When Saul was informed of this, he said: “God hath delivered him into mine hand, for he is shut in by entering into a town that hath gates and bars.” As Saul approached, David bade Abiathar the priest, who had fled to him from Nob with the image of Jehovah, to bring the image. David inquired of it: “Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men into the hands of Saul; O Lord God of Israel, I beseech thee tell thy servant.” And Jehovah said, “They will deliver thee up.” Then David despaired of holding the town and fled to Ziph and Maon in the wilderness by the Dead Sea. But Saul followed and overtook him: nothing but a mountain now divided David’s band from the king. David was already surrounded and lost--when a message reached Saul: “The Philistines have invaded the land.” It was probably an expedition that the Philistines had undertaken in aid of the hard-pressed rebels. Saul immediately abandoned the pursuit and marched against the foreigner. But David named the rock the Rock of Escapes. After the king had beaten the Philistines he took three thousand men from the army that he might completely quell the rebellion. David had retreated farther east, on the border of the Dead Sea in the neighbourhood of Engedi, “upon the rocks of the wild goats,” and here Saul reduced him to such straits that he despaired of maintaining himself in Judah and got away to the Philistines with his following. The rising was at an end. David’s attempt to induce the tribe of Judah to secede from Saul, had completely failed. Driven from the soil on which he had raised the standard of revolt, he no longer hesitated to formally enter the service of the Philistines, and the latter welcomed the support of a brave and clever rebel, knowing that though once their enemy, he had already given much trouble in Judah to the arms of Saul, whose force they had so often felt and who had snatched from them their dominion over Israel, and aware that his resentment against his benefactor and master might prove of the greatest service to them, King Achish of Gath, to whom David had a second time fled, declared: “He hath made his people Israel utterly to abhor him; therefore he shall be my servant forever.” And he gave him and his band of freebooters the town of Ziklag as a dwelling-place. David was now established at Ziklag as a vassal of Achish. At the latter’s command he had to march to battle and also to deliver up a share of the booty taken, and from Ziklag in the territory of the Philistines he and his small army, still recruited from the discontented of Israel who fled to David across the frontier, conducted a guerilla warfare against Saul and his native country. In these expeditions David was shrewd enough to spare his former adherents in Judah, the towns which had once declared for him, and to direct his attacks solely against the followers of Saul; he even secretly maintained relations with his party in Judah, and out of the booty