The battle of Mizpah where Samuel raised his Ebenezer demonstrated to Israel what God could do for his people. Alas, though, Samuel grew old, his sons did not follow in the ways of the Lord, and the people came to Samuel with a request for a king, a man to lead them as kings in the surrounding nations did. The Israelites had forgotten what the Lord could do, and they wished instead to follow a man who would lead them against the Philistines.

They were rebelling against God as back in the days of Moses: "they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Sam. 8:7). After the people were warned about what a king would do (1 Sam. 8:10-22), they were sent home, and God set in motion the choosing of the king. Saul was anointed and crowned, but not everyone supported him until after the battle for Jabesh-gilead against Nahash the Ammonite. God was willing to operate through Saul (chap. 11), and Saul's kingship was reaffirmed by "all the Israelites" (v. 15) at Gilgal. However, his kingship was soon repudiated.

It is in chapter 13 that we again encounter the Philistines. The text is broken in verse 1, which tells Saul's age when he began to reign and the length of his reign. However, the following story took place shortly after 1050 B.C. Saul was in command of the main Israelite striking force at Michmash, and Saul's son Jonathan seemed to be the head of the reserve force back in Gibeah. It was Jonathan who began this episode of what would turn out to be a long conflict with the Philistines by making a preemptive strike against them; Jonathan left Gibeah and successfully hit the Philistine garrison at Geba (or was it Gibeah? McCarter 1980, 181-82, 227, as well as 1 Sam. 10:5 and 13:3). This led both the Philistines and Israelites to muster their men.

Saul took his men down to Gilgal where Samuel was to meet them, but Saul, in a wrongheaded attempt to keep his force together, took on the role of the priest and offered the burnt offering just before Samuel made his appearance. Therefore, Samuel denounced Saul and his kingship, declaring that Saul would not leave a dynasty after him. Samuel then left for Gibeah.

What follows are verses that can be better understood now that pertinent artifacts are being excavated and studied.

That the Philistines had iron has been shown by the excavations throughout Philistia. Recall a previous section where I stated that an iron knife with an ivory handle and bronze rivets, as well as an ingot of iron, had been recovered during a recent season at Ekron. These and other metal implements belong to stratum V, around 1050 B.C. They date to the time of our story in 1 Samuel 13. An iron knife with a similar ivory handle and bronze rivets was recovered at Tell Qasile from an earlier period (stratum XII), cirea 1150-1100 B.C. (A. Mazar 1985b, 1, 6-8). At both Qasile and Ekron the knives were found in context with the Philistine pottery, and at Ekron they were found beside a bamah, a high place. "Such iron knives with bronze rivets have been found in twelfth to early eleventh century contexts throughout the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, from Perati in Attica to Hama in Syria, almost always uncovered in association with typical Mycenaean IIIC1 pottery of the twelfth century B.C. (or its local imitations)" (Muhly 1982, 49).

The ingots and iron knives call to mind several passages in the Iliad. At the funeral and games for Patroclus after the death of Hector by Achilles' hand, the animals were sacrificed with an iron knife: "Many a white ox fell with his last gasp to the iron knife . . ." (23.30-31, Rieu 1950, 413). The Iliad also contains several passages where iron is offered either as part of a ransom or as a prize. For example, when one Trojan is captured, he begs his captor, "Take me alive, son of Atreus, and take appropriate ransom. In my father's house the treasures lie piled in abundance; bronze is there, and gold, and difficultly wrought iron . . ." (6.46-48, Lattimore 1951, 154). And at the funeral games for Patroclus, prizes for a chariot race included a woman skilled in the fine crafts and a large tripod as the top prize; two talents of gold as fourth-place prize, and a third-place prize of a bright grey iron kettle (23.257-70, Rieu 1950, 419). In another contest the prize was a lump of pig iron, large enough, according to Achilles, "`to keep the winner in iron for five years or more, even if his farm is out in the wilds. It will not be lack of iron that sends his shepherd or his ploughman in to town. He will have plenty on the spot'" (emphasis mine; 23.833-35, Rieu 1950, 434).

The Philistines possessed the technology of working with metal for both weapons and farming implements, according to 1 Samuel 13:19-22. Likewise, the Iliad presents the Aegean Greeks as having the technology for producing both iron weapons and iron farming implements. Moses, in Deuteronomy 8:9, mentions that among the blessings of the Promised Land are its mountains of iron. Yet, in the days of Saul, the Israelites were not yet as skilled in working with metal as the Philistines were. Even three hundred years earlier and probably at least a full century before Moses, Pharaoh Tut-ankh-Amon was buried in a tomb containing, among other things, a beautiful iron knife. Iron was known in the Late Bronze Age, but the technology for working the ore was not available throughout the Near East until well into the Iron Age.

First Samuel 13:19-22 includes a word that has been troublesome for a long time. The word is pim in verse 21. That word is used only once in the Hebrew Bible -- here in this verse. Neither the translators of the King James Version nor those of the Authorized Version knew what it meant, so they translated it as "file," an implement for sharpening farm tools. The translators of the Revised Standard Version knew it to be a weight used for payment but did not know its value. By now, however, at least a dozen weights bearing the inscription pim have been uncovered at various sites such as Tells Gezer, Timnah, Ashdod, and Ekron. The weight of a pim is about one-fourth of an ounce of silver, or two-thirds of a shekel. This is the way that the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version have translated the word. Interestingly enough, one Bible encyclopedia mentions that pim is probably a non-Hebrew word belonging to the Philistines (ISBE 4:1054). This reasoning may be due to the fact that the word occurs only here, in a Philistine context. In any case, the Philistines charged around one-fourth of an ounce (of silver) to sharpen a plow or a mattock and half that for sharpening an axe or setting the point on an oxgoad.

