The condition of Israel became intolerable.  There was but one remedy:  the people needed a leader who should organise them into an army and a nation, and lead them forth against their foes.  Saul was elected king, and the choice was soon justified by the results.  The Philistines were driven out of the country, and Saul set up his court in the very spot where a Philistine garrison had stood.

But the Philistines were not yet subdued.  Civil war broke out in Israel between Saul and his son-in-law David; the troops which should have been employed in resisting the common enemy were used in pursuing David, and David himself took service as a mercenary under Achish, King of Gath.  Saul and his sons fell in battle on Mount Gilboa; the relics of the Israelitish army fled across the Jordan, and the Philistine again ruled supreme on the western side of the Jordan.  David was allowed to govern Judah as a tributary vassal of the Philistine “lords.”

The murder of the feeble scion of Saul’s house who had the name of king on the eastern side of the Jordan put an end to all this.  David threw off his allegiance to the Philistines, and was crowned King of Israel.  This act of open defiance was speedily followed by the invasion of Judah.  At first the war went against the Israelitish king; he was forced to fly from his capital, Hebron, and take refuge in an inaccessible cavern.  Here he organised his forces, and at last ventured into the field.  The Philistine forces were defeated in battle after battle; the war was carried into their own territory, and their cities were compelled to surrender.  Philistia thus became a part of the Israelitish kingdom, and never again made any serious attempt to recover its independence.  At the division of the Israelitish kingdom it fell to Judah, and its vassal princes duly paid their tribute to the Jewish kings.  It would seem from the Assyrian inscriptions that they were played off one against the other, and that signs of disaffection in any one of them were speedily followed by his imprisonment in Jerusalem.  At all events, the Philistine cities remained in the possession of Judah down to the time of the overthrow of the monarchy, and the most devoted of David’s body-guard were the Philistines of Gath.

It has been said above that Judah was a mixture of Hebrew, Kenite, and Edomite elements.  Kenite means “smith,” and the tribe furnished those itinerant smiths who provided Canaan with its tools and arms.  Reference is made to one of them in the Travels of a Mohar, a sarcastic description of a tourist’s misadventures in Palestine which was written by an Egyptian author in the reign of Ramses ii., and of which a copy on papyrus has been preserved to us.  The horses of the hero of the story, we are told, ran away and broke his carriage to pieces; he had accordingly to betake himself to “the iron-workers” and have it repaired.  Similar itinerant ironsmiths wandered through Europe in the Middle Ages, handing down from father to son the secrets of their craft.