Recent excavations in Ashdod have brought to light a small cache of clay tablets which have only recently been deciphered. They were encrypted, for reasons which will soon become apparent; but the code was relatively simple, and when broken revealed a correspondence which sheds fascinating light on some of the events found in the first book of Samuel. The complete edited correspondence will be published in several years' time; funds are at present being sought to facilitate this process. In the meantime, I am happy to present here, for the first time perhaps, the most interesting of the letters (provisionally codified as Ashd E1.3). Since this is a popular volume aimed at a general readership I have employed a fairly colloquial idiom throughout. For this I apologize to my scholarly colleagues, who may nevertheless rest assured that the gist of the matter is accurately represented.