Hate to harp on this, but I caught a doc on History Channel yesterday on Biblical battles. One of which discussed was Gilboa. At Gilboa, Saul and Jonathan both met their ends, which put the hero David in the position to succeed Saul. David had already slain Goliath, but that didn't change the outcome of history much. So I am convinced now that this mysterious Tabithas or whatever it is in fact David. If David were killed, then he couldn't step into the void left by Saul and Jonathan, and so, presumably, "Occupation Duty" is born.
- Would that make "Evraioi" = Bethlehem since the reference is "Tabitas of Evraioi"? ML4E 03:06, April 6, 2010 (UTC)
- At one point the town was named Bethlehem Ephrathah. Maybe they wanted to call him "David of Ephrathah?" Shifting a ph to a v is quite easy, dropping a th only slightly less so.
- I did find a few stray Google hits on Evraioi. The first one is us. The rest are quite . . . disordered, but I was left with the vague sense that evraioi may be a vulgarity in Greek. That won't help us much. Turtle Fan 04:27, April 6, 2010 (UTC)
- Saul had convinced himself that David wanted the throne and was trying to kill him. A contingent of the army liked David more and went to war to defend him, but David had no interest in taking the throne as long as Saul lived because Saul had been anointed by God. And David and Jonathan were tight so Saul had never had anything to fear to begin with.
- After Saul died I believe a general named Abner tried to make himself king and continue the civil war. He was quickly defeated because no one took him seriously: he was too fat, all he ever did was bitch and moan about how hard it had been to serve under Saul, and he kept flirting with Mark Twain's daughter.
- The wars against the Philistines continued. David eventually made Israel a regional hegemon and put the Philistines on the run, but they never went away completely till the really huge (by the standards of the time) empires rolled through. I don't remember whether the Assyrians or the Babylonians finally put the last nail in Philistia's coffin.
- That's why the story has me so skeptical, by the way. No matter how the contests among the powers on the Mediterranean's eastern shore played themselves out, sooner or later there would arrive an empire large enough to swallow the region whole. Imagine two lions fighting for leadership of a pride, and then the next day a flock or whatever you'd call it of T-Rex comes along and kills all of them. Still, I do share some of TR's interest.
- Anyway, the battle at the Valley of Elah is certainly able to serve as a PoD. The Philistines were supposed to win, but David's upset set them packing and they had 10,000 killed. Let Goliath win and the opposite could easily come to pass. It would take the Israelites years to recover, or maybe they never will at all. Gilboa would most likely never even come up. Turtle Fan 00:38, April 6, 2010 (UTC)
Obviously, we'll know for sure in December, but I find this story more and more intriguing, and so find the subject of its POD intriguing. TR 21:56, April 5, 2010 (UTC)
- The POD is only a throw-away line not an introductory vignette like say Lincoln's death in Must and Shall. Hope you're not disappointed. ML4E 03:06, April 6, 2010 (UTC)
- Maybe they come back to it later? Turtle Fan 04:27, April 6, 2010 (UTC)
- No, I have read the whole story (about 15 pages) and there is only a couple of lines of discussion between two characters in an APC on the way to the barracks in Moab from their base in Gaza. ML4E 19:59, April 7, 2010 (UTC)
- Hmm, why did I think you had only read part of it. That's terribly annoying, but then I suppose it is realistic: Most people don't explain mythohistorical allusions in great detail very often, and if they do they're likely to have had a a view distorted over the centuries. That's one problem with setting AH stories long after their PODs.
- I guess at some point we'll just have to make an executive decision as to whether we want to consider Tabitas as David. Evraioi as Bethlehem Ephrathah might be a slight stretch, but someone who's just a couple of phonetic shifts and one extra syllable away from David and is remembered for having fought Goliath is convincing enough to me. We've given people articles with less to go on than that. Turtle Fan 20:24, April 7, 2010 (UTC)
Time to move the article?
Thanks to the argument presented by Crystal Palace, I think we should go ahead and move the article to David of Israel (or David of Judah or King David). TR 15:24, April 19, 2011 (UTC)
- "David, King of Israel" would seem to be the most in keeping with our policy for naming articles on one-named characters. (Actually, this probably should have become "Tabitas of Evraioi" long ago.) Turtle Fan 17:26, April 19, 2011 (UTC)
Succession Box
TR, to the best of my knowledge there was no distinction between Israel and Judah until the reign of David's grandson Rehoboam. The title was King of Israel and that was the end of it. If he was not able to enforce his kingship in all of the country, it's comparable to Lincoln's presidency. Turtle Fan 20:08, April 19, 2011 (UTC)
- I just lifted that wholesale from wikipedia. Feel free to edit it. TR 20:12, April 19, 2011 (UTC)
- Done and done. Turtle Fan 00:10, April 20, 2011 (UTC)
New Short Story Template
For some reason the "type of apperance= reference" does not appear. ML4E 21:53, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
- I'd misspelled "appearance". It's fixed, so that shouldn't be a problem. TR 22:07, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
Trim
I took out ten of eleven paragraphs, and threw a line about fighting Goliath into the remaining one, since that's the only salient detail for our purposes. I don't love the way that reads now, but I couldn't figure out a more organic way to write it into such a short section. Turtle Fan (talk) 15:23, 29 February 2024 (UTC)