Joel S. Baden's
The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero is $1.99.
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I bought this book a few years ago when it was on sale and loved it. Baden is an Old Testament textual scholar that convincingly reconstructs what he thinks is the real story of David from the biblical books of Samuel. In a nutshell, David was the leader of a band of ruffians that usurped Saul's throne by force with the help of Israel's enemies. Here's the opening paragraph of the introduction, describing the events of 1 Samuel 25:
Quote:
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In a small village in Israel, some three thousand years ago, there lived a man and his wife who owned flocks of sheep and goats that grazed in the fields some distance from the village. One spring day, ten men appeared in the village. They were messengers from a larger gang of fugitives from society who roamed the countryside living as they could. They presented the man with a request: they had been protecting the man’s flocks and shepherds out in the fields and no harm had come to the man’s property, so now they would like the man to give them some money or food for their efforts. The man, who had never encountered this gang before, much less asked them to protect his property, refused to give them anything and turned them away. The next day, the leader of the gang showed up at the man’s door with his full entourage, four hundred men armed to the teeth. Shortly thereafter, the man lay dead, and the gang leader had married the man’s widow, thereby assuming legal ownership of the man’s flocks, servants, house, and fields.
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I recommend having a Bible on hand while reading the book. For me, the most fascinating thing was the wealth of detail present in the biblical text that the author points out, but that I would otherwise have missed on my own.