Rev.Dr. Peter Jenner

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1 Samuel 17                                    16/11/08

 

 

Imagine the scene, if you will. We're in front of the gates of Troy. The battle rages as the Trojans defend their city against the Achaians. The siege is not yet at a stalemate; the famous wooden horse which enables the Achaians to take the city is still way in the future.

 

And in the middle of the battle, the mighty Hektor, Prince of Troy, somehow manages to get everyone to stop. He gets all the Trojan soldiers to sit down on the ground in the middle of the battlefield and Agamemnon, the Achaian Commander-in-Chief, gets his troops to do the same. And they all listen to what Hektor has to say. He issues a challenge; he will take on any Achaian warrior who's brave enough or foolhardy enough to face him in single-handed combat. At first no-one dares take up the challenge, but before too long nine Achaians volunteer to take Hektor on in single combat. So how can they decide which one of them is going to have the honour? Agamemnon has the idea of holding a raffle. He takes off his helmet and each of the nine throws in a marked token; the one that comes out of the hat first is the winner. And so it is that Ajax has the chance of winning glory for himself and his army.

 

Hektor and Ajax duly confront each other. They lob a few spears about and they bash each other's shield. And they're just starting to do a bit of damage to each other (Hektor coming off worse) when two heralds come onto the pitch. They're a sort of cross between a pair of referees and a squad of United Nations peacekeepers. They say, "Well done lads. Good show. Why don't you call it a draw? Then we can all come back tomorrow and start fighting again." And that's what they do. Hektor and Ajax swap shirts (well, bits of armour actually) and they go back to receive the adulation of their comrades.

 

You can read all of that in Homer's Iliad, book 7. It probably seems a bit strange to us that in the middle of a battlefield, everyone would stop to set up a contest between two warriors. You can debate for a long time how historical the Iliad is, but it's certainly the case that Goliath issuing a challenge to single combat in the middle of a military campaign is not without parallel in ancient literature. That doesn't prove that this Old Testament story is what actually happened historically, but it might not have sounded to its first readers as far-fetched as it might do to us.

 

I don't think we know many technical details about the way war was fought in the Old Testament world. But we know quite a lot about warfare in the Greek and Roman world. For instance, in 401BC a Greek army marched into Persia. Among the Greek force was Xenophon who wrote a detailed account of 'The Persian Expedition'.

 

In Xenophon's world, the result of a battle was almost always decided by the clash of the heavy-armed infantry soldiers, the hoplites. But Xenophon gives us details about other sections of the army, some of which fought at a distance. Both armies had archers who could fire arrows about 200 metres and they had javelin throwers. Their range was about 175 metres. The javelin was shorter than a modern athletics javelin and it was thrown with the aid of a leather loop which increased its range and accuracy. I understand that a few years ago certain gentlemen of Mellor started investigating the ancient javelin techniques and found that they worked very well - until one amateur javelin-thrower had a mishap and hit his own car, whereupon a wife banned further experimentation.

 

The archers and javelin throwers of the Greek and Persian armies were fairly well matched, but there was another method of fighting at a distance. Each army had squadrons of slingers. This is a description of this dark art from a modern textbook which sums up the information we have from ancient sources:

"The sling … comprised a one-inch strap of leather or plaited sinew 3 feet long, with a wider 'pocket' in the middle; one end was held between forefinger and thumb, the other fastened to another finger of the same hand; the slinger loaded the pocket with a missile, whirled the sling round his head or parallel to his body, released the free end, and projected the missile at a speed which could exceed 90 feet per second; in skilled hands it was an extremely accurate and deadly weapon."