The mention of "no smith" in 1 Samuel 13:19 has also puzzled readers for a long time. We assume that the reference here is to iron and the working of iron (see, for example, the NIV Study Bible note, p. 393). This assumption leads to other questions. What was the secret in making iron weapons? Was it so difficult that the few accomplished people could keep the technique to themselves for such a long time? And, if the protagonists in the Iliad had iron ingots and gave iron as gifts, why did they fight with bronze weapons? Thanks to the definitive works of James Muhly and Jane Waldbaum pertaining to metalworking in the ancient Near East, these questions and others can now be answered (Muhly 1982; Waldbaum 1978, 1990; A. Mazar 1990, 356-66).

Bronze weapons were made of an alloy of 90 percent copper and 10 percent tin. Iron ore was more plentiful in the Near East than copper ore and easier to dig out. Tin had to be imported from, it is thought, as far away as England and Afghanistan. Why, then, did the ancient Near Eastern peoples continue to make bronze weapons instead of iron ones? There are two reasons, according to Muhly, and Waldbaum adds a third.

First, fashioning iron into feasible weapons required melting it in a kiln that could heat to 1530 degrees Celsius, whereas melting copper required a temperature of 1100 degrees Celsius. Weapons made from iron not heated to this high temperature were inferior to those made of bronze.

Second, archaeology in recent years has demonstrated that there was extensive trade throughout the ancient Near East and to regions beyond it during the Late Bronze Age. While this extensive trade, which included tin, lasted, there was no need to devise kilns that could melt the iron at 1530 degrees Celsius. Around 1200 B.C., the Near East and the Aegean witnessed the collapse of empires, the Trojan War, and the movements of the Sea Peoples. Needless to say, trade was disrupted. It appears that tin was then in short supply. Necessity became the mother of invention, and a better kiln was developed.

It also appears that many of the early iron implements that were around in the Late Bronze Age, like those mentioned in the Iliad, were made of wrought iron rather than of the carburized iron produced in the hotter kiln. Wrought iron is shaped by hammering, and this was done after the iron was smelted and was still in a pliable state. Since iron weapons produced in this manner are inferior to bronze weapons, the plentiful supplies of iron ore in the ground were worthless until the turmoil at the end of the Bronze Age forced the smithy to develop a hotter furnace in order to work an ore other than copper and tin.

Even when the hotter furnace is used, a superior weapon does not automatically result. The process is still quite complicated, and a smithy would probably have to have done considerable experimentation before discovering that iron, after it has reached its melting point, must be quenched (by plunging it into a vat of cold water) and tempered (by further heat treatments at different temperatures). Only then does a carburized iron implement superior to any bronze one result. The people who possessed this technology could garner power, as 1 Samuel 13:19-22 explains. The Philistines restricted the spread of their superior metalworking technology to maintain their power over the Israelites.

Interestingly, the word for iron is not even used in the 1 Samuel 13:19 passage, nor is there any reference there to a Philistine monopoly of iron. Perhaps the passage intends to show that the Philistines were technologically superior to the Israelites in all metalworking and were able to control access to the metals and the technology. However, tests that have been done on iron artifacts from Philistine sites do not show a consistent pattern of carburizing the iron.

Jane Waldbaum suggests a third reason for a switch from bronze weapons to iron, an ecological one. Bronzeworking required two to four times more wood charcoal than ironworking. Perhaps the ancient Near East was becoming deforested and the smithy was forced to develop a better way. Waldbaum recognizes, however, that at present there is not enough evidence to support this hypothesis.

The technological advance in ironworking could only be used for implements having a simple shape to mold; therefore, iron was used for weapons of war and for farming tools. Bronze, evidently, had been the metal of choice for making weapons in the eleventh century B.C. before iron began to dominate, and through the centuries bronze has continued to be chosen for casting objects with a more intricate design, such as statues.

Tests have been conducted on some Iron Age objects excavated in Israel and Cyprus to determine if they were carburized or wrought, and one hopes this testing will become a standard practice in order to better determine when and where advanced iron technology developed. No tests have been conducted yet on the iron knife with the ivory handle found at Ekron during the 1988 season. The iron knife from King Tut's tomb that I mentioned also has not had any technical tests done on it, but it is suspected that it was made from meteoritic iron rather than from iron ores found naturally in the earth. Other iron objects from the Late Bronze period that have been tested have been shown to be from meteorite iron.

Based on tests of iron artifacts from the 1200-900 B.C. time frame, Muhly believes that iron technology was developed in the East Mediterranean -- the dominant role belonging to the Greeks and the Greek colonists who arrived on Cyprus early in the twelfth century. These are the same people who made the Mycenaean IIIC:1b pottery. He further believes that from Cyprus the iron metallurgy was introduced to Canaan via the Sea Peoples, which included the Philistines.

First Samuel 13:19-22 states that the Israelites had to go to Philistia to maintain their metal farm implements. Of the iron artifacts found in Israel from this Iron I period, iron weapons (such as the iron knife at Ekron) are found only at Philistine sites, whereas iron farm implements (such as an iron plowshare found at Gibeah, Saul's hometown) have been found throughout Palestine. Muhly believes, however, that Philistine control over the Israelites was political rather than simply technological. King David was the Israelite who would break the Philistine confederation.