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 east of Jordan up to the desert edge, David had stopped further incursions from Arabia; and, though the Aramaean state of Damascus was growing into a formidable danger, he had checked for the present its tendency to spread southwards, and had strengthened himself by agreements with another Aramaean prince, him of Hamath, who lay on the north flank of Damascus, and with the chief of the nearest Phoenician city, Tyre. The latter was not yet the rich place which it would grow to be in the next century, but it was strong enough to control the coast road north of the Galilean lowlands. Israel not only was never safer, but would never again hold a position of such relative importance in Syria, as was hers in a day of many small and infant states about 1000 B.C.: and in later times, under the shadow of Assyria and the menace of Egypt, the Jews would look back to the reigns of David and his successor with some reason as their golden age.