Suggest an Edit — David

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Biography

Short Description

David, according to the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel and Judah and the successor of Saul. Tradition places his life in the late eleventh and early tenth centuries BCE. He was the youngest son of Jesse, a Bethlehemite of the tribe of Judah, and spent his youth as a shepherd. The prophet Samuel, having rejected Saul at God's command, anointed David in secret at Bethlehem. The biblical narrative recounts that David entered Saul's service as a harpist to soothe the king's troubled spirit and as an armor-bearer, and that he gained national fame by killing the Philistine champion Goliath of Gath with a sling and stone. Saul's subsequent jealousy drove David into outlawry in the wilderness of Judah and among the Philistines; he gathered a band of followers, twice spared Saul's life, and after Saul's death in battle on Mount Gilboa was anointed king over Judah at Hebron. Some years later the northern tribes also accepted him, and he became king of a united Israel.

David captured the Jebusite stronghold of Jerusalem, made it his capital, and brought the Ark of the Covenant there with great ceremony, establishing the city as the religious as well as political center of the kingdom. He expanded Israelite territory through campaigns against neighboring peoples, including the Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, and Arameans. He is credited in the biblical sources with organizing the administration, the army, and aspects of the Levitical service. Through the prophet Nathan, God established a covenant with David promising that his house and kingdom would endure, a promise that became the foundation of Jewish messianic expectation and, in Christian interpretation, of the royal genealogy of Jesus. David desired to build a temple for the Lord in Jerusalem, but was told that this task would fall to his son because he was a man of war who had shed blood.

The biblical account does not present David as without grave fault. He committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and arranged Uriah's death in battle; the prophet Nathan confronted him, and David repented, an episode long associated with Psalm 51. The first child of that union died, but Bathsheba later bore Solomon. David's household was thereafter marked by violence and rebellion: Amnon's rape of his half-sister Tamar, Absalom's murder of Amnon and subsequent revolt, Absalom's death at the hands of Joab, and the later usurpation attempt by Adonijah. In his last days David designated Solomon as successor and charged him with building the Temple and with settling accounts with Joab and Shimei. According to the Books of Kings he died in Jerusalem and was buried in the City of David. Extra-biblical evidence for a historical David is limited; the ninth-century BCE Tel Dan Stele refers to a "House of David," which many scholars take as indicating a dynastic founder of that name, while the extent of a tenth-century united monarchy remains a matter of archaeological debate.

In