was a master musician." "His instrument was the lyre -a small harp" "Bo Lawergren is an expert in recreating musical instruments of the ancient world." "Although no actual lyres from the time of David survive in Israel, contemporary illustrations from Egypt have given Bo enough detail to recreate the kind of lyre he believes David would have played." "David's lyre probably looked like this model I have here." "It is made of wood, entirely wooden arms curved arms, wooden body" " the hole in the bottom would be the sound hole, wooden bridge, and tuning collars made of some kind of rope." "It's difficult to know exactly what David's lyre would have sounded like" "It depends on many things." "For example, the composition of the string." "Is it gut, is it linen, or what is it?" "The thickness of the string and the tension in the tuning collar up here." "So the sound you hear here, is probably very similar to David's lyre but we can never be sure it's exactly the same." "David's lyre playing has shaped his legendary image as the music-loving hero." "But some historians are reading between the lines of the Biblical accounts." "They believe that David's lyre playing sheds light on his true ambitions:" "they were in politics." "Israel in 1000 BC was not a unified country." "The Bible says that it was divided between Judah in the south and an area known as Israel in the north." "David lived in the South." "But they came together to fight their joint enemy -the Philistines." "Israel had chosen a King who led these ongoing battles." "The Bible calls him Saul." "He was known as a great warrior who suffered from dark moods." "David was brought to court to play for him." "It was his music that was said to lift Saul's spirits." "We know that from today's music that music can have a great influence on our emotional life." "We can have exciting music;" "we can have calming music..." "So it's very likely that it also happened during King David's time." "But what the Bible doesn't say is that" "David's music brought him huge political benefits." "In the Biblical story David's musical skills get him to the court and his musical skills are specifically medicinal." "They exorcise Saul's demons; they cure Saul of whatever is possessing him." "This gives David enormous leverage at the court, because he is indispensable to the king." "Of course David didn't gain power with his musicianship alone." "The shepherd boy was becoming a man." "The battle with Goliath turned him into a hero." "People even started to suggest that David was better than King Saul." "Feeling threatened Saul started to make attempts on David's life." "So, the Bible says, David fled to the far south of Israel, then known as Judah." "At this point the Bible portrays David as the victim of Saul's paranoia." "But modern research suggests that he used his exile for political purposes." "The bible has it that Saul chased David from the court in a jealous rage." "The reality has to be that he was in the South organising a group of brigands, irregular forces, to build his power base" "He was there to accumulate money, power, influence." "The most powerful man in Judah at the time was a clan chief called Naval." "And yet within a few years David had become undisputed ruler." "The Bible insists that David did nothing to instigate his own rise to power." "His only link with the clan chief was to send a delegation of men to ask him for provisions." "Naval apparently refused." "When the men returned empty handed, an enraged David threatened to kill Naval" "But before he could act, the Bible says that Naval was struck down by God." "David replaced him as the most important man in Judah." "Scholars believe that the biblical account is all too convenient." "It's hard not to suspect in reading that story that" "David may have been involved somehow in getting rid of Naval simply because he had so much to gain and in fact did gain so much from Naval being out of the way..." "It's a pattern which becomes increasingly familiar as David's career progresses." "There's going to be a series of deaths of important characters, a trail of bodies as it were on David's road to the throne." "And in each case David is the primary beneficiary..." "If you look at the Biblical text carefully you can see that David in reality was not the David that tradition had developed." "He wasn't the David of Michaelangelo, he was a real human being in a rough racket in a rough neighbourhood - he had to fight his way to power..." "In the Bible David does win power." "He replaces Saul as King of Israel, after Saul meets a tragic death on the battlefield." "The story goes that David never actively challenged the King's power." "But his actions suggest otherwise." "In a surprising move David goes to work for the sworn enemies of King Saul" " the Philistines." "The Bible is adamant that David remained loyal to the King." "Butjoining the Philistines could be read as a treacherous move." "David's alliance with the Philistines opened a new front against Saul." "The southern hill country became hostile to Saul in a way that it hadn't been when there was no David in it..." "Saul managed to hold out against the Philistines for a while." "But scholars believe that their alliance with David turned the tables on the King." "When he had to confront the Philistines to his West and David to his South, that ultimately led to his demise, it weakened him..." "I think David was the thing that did tip the balance and cause Saul's ultimate defeat..." "Conveniently for David Saul was killed on the battlefield and David became King in his place." "Suspiciously, the Bible insists that David played no part in Saul's death." "It says David was so distraught at the news that he composed a lament in the King's memory" "But experts are skeptical atjust how genuine David's grief really was." "David laments Saul's death, but David laments the death of all his enemies... maybe he really composed that poem, but if he did compose it, he must have been laughing all the way to the bank" "because he was the one who stood to pick up the pieces." "The Bible's statements of David's innocence are so frequent, many scholars now believe they may instead point to David's guilt." "Over and over and over again the author seems to emphasise that" "David had nothing to do with Saul's death" "David