0.1 · עוֹלָמוֹ שֶׁל דָּוִד / David’s World

The wilderness of Ein Gedi, in the tenth year of Saul, king of Israel. About a thousand years before the common era.

הַמַּחֲנֶה / The Camp

Where the hill country of Judah breaks off and falls three thousand feet to the lowest water in the world, there is a spring. It comes up warm out of the rock, winter and summer, and drops from ledge to ledge through gardens it has made for itself — reeds, balsam, wild fig — a green thread hung down a brown cliff. The shepherds of that country called the place עֵין גֶּדִי, Ein Gedi, the Spring of the Kid, because the ibex brought their young down to it at dusk to drink. Their word for spring, עַיִן, ayin, was also their word for eye: a spring is water looking up out of the dry land the way an eye looks out of a face. That is how their language worked. Every name said something, if you knew the tongue.

Above the spring, in the caves and folds of the cliff where only the goat paths went, about six hundred men were camped that evening. They were not an army, or not yet: the story would remember them as every man in distress, and every man in debt, and every man bitter of soul — runaways, younger sons, men who owed what they could not pay, men who had nowhere lower left to go. Their fires were small and set back under the overhangs, where the rock would swallow the light. Their captain was a young man of Bethlehem named דָּוִד — David, son of Jesse — and the king of Israel wanted him dead.

Not many days before, in the wilderness south of there, it had nearly ended. Saul’s men on one side of a mountain, David’s on the other, and the gap closing like a hand closing — and then a runner had come to Saul out of the north, shouting that the Philistines were raiding the land, and Saul had turned back. The men had started calling that mountain the Rock of Partings. Some of them said it laughing. David did not call it anything. He had stopped naming the places where he had almost died; there were too many.

At the fire, Abishai — his sister Zeruiah’s son, though the two of them were nearly of an age — ran a whetstone along the edge of his spear and talked about next time.

“Next time the mountain will not have two sides,” Abishai said. “Next time God will shut him in a room with you, and there will be a door for one.”

David said what he always said: that the man was the king, and the king was the LORD’s anointed, and the LORD could do his own judging. Abishai spat into the fire, which said what Abishai always said.

At the edge of the light sat a young man who was sharpening nothing. He kept close to a long bundle of linen, one hand resting on it the way other men’s hands rested on their swords. His name was אֶבְיָתָר — Abiathar — and the bundle was the ephod, the breastpiece of the priests, by which a man might ask a question of God and be answered. He was the son of Ahimelech, priest of Nob; and of the house of Nob he was all that was left.

For David had gone to Nob once, alone and hungry, running from the king with nothing in his hand, and Ahimelech the priest had given him what there was: holy bread from before the LORD, and one sword. A man named Doeg the Edomite had been there that day, detained before the LORD, watching. He had told Saul. And Saul had summoned the priests of Nob, eighty-five men who wore the linen ephod, and when his own guards would not raise a hand against them, Doeg the Edomite had done it — the priests, and then the town, and everything in it that breathed. One son of Ahimelech had gotten away, running south with nothing in his arms but the ephod, and had found David in the wild and told him.

“I knew it that day,” David had answered him — the words are kept — “when Doeg the Edomite was there, I knew he would surely tell Saul. It is on me: every life of your father’s house.” And then he had sworn him this:

שְׁבָה אִתִּי אַל־תִּירָא כִּי אֲשֶׁר־יְבַקֵּשׁ אֶת־נַפְשִׁי יְבַקֵּשׁ אֶת־נַפְשֶׁךָ כִּי־מִשְׁמֶרֶת אַתָּה עִמָּדִי

sh’vah iti, al-tira; ki asher-y’vaqesh et-nafshi y’vaqesh et-nafshekha; ki-mishmeret atah imadi — “Stay with me; do not be afraid. He who seeks my life seeks your life; with me you are in safekeeping.” (שְׁמוּאֵל א׳ כ״ב:כ״ג / 1 Samuel 22:23)

One man in Israel had David’s sworn word that he was safe. He sat now at the edge of the firelight with the ephod on his knees, watching the flames.