['Xenophon: The Persian Expedition' ed by J Antrich & S Usher BCP Footnote 3:16]

 

The missiles of the Persian slingers were stones about the size of a fist; they'd weigh about 10 or 12 ounces. Imagine the damage you could do with fist-sized stones travelling in excess of 60 miles an hour. The range of these Persian stones was about the same as arrows and javelins, something like 175 to 200 metres. But Xenophon tells us that the Greek army had a great asset in having a contingent from Rhodes, which was famed for its slingers. The Rhodians had developed the technology a stage further. They'd ended up casting small pellets in lead; you'd almost call them bullets. The most effective were in the shape of two cones stuck together with a point at both ends. They weighed less than two ounces, but because they were denser and smaller than stones, they had completely different aerodynamic properties such that their range was something like 400 metres. I reckon that's about from the churchyard gate to the Devvy. And because this was way beyond the range at which the Persians could return fire, the Greeks found that they could use their Rhodian slingers with quite devastating effect. This was such an important part of their army that when they got into dire straits, the Greek commanders asked for volunteers to train as slingers in exchange for being excused mundane duties in the camp; immediately they had 200 new slingers in training. And it seems that in the hands of a well-trained and experienced slinger either stones or lead pellets could be delivered with an accuracy which we would probably find quite astounding.

 

David evidently didn't have the technical advances of the Rhodians at his disposal, but think again about his defeat of Goliath. Again, this doesn't prove that the story happened exactly as we have it, but contrary to what we might think, the outcome of this asymmetric contest is probably not too far-fetched. The Old Testament sees the hand of God in what happened but you don't have to attribute David's victory to a direct miraculous divine intervention. Instead, imagine an athletically gifted youth with very good hand-eye coordination. He's grown up looking after sheep, which entails long periods by himself in the countryside with not a lot to do. To while away the time, he sets up tin cans on dry stone walls (or the ancient equivalent) and he takes pot shots at them with sling and stone. He finds he has a natural aptitude for this and he practises a lot with what was, remember, "in skilled hands an extremely accurate and deadly weapon." It could be quite realistic to think that he could bring down a mighty warrior experienced in and prepared for a very different sort of combat.

 

When we heard that story at the Rose Queen service, Anna said she chose it because it was "about the small person standing up to the bully". I think that's a pretty good summary of how the Old Testament uses this story and it would certainly be true to generalise that the Biblical witness is quite clear that while God tends usually (but not always) to use small people to achieve his purposes, God's way is not the way of threatening behaviour, never the way of coercive persuasion. God never ever uses bullies.

 

I seem to have come across the word 'bullying' in quite a few contexts lately. One of them will probably be familiar to some of you who are at college or who work in schools. Tomorrow begins 'National Anti-Bullying Week'. There's some very good stuff on the inter-web about that, under the slogan "creating a world where bullying is unacceptable". I'm going to come back to that in a few Sundays' time in a slightly different context, but as I thought about this for today, a week on from Remembrance Sunday, my thoughts went in a particular direction.

 

The story of David is the story of a small person who became a Big Person; the shepherd boy becomes king. And the big picture is usually a small picture writ large. There may be established ways of tackling bullying at school, at work, in a social network and so on; in those settings there are ways of dealing with individuals who attempt to abuse power and manipulate others. But when you're king, when you have national and international responsibility, you have to deal with the abuse of power and with manipulation on a very different scale. So, in the end, what can Big People do against the bullying behaviour of those with immense resources and absolute political power?

 

My way of not really answering that question is to reminisce that in the chaplaincy at Reading we had one notice board on which anyone could put anything they wanted to. On the first day of the first Gulf War at the start of 1991, I put on that notice board a cartoon which had appeared that morning in the Guardian. I'll describe it for you in a moment. By the next morning someone had put next to the cartoon a very strongly worded anonymous note saying that they found this paper cutting very offensive. They didn't say why, but it had obviously upset someone. And this started quite a discussion among students about both free speech and about how two people can look at the same thing: one sees a very perceptive comment about the way things are, the other sees the opposite.

 

I still have the cartoon. A cave man is lying flat out out on the floor. Two other cave men are standing over him, looking down at him. One of them holds an enormous club in his hand. The caption reads: "One day we're bound to evolve a better way of settling disputes."

 

For countless centuries people have devoted great resourcefulness and time and effort into developing ever more efficient and effective ways of killing each other. I wonder how humanity could have put the same effort into "evolving a better way of settling disputes." I wonder where we might be now if we had done.