SECTION 8. PALESTINE

If the Phoenicians were feeling the thrust of Steppe peoples, their
southern neighbours, the Philistines, who had lived and grown rich on
the tolls and trade of the great north road from Egypt for at least a
century and a half, were feeling it too. During some centuries past
there had come raiding from the south-east deserts certain sturdy and
well-knit tribes, which long ago had displaced or assimilated the
Canaanites along the highlands west of Jordan, and were now tending to
settle down into a national unity, cemented by a common worship. They
had had long intermittent struggles, traditions of which fill the Hebrew
Book of Judges--struggles not only with the Canaanites, but also with
the Amorites of the upper Orontes valley, and later with the Aramaeans
of the north and east, and with fresh incursions of Arabs from the
south; and most lately of all they had had to give way for about half a
century before an expansive movement of the Philistines, which carried
the latter up to Galilee and secured to them the profits of all the
Palestinian stretch of the great North Road. But about a generation
before our date the northernmost of those bold "Habiri," under an
elective _sheikh_ Saul, had pushed the Philistines out of Bethshan and
other points of vantage in mid-Palestine, and had become once more free
of the hills which they had held in the days of Pharaoh Menephthah.
Though, at the death of Saul, the enemy regained most of what he had
lost, he was not to hold it long. A greater chief, David, who had risen
to power by Philistine help and now had the support of the southern
tribes, was welding both southern and northern Hebrews into a single
monarchical society and, having driven his old masters out of the north
once more, threatened the southern stretch of the great North Road from
a new capital, Jerusalem. Moreover, by harrying repeatedly the lands