is far away from Saul when Saul dies Why all this emphasis on David not having anything to do with Saul's death unless perhaps the truth of the matter was that he was involved in some way?" "The Bible claims that David did not commit a whole series of murders." "To deny one murder might be unfortunate." "To deny two murders -coincidence." "To deny 8, 10, 12, murders - it's likely a pattern of behaviour" "You don't deny something of which you are not accused." "Therefore David was being accused of committing these murders..." "I hate to say it, but it's true, the Bible's denial is almost an admission of guilt." "Exactly what role David played in Saul's death we may never know, but what is clear is that David succeeded him to become Israel's most famous ruler." "It's a defining moment in the story of David." "It's the first time that the tribes in the north and south have been ruled by one king." "The Bible says David begins to formally unify the two regions" " the act for which he will be remembered and celebrated down the centuries." "But this unified nation needs a new heart a new capital to satisfy both north and south." "So David chooses an insignificant fortress roughly in the centre of the land" "He calls his new base the City of David." "We know it by another name" "Jerusalem." "David could have picked any one of a number of towns in the vicinity of Jerusalem to administer from, but Jerusalem offered the greatest defensive advantages" "This was an area from which he could unite 2 populations and therefore it was a strategic location to hold and operate from." "But the city was under the control of a hostile people and it was never going to be an easy conquest." "Jerusalem was a pretty difficult place to capture, high citadel, strong walls, determined defenders..." "David is determined to get it, he has got to think his way inside it" "Blockade would be terribly long drawn out frontal attack would be ruinously expensive in man power and would demoralise the Israelites." "So David looks at the site and thinks how am I going to get into it." "Is there's some way up to the citadel mount other than charging at the gates." "David is said to have captured the city in a surprise attack through the towns water systems." "Then turned it into a great city full of splendour." "But there's a problem with the traditional version of events." "Up until the 19th century no archaeological evidence of the water tunnels had ever been found." "The first tantalising glimpse of a breakthrough came as long ago as 1867, with the discovery of a deep water shaft below Jerusalem." "Today guides lead tourists through this popular site." "A British explorer, named Captain Charles Warren comes to this area." "He begins exploring the lower Gihon spring which is just beneath my feet, 13 metres down in the bottom of this shaft is the Gihon spring." "Warren, Capt. Charles Warren and his assistant Birtles enter the Spring." "They crawl through on their knees and enter into the area around you." "And Warren says to himself," ""Behold I have discovered the shaft used by King David, to capture the city"." "An exciting discovery but with a problem." "No one could date the tunnel." "The Pottery fragments needed for dating had been accidentally lost." "But a second breakthrough in 1996 by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich, yielded the vital missing dates." "We started about 8 years ago, we started to go through 8-9 metres of the ancient city dump." "And then landed on these constructions made of huge stones, you can see each one of these stones weighs 2 to 3 tonnes." "The stones were part of a huge fortification guarding the entrance to the Warren Shaft spring..." "Next to them Ronnie Reich found the essential shards of ancient pottery to date the tunnels..." "These stones are associated with floors and pottery shards and by the pottery we could date them to the middle bronze age, which is about 3800 years ago..." "That's 1800 BC - proof that the water system existed long before the 10th century when David lived." "The discovery was consistent with the story that David and his men crept into Jerusalem through these tunnels." "If anybody could in, ancient times, climb up these rock walls which are very steep very smooth and very high then this is a possible candidate for entrance." "The method of attack would have been in keeping with military tactics of the time" "It happens at other places in the ancient world, people getting into cities through water channels, through aqueducts, it is a recognised means of gaining access to a city so... this is an entirely plausible story." "King David and his troops enter the Gihon spring down below where they wade and run through water" "In their capturing of the city." "They climb up a vertical shaft into the tunnel we're standing in now and now they run up the last bit of stairs and entering into the middle of the enemy city..." "They go up to the guards at the gate, they cut their throats... open the gates and a few attachments of Israelite troops enter the city..." "David may well have captured Jerusalem, just as tradition says." "But the claim that he built a palace there has been much harder to support." "For despite digging there for over a hundred years the archaeologists have found very little." "But there may be a good reason for that." "When we think today of a palace, what do we have in mind," "Buckingham Palace in London." "Nothing of this type ever has been built here, certainly not in relation to King David..." "So I imagine if he has built here a palace it is not more than a larger private house..." "Instead of living in splendour in a great palace" "David may have settled for a much humbler dwelling, typical of a village or poor town." "Ronnie Reich believes the Bible writers attributed more to David's reign, than in reality he achieved..." "When you are writing a text well the sky's the limit to your imagination, you can describe whatever you like, so we have a contradiction between the text... and between what really was created on site." "Throughout the account of his rise to power the Bible takes great pains to protect David's image." "But once he arrives in Jerusalem and becomes King of a unified Israel the tone changes." "For the first time the Bible is surprisingly open about a major scandal." "A