Across David’s own knees lay a sword too long for most men to swing. He had taken it at Nob from behind that same ephod, where it had hung wrapped in a cloth like a relic, because it was one: the sword of Goliath of Gath, whom David had killed in the Valley of the Elah with a stone and a sling, back when he was still a boy who carried bread to his brothers.

אֵין כָּמוֹהָ תְּנֶנָּה לִּי

ein kamoha; t’nenah li — “There is none like it. Give it to me.” (שְׁמוּאֵל א׳ כ״א:י׳ / 1 Samuel 21:10)

Those had been David’s words when the priest offered it. The priest who had put it into his hands was Abiathar’s father.

The fire settled. David picked up a broken piece of pottery from the ground beside him — the wilderness was full of them, older than anyone could say — and with the point of his knife he scratched three letters into it. They were not the letters a modern eye would know. They were older, plainer, more like drawings, because that is what they were: every letter of that alphabet was the picture of a thing. He wrote:

𐤃𐤅𐤃

A door. A peg. A door. The first letter was dalet, the door of a tent; the last was the same door again; and between them stood waw, the peg that holds — tent peg, hook, the pin a curtain hangs from. His own name: two doors, and between them the one small thing that joins. It read the same from either end. He turned the sherd in the firelight and looked at it, a man with a doorway on each side of his name.

Abiathar leaned over to see, because letters were a priest’s business.

“In Damascus they make them much the same,” Abiathar said. “A little leaned over, as if the wind were at them. But the same letters.”

“Strange,” David said, “that a man’s enemies should write with his own letters.” For Damascus and Zobah were Aram, and Saul had fought the kings of Zobah all his days.

“Letters go where the trade roads go,” Abiathar said. “They do not ask anyone’s leave.”

David set the sherd down by the fire. Across the dead water below them the mountains of Moab were going from red to purple to nothing, the way they went every evening. His father and his mother were on the other side of that water. He had taken them there himself, down and around the sea’s southern end, and stood before the king of Moab and said, Let my father and my mother come out to you, until I know what God will do for me — and the king of Moab had taken them in. It was not so foreign a country as it sounded. His father’s grandmother had come from those mountains: a Moabite woman who had buried her husband and then clung to her husband’s mother, to her people and to her God, and come to Bethlehem at the barley harvest. Her name was Ruth.

Bethlehem.

He had been a boy in Bethlehem, the eighth of eight sons, the one nobody counted. The day the old man came, David was with the sheep, which is where he always was; that was the arrangement. He remembered the runner coming up the pasture, out of breath. He remembered coming down still smelling of the flock, and the whole feast standing — the elders of the town, who had trembled when the old man’s shape first showed on the road; the sacrifice ready; nobody eating — because the old man had asked, Are these all the young men? and his father had said, there is still הַקָּטָן, ha-qatan, the little one — he is keeping the sheep. They had not set a place for him. And the old man — it was Samuel, the seer, the one who had made Saul king — had said: We will not sit down until he comes.

So they had all stood and waited. For him.

He remembered his brothers in a row, tallest first, Eliab at the head of it with his soldier’s shoulders, looking at a point just above David’s head the way he did. He remembered the horn — a ram’s horn, full of oil — and how the old man’s arm had trembled, tipping it, and the smell of the oil, and the feel of it going down through his hair and along his neck, more of it than seemed necessary, while his brothers watched and nobody said one word of why. Then the old man had gone away, up the road toward Ramah, and the feast was eaten, and by evening David was back with the sheep, because somebody had to be.

No one had explained anything. But the old man had heard something that day, standing there with the horn in his hand — words spoken behind his eyes, where only he could hear them; words David himself was not given to hear. The scroll would keep them:

קוּם מְשָׁחֵהוּ כִּי־זֶה הוּא

qum m’shachehu, ki-zeh hu — “Rise and anoint him, for this is he.” (שְׁמוּאֵל א׳ ט״ז:י״ב / 1 Samuel 16:12)

The fire was coals now. Somewhere up the cliff a stone clicked and went still — an ibex, or the watch changing. Who am I, he had asked the king once, in the days when the king still loved him, and what is my life? The king had never answered. The question had kept.

