David Captures Jerusalem

The capture of Jerusalem in chapter 5 of Second Samuel is one of the most consequential events in the entire Old Testament, not because of the military action itself - the text dispenses with it in a few verses - but because of what the city becomes. A Canaanite fortress that had survived Israelite settlement for centuries becomes, in David's hands, the capital of a united Israel and eventually the location of the Temple. The theological and cultural weight that Jerusalem would carry for the remainder of the biblical story, and well beyond it, began here.

Jerusalem Before David

Jerusalem - called Jebus in several biblical texts, reflecting its Jebusite identity - is notable for one thing above all others before David's conquest: it had not been taken. The city appears in Joshua 15:63 with the flat admission that "the people of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem; so the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day." It appears again in Judges 1:21 with the same admission for the tribe of Benjamin. Through the entire period of the judges and the reign of Saul, Jerusalem remained a Canaanite city within territory that Israel claimed.

Its location explains its resistance. Jerusalem sits on a ridge bounded on three sides by deep valleys - the Kidron to the east and the Hinnom to the west and south - with the city proper occupying a narrow spur that required an attacker to approach from the north. The water supply was secured through an internal shaft connecting the city to the Gihon spring in the Kidron Valley, making siege particularly difficult. These features that made Jerusalem so difficult to take also made it, once taken, an extraordinarily defensible capital.

The Capture and Its Obscurities

The actual account of the capture in 2 Samuel 5:6-10 is one of the most debated passages in the book. The Jebusites taunt David with the claim that "even the blind and the lame will ward you off," a phrase whose meaning is disputed. David's response references a water shaft and the "lame and the blind," and verse 8 adds an editorial note that explains why "the blind and the lame shall not come into the house" - a cultic regulation whose connection to the narrative is unclear. Whether "whoever strikes the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft" means that David's troops gained access through the water system - what archaeologists now call Warren's Shaft - or something else entirely has been debated for well over a century without resolution.

The obscurity of the account is itself informative. The battle for Jerusalem was apparently not so significant a military achievement that it required detailed narrative celebration. What mattered was not how the city was taken but what it became once David had it.

Jerusalem as David's City

David's first act after taking the city is to rename it: it becomes the City of David. This naming is a political act of possession, but it is also a theological act of identification. By making Jerusalem his personal property - taken with his own forces rather than allocated to any tribe - David created a city that belonged to the whole of Israel rather than to any particular tribal territory. No tribe could claim Jerusalem as its own. It was David's city, which meant it was Israel's king's city, which meant it was available to become Israel's national and eventually its religious center in a way that a city within tribal boundaries could not have been.

The building program that followed the capture - David building on the city and the note that Hiram of Tyre sent cedar and craftsmen - suggests a rapid development of Jerusalem's infrastructure. The Millo, whatever that term refers to exactly (possibly a terraced structure or fill supporting the expanding city), appears in several passages as a symbol of Jerusalem's construction and growth. The archaeological record of tenth-century Jerusalem is sparse and disputed, and the question of how large and how developed the city was in David's time remains a live debate in biblical archaeology. What is not disputed is that from David's reign onward Jerusalem is the center of the story.

The Philistine Campaigns

The notice of Jerusalem's capture is immediately followed in the text by two accounts of Philistine attacks on David and his victories over them. The juxtaposition is significant. The Philistines had apparently tolerated David while he was a vassal in their territory and while he was king only in Judah. His becoming king over all Israel changed the equation: "When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over Israel, all the Philistines went up to search for David." The military campaigns that follow establish David's military dominance over the most persistent external threat Israel had faced, and they do so in connection with divine guidance sought and received. At Baal-perazim David inquires of God before attacking; at the second engagement he inquires again and receives different tactical instructions, which he follows precisely. The pattern is consistent with the David of the earlier narrative: a military commander who is also a man who asks before he acts.