mystery scholars are only now beginning to unravel." "One of the biblical sources for David records his blatant abuse of power, involving a woman called Bathsheba." "David is at the height of his power and he's up on the palace wall one evening... and he looks out and there below him is this beautiful visage, this Bathsheba in her afternoon bath" "...bring me Bathsheba." "Bathsheba arrives at the palace and before we know it" "Bathsheba is seduced, Bathsheba is pregnant..." "Unfortunately Bathsheba was already married and at the time of David, adultery was a crime with serious consequences..." "Not only is David in a dicey situation because of his adultery with Bathsheba but Bathsheba is in a dicey situation." "If... she has clearly committed adultery and it is clearly proven, she is in a terrible predicament because she can be stoned to death." "The Bible is also frank about the way David deals with Bathsheba's husband." "The narrator has David bring Bathseha's husband back from the wars" "in an attempt to have him co-habit with his wife and then one could say that the child that is about to be born is really the child of Bathsheba and Uriah her husband but it doesn't work." "Uriah refuses to sleep with Bathsheba while his troops are still out in the field." "Although this plan fails, the story says, David soon comes up with another" "David sends Uriah back to his troops with a letter to the officers there, telling them to put Uriah at the forefront of the battle to make sure he's killed in battle and this happens." "So David is guilty then of adultery and of murder..." "Having worked so hard to build up the character of David it's puzzling that the writers of the Bible should now begin to reveal his flaws." "Steve Mckenzie believes that this is one occasion when the spin-doctors didn't quite have the last word." "The Bathsheba story is a kind of a mystery because it's so different from the surrounding material." "After the spin-doctors have painted their picture of David then somebody else has come along and inserted this story of Bathsheba in that work." "Exactly what the motivations of the person who inserted the Bathsheba story were," "I don't know for sure." "It may have been a way of saying this is what happens when you get a king with supreme power they commit false..." "I think the irony is I love the Bathsheba story, it may be my favourite part." "Because he's not the innocent David he's the David who is guilty of adultery, who has his flaws but that's the David we identify with." "The bible writers may well have believed that" "David's reputation could withstand a bit of scandal." "After all he had achieved what must have seemed like an impossible feat" " the unification of Israel." "The irony is that today scholars are less sure that" "David did truly unify the country." "The incident that casts the most doubt on David's achievement is a revolt" " led by the King's own son, Absalom." "The beauty of the Absalom revolt in historical terms is that it shows that David was hugely unpopular." "The entire population of Judah and Israel rise up against him... this man was hated widely hated and probably did not have widespread control of the countryside at the time..." "The Bible plays down the revolt, blaming it all" " in a rather modern twist - on poor parenting skills." "It hints that it was David's leniency towards his children that enabled Absalom to rebel." "I think the way that the spin doctors are using that element is to paint this portrait of David as gentle... somebody who is too gentle to harm anyone certainly would not harm his own son..." "The image of a gentle David makes some scholars doubly suspicious, because just as the revolt is stopped, Absalom is killed on the battlefield." "The reason why I'm suspicious at that point is because we have the same pattern here that we had with some of the earlier figures who stood in David's way, namely somebody dies violently, the text goes to lengths to say David had nothing to do with it" "and when David finds out about it, he mourns profusely." "That's exactly what happens with Absalom, and so, again I think David is probably the one who is ultimately behind it." "The death of Absalom is a good indication ofjust how David held on to power." "The Biblical story portrays the unification of Israel as an elective process, the people come together and they choose David to be their king." "In reality he was more of a conqueror than an electee, he governed by force, he united the people sheerly by force of arms." "So, David's unified kingdom, was not such a golden age after all..." "But the fact that it was unified at all may finally solve one of the greatest puzzles of this whole story." "What drove the Biblical spin-doctors to paint such a glowing picture of David and his reign?" "The history of Israel is a very long one and it changes..." "And so by that time the Chronicler writes ...Israel is no longer a united nation." "They have been dispersed by foreign powers..." "And the chronicler is writing to try to unite the people who claim to be Israelites, unite them into one nation and that's where David becomes kind of the model... this is who we want to be, who we once were... a united people under one ruler serving our God." "David died after 40 years as king, leaving his son Solomon to inherit the throne." "Whilst the Biblical David is a hero who unified Israel, the David of history emerges as a very different figure." "The David of tradition is a Saint." "The David of history was much more human." "He ruled by terrorising his people, because he was a near eastern king." "And no near eastern king stayed on the throne long, except by dint force." "It's an image of David that's more in line with the realities of the ancient world." "And it's not so far removed from our own times." "To a large extent we recognize in the historical David that human beings haven't changed over millennia." "We're still grappling with the same problems and still struggling with the same issues" "And one of those is people who grasp for power and hold onto it and the extent they're willing to go." "David probably had all the flaws of the ambitious and the powerful." "Perhaps these flaws may detract from the image of him as Biblical hero." "But without them, he may never have secured his place in history."