all lead him.
Rapid and impetuous as he was by nature, schooled to swift decisions,
followed by still swifter action, knowing that a blow struck at once,
while all was chaos and despair at home, might set him on the throne, he
holds nature and policy and the impatience of his people in check to
hear what God will say. So fully did he fulfil the vow of his early
psalm, "My strength! upon thee will I wait" (lix. 9).

We can fancy the glad march to the ancient Hebron, where the great
fathers of the nation lay in their rock-hewn tombs. Even before the
death of Saul, David's strength had been rapidly increasing, by a
constant stream of fugitives from the confusion and misery into which
the kingdom had fallen. Even Benjamin, Saul's own tribe, sent him some
of its famous archers--a sinister omen of the king's waning fortunes;
the hardy half-independent men of Manasseh and Gad, from the pastoral
uplands on the east of Jordan, "whose faces," according to the vivid
description of the chronicler (1 Chron. xii. 8), "were like the faces of
lions, and were as swift as roes upon the mountains," sought his
standard; and from his own kinsmen of Judah recruits "day by day came to
David to help him, until it was a great host like the host of God." With
such forces, it would have been child's play to have subdued any
scattered troops of the former dynasty which might still have been in a
condition to keep the field. But he made no attempt of the sort; and
even when he came to Hebron he took no measures to advance any claims to
the crown. The language of the history seems rather to imply a
disbanding of his army, or at least their settling down to domestic life
in the villages round Hebron, without a thought of winning the kingdom
by arms. And his elevation to the partial monarchy which he at first
possessed was the spontaneous act of "the men of Judah," who come to him
and anoint him king over Judah.

The limits of his territory are substantially those of the kingdom over
which his descendants ruled after Jeroboam's revolt, thus indicating the
existence of a natural "line of cleavage" between north and south. The
geographical position of Benjamin finally attached it to the latter
monarchy; but for the present, the wish to retain the supremacy which it
had had while the king was one of the tribe, made it the nucleus of a
feeble and lingering opposition to David, headed by Saul's cousin Abner,
and rallying round his incompetent son Ishboshe