David, the future king of Israel, stole from the Philistines the coveted art of iron-making, turned ploughshares into swords, and conquered all his enemies. Israel as a nation grew as a result of this technical prowess. It would be a blatant misnomer to call this technology transfer, a term implying legal methods of transfer. If David stole it, it was illegal and covert. The precise term used today would be “reverse engineering.”