David lay down with the great sword in reach of his hand, under the same stars the sheep of Bethlehem had slept under, and the spring talked to itself all night at the foot of the cliff, water in the desert, an open eye.

הַלְּשׁוֹנוֹת / The Languages Around David

The camp at Ein Gedi lay at the crossing point of a crowded world. None of these peoples spoke “Hebrew” — least of all the Israelites, who had no such name for their own speech yet. A man like David, who had traded, fled, soldiered, and sung across these borders, would have heard all of this:

People Their speech Their letters To David
Israel and Judah the tongue this book teaches Paleo-Hebrew his own
Moab, across the Dead Sea Moabite the same letters nearly his own — his great-grandmother’s tongue
Tyre and Sidon (Phoenicia) Phoenician the same letters a sister speech; sailors’ and traders’ talk
Aram (Damascus, Zobah) Aramaic the same letters, leaning a cousin speech — close, but the tongue of Saul’s enemies
The Philistine cities (Gath, Ashkelon) their own speech, from over the sea uncertain foreign; David had lived in Gath and heard it all around him
Egypt Egyptian hieroglyphs and their script forms the old power to the south, far away and fading

Two things in this table are worth holding onto. First: Hebrew, Moabite, Phoenician, and Aramaic were close kin — roughly as close as Italian is to Spanish. A Moabite and a Judahite could understand each other with a little patience. Second: they all wrote with the same alphabet, give or take a local slant. Keep your eye on that Aramaic column. Five hundred years after David, in the Babylonian exile, his descendants will trade their letterforms for the Aramaic ones — and when David wakes in Chapter 1 and looks at a road sign, that is the script he will see: the letters of Damascus, writing the words of Bethlehem.

הָאוֹתִיּוֹת / The Letters David Knew

The letters David scratched on the potsherd are called Paleo-Hebrew — the old Hebrew script. Every letter began life as the picture of a thing, and the letter’s name is the thing’s name; the sound of the letter is the first sound of the name. What David wrote by the fire:

𐤃𐤅𐤃

— read from right to left: dalet, waw, dalet — D, W, D — David. In the square letters this book will teach you, the same name is written דוד.

Paleo Name A picture of Sound Square heir
𐤀 alef an ox’s head the catch in the throat א
𐤁 bet a house b ב
𐤃 dalet a door d ד
𐤅 waw a peg, a hook w ו
𐤌 mem water m מ
𐤏 ayin an eye a deep-throat sound now lost ע

Alef and bet together should look familiar: passed to the Greeks they became alpha and beta — the alphabet, which is simply these letters’ names walking west. And ayin, the eye, is the letter that begins עֵין גֶּדִי — the Spring, the Eye, of the Kid. The picture in the letter and the meaning of the word are the same image. David’s writing was full of such small rhymes between the eye and the ear.

The full square alphabet, letter by letter — with its Paleo ancestors and its Greek and Latin grandchildren — is waiting for you in Chapter 0.2.

הַקּוֹלוֹת / The Sounds David Made

When David speaks in this book, remember that his Hebrew did not sound like the Hebrew of a Tel Aviv street. His mouth held sounds that Modern Israeli Hebrew has let go:

Letter In David’s mouth In modern Tel Aviv
ע a voiced sound deep in the throat (like Arabic ʿain) usually silent
ח its unvoiced twin, a breath forced deep in the throat kh, as in Bach
ט an emphatic t, pressed and dark a plain t
צ an emphatic s ts
ק a k made far back, against the uvula a plain k
שׂ a third s-sound, hissed at the sides of the tongue a plain s

If you know Greek, you have seen this movie before: Ancient Greek φ, θ, χ were aspirated stops — p, t, k with a puff of breath — and Modern Greek has shifted every one of them to a fricative (f, th, kh). Languages wear their consonants smooth the way water wears stone, and Hebrew’s three thousand years have done what Greek’s did. But not everywhere, and not for everyone: some Jewish communities — the Jews of Yemen above all — carried David’s ע and ח alive in their mouths into the present day. This book will have reason to return to that.

