The Philistines were seafarers, traders, “accomplished architects and builders, highly artistic pottery makers, textile manufacturers, dyers, metalworkers, silver smelters, … and sophisticated urban planners,” the Dothans write in People of the Sea. Thesauri list synonyms for the adjective philistine such as barbaric, uncultured, and savage. Their memory will forever endure the infamy of being the principal enemy of the Hebrews. The Philistines are likely the first Europeans in the Old Testament. Their names and archaeological remains point even farther, to the Aegean Sea-specifically, to southern Greece. But according to Israeli archaeologists Trude and Moshe Dothan, Crete was probably not their homeland. The Bible describes them as arriving from the sea, from Caphtor (Amos 9:7), or modern-day Crete. Unlike earlier inhabitants of the land, the Philistines were not Semitic. War with this people, God said, might make the Israelites “change their minds and return to Egypt” (Ex. Because of them, the route of the Hebrew exodus could not hug the shores of the Mediterranean but instead detoured deep into the desert. More than 1,200 years before Christ, waves of new settlers began entering the lower coastal regions of the Promised Land. On the field of battle that fateful day, Goliath met not a child, but a man. To see who David really was-to understand why he was ordained as a king, why he fell from grace, and why that matters for us today-we need to learn to see David a little more like Michelangelo did. Many of us formed that picture likely because of the ambiguity of a single Hebrew word and the ways Bible translators chose to render it in English. Billy Graham referred to “little David.” Jewish commentaries and translations, too, have often treated David as a little guy.Ĭertainly, David the child preaches well: Dare to be a David! You too can defeat giants if only you believe! And he has an important theological role to play: A small David helps us emphasize a great God.īut the boyish picture of David obscures the reality of a much more nuanced character. This version of David is not confined to children’s Bibles. In all of them, David is a boy between the ages of 8 and 12-an innocent Sunday school cartoon.Ĭhances are, you grew up with the same puny David as I did: hopelessly small, draped in Saul’s armor as in a drooping bedsheet, eyes covered comically by Saul’s helmet. Some are hand-me-downs from the 1980s and ’90s others are from this millennium. On my son’s bookshelf sit half a dozen children’s Bibles. If Michelangelo’s brawny statue is the world’s most recognizable likeness of Israel’s most famous king, why do we continue to think of David battling Goliath as a child? Like a young man who might pursue a lion on foot and kill it with oversized hands. Michelangelo’s David looks like a fully grown Olympic decathlete. The sculptor chose not to depict his subject as a sleek prepubescent boy the way Donatello had a couple of decades earlier in bronze, or the way other Renaissance artists had. Michelangelo’s most unusual artistic decision, though, was possibly David’s age. For the same reason you may have giggled at it in middle school, authorities had it clad with a fig leaf off and on for centuries.Īlso startling was the choice of scene: Instead of sculpting David standing triumphant over the severed head of Goliath, Michelangelo depicted David before the fight, full of rage and fury and the knowledge of what he must do. But the sculpture was not without controversy. In the art museum where David resides today, the Galleria dell’Accademia, millions of visitors pass under the gaze of what remains the world’s most famous statue.įlorentines lauded David immediately. The 17-foot-tall colossus stood for centuries outside the entrance of Florence’s town hall as an unmistakable symbol of the city-state’s strength and resistance against outside invaders. Three years later, Michelangelo’s David was unveiled. Characteristically, Michelangelo often neglected to eat or change clothes. A 26-year-old named Michelangelo worked the block day and night, removing multiple tons of marble. The task was immense, the marble mediocre.įinally, nearly four decades after chisel had first been put to stone, another sculptor agreed to finish the piece. Eventually, a colossal block of marble that came to be nicknamed “the giant” was hauled to Florence for what would be the most ambitious of the statues: a towering likeness of David, the Old Testament king.īut the project stalled. The first commission went to Donatello, the most influential sculptor of the early Renaissance. These were to be among the finest statues in the world. They decided to commission a dozen statues to line the roof’s buttresses. Six hundred years ago, the leaders of Florence, Italy, gazed upon their magnificent cathedral and felt something was lacking.
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