King David’s City

At a later date, around 1020 BC, the biblical figure of Saul became the first king of the loosely organised group of northern tribes called Israel. After Saul's death, in about 1000 BC, the elders of Israel went to David, who had first served under Saul but then later rebelled against him. David, born the son of a Bethlehem farmer, had since established his own kingship over the tribes of Judah to the south, and the elders of Israel now asked him to be their king also. Entirely encircled by the united Kingdom of Israel and Judah was the alien Jebusite enclave of Jerusalem.

The capital of the Kingdom of Judah was at Hebron, twenty miles south of Jerusalem. Hebron had powerful associations as it was believed to be the burial place of Abraham and other ancestors of the feraelites. David was thirty when the elders came to him at Hebron and made him king of both Judah and Srael, and for seven years he remained there before conquering Jerusalem. For all the symbolism of Hebron, David made Jerusalem his new capital, from where he ruled over ‘all ferael', as the Bible puts it, for another thirty-three years.

If Jerusalem's citadel and walls, and its sacred origins, played some part in David's decision to make the city the capital of his united kingdom, it is likely that the overriding reason was that it belonged to neither Judah nor ferael, and that none of the twelve Israelite tribes had any historical or religious claims on the city. In fact Jerusalem after the conquest was a mixed city; instead of expelling the original Canaanite and Hittite inhabitants, the feraelites dwelled among them. Jerusalem was the perfect choice for an independent capital from where the king could bring the tribes of ferael and Judah under his central control.