הַמִּרְדָּף / The Pursuit

The sun came up out of Moab, across the water, and before it had cleared the mountains the lookout was already coming down the goat path, fast, in that gait men use on a slope when running would kill them.

Saul had come back from the Philistines. And someone had told him — the words ran through the camp in the exact shape the teller gave them: Behold, David is in the wilderness of Ein Gedi. The king had taken three thousand men, chosen men, picked out of all Israel, and was coming south along the shore of the dead sea. Against them: six hundred, and not all of the six hundred were fighting men.

There were no trumpets and there was no shouting. The camp came apart quietly, the way a practiced camp does — fires drowned, loads shouldered, the flocks pushed up the wadi — and the six hundred went up the cliff by the paths the ibex had made, which was the whole strategy: to go where three thousand chosen men, in armor, in column, could not usefully follow. There were places where a man climbed with his face against the warm rock and did not look down. Above them the ibex themselves stood out on knobs of stone that nothing else could stand on, and watched the men with their yellow eyes, unimpressed. Men had named those heights for them: צוּרֵי הַיְּעֵלִים, tsurei ha-ye’elim, the Rocks of the Wild Goats. The name was simply the truth, like all the names of that country.

They climbed through the heat of the day, and the cliff’s own shadow found them in the afternoon and climbed with them. Toward dusk they came out on the high terraces, where there were sheepfolds — rough rings of dry stone, older than memory, laid up by shepherds at the mouths of the caves so that flocks could be folded there at night. Behind the folds the cliff was honeycombed. And there, behind one of them, was a cave: a low mouth in the rock, unremarkable, and behind the mouth a darkness that had weight, the darkness of a mountain that is hollow for a long way in.

The men filed in by twos and threes, swallowed one pair at a time. David stood at the mouth while they passed him, counting, the great sword slung at his back. Below, a long way down, the spring fell from ledge to ledge, talking; the last light lay out flat across the water; and the mountains of Moab, where his father and mother were, went from red to purple to nothing, as they had gone ten thousand evenings before that one, and would again.

Then he bent his head beneath the stone and went in after his men, out of the last of the light.

לִפְנֵי הַמְּעָרָה / Before the Cave: A Note to the Reader

Everything in this chapter reached you in English, because — for a few more pages — you cannot read a word of Hebrew. Neither, in a sense worth taking seriously, can David. The man who just walked into that cave is about to wake beneath letters he has never seen: Aramaic square script, the letters of Damascus, writing his own language on signs above his head. He will have to learn to read all over again. You are, at this moment, standing exactly where he will stand — and so you will learn your letters first, and be waiting for him when he comes out.

That is the work of the next two chapters — the only two chapters of this book that ask to be finished before Chapter 1 is begun. Chapter 0.2 teaches the square alphabet; Chapter 0.3 teaches the small marks that carry its vowels. They are short. Take them slowly, out loud.

Here is the whole book, meanwhile, in two columns — what the man asleep in the cave is carrying across three thousand years, and what is waiting for him on the other side:

He brings with him He will have to learn
the roots — the three-letter hearts of words, almost unchanged the square letters
the patterns that grow words from roots three thousand years of new words
the common words — most of the language’s daily bread sentences built a new way
the old sounds, more of them than his descendants kept a Hebrew with fewer sounds than his own
his psalms that everyone still sings them

One more thing. You have already begun to read, whether or not it felt that way. You know that עַיִן, ayin, is an eye and a spring, and why the letter that carries its sound is the picture of an eye. You have watched a man write his own name as a door, a peg, and a door — a name with a doorway at either end, belonging to a man who is about to walk through one. And you know what the letters of Damascus will do, five centuries on, to the letters of Bethlehem. Hold on to all of it. This book means to teach you to catch it doing such things.

Preview: Chapter 0.2

הָאָלֶף־בֵּית הַקָּדוּם / The Ancient Alphabet — How the letters of David’s enemies became the letters of the Torah scroll: the story of the great script shift, and then the square alphabet itself, all twenty-two letters — each with its Paleo-Hebrew ancestor, its picture, its sound, and its Greek and Latin grandchildren. By the end of it you will be reading.