This book exists in two versions. One version, with the title King David and His Reign Revisited, is available at the Apple iTunes store. As an iBook (for the iPad and Mac computers), it’s the first of its kind in the humanities: a monograph that enhances the text in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts, with hundreds of striking images, a fixed-page format, videos, audio clips, and an innovative new approach to footnotes. That version is focused on the figure of King David. The version you are now reading bears a different title (David, King of Israel, and Caleb in Biblical Memory) in keeping with the expanded nature of its contents: It includes several chapters, along with a discussion throughout, of the relationship between David and another Judahite luminary – Caleb, the warrior known for his intrepidity during Israel’s wars of conquest. As I show, David and Caleb are two competing figures for the Judahite authors who were responsible for the final shape of the Hebrew Scriptures.

My work on David and Caleb began as chapters in a larger study that I conducted with the support of a Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2011/2012. The aim of the project was to show how the political concerns that fuel war commemoration in ancient and modern societies are very similar to the forces that gave rise to many biblical texts as well as propelled Israel’s ethnogenesis as a heterogeneous people. As the book became too lengthy, we decided to break off the chapters that treat a corpus of Judahite texts. The remaining chapters, which treat war commemoration in the Hebrew Bible from a variety of perspectives related to Israel (rather than Judah), have been collected for a separate volume.