It is obvious that in such quarrels as he had to conduct on all sides, David had need of a carefully administered and well-disciplined army. The nucleus of his troops, a kind of guard on whom he could implicitly rely, consisted of those six hundred men, who, long ago, in the days of his flight from Saul, had gathered round him and had remained true to him during his persecution. When David became king, they, of course, stayed with him. Henceforth they represented his bodyguard, and bore the name of _Gibborim_, the “Heroes.” In war, special tasks were, as a matter of course, assigned to them. The gaps in the circles of these picked troops, which resulted from David’s numerous wars, were afterwards filled up after the victories over the Philistines--for reasons which are explained by the purpose of the force as the king’s bodyguard. The recruits were chiefly foreigners, especially Philistines and Cretan mercenaries of cognate race. Thus this whole force soon bore the name of Cretans and Philistines. Important as this picked body was at all times to David, it could not possibly suffice for his great campaigns. David recognised that for wars such as he had to conduct, a permanent and reliable military organisation was necessary for Israel, even in time of peace, so that even then Israel’s troops might be under surveillance and no tribe be able to evade its duty in the moment of war. The census of the people undertaken by David’s chief captain, Joab, served this object. It was to secure the supervision of those capable of bearing arms in Israel, and to afford a groundwork for that organisation. Joab spent three-quarters of a year on the way; he extended his journey to Kadesh on the Orontes, the capital of the once mighty Hittite empire, which, consequently, if the statement is correct, had also been subdued by David. Soon after this numbering, a destructive pestilence fell upon Israel. In this David recognised Jehovah’s avenging hand. We have other reasons to assume that David’s remodelling of the army was not the cause of his success in the struggle with the neighbouring peoples. It appears only to have been taken in hand as a result of the information here collected, and as a measure which might be of value at a subsequent period. The close of David’s history, so far as it is not dominated by the well-known occurrences in his own family, might be said to be comprised in two episodes, which concern his relations to the few surviving members of the family of his predecessor, Saul. They probably belong to the time before David’s foreign wars, but stand in our narrative in no historical sequence, so that it is difficult to define their date exactly. The second of them is to be judged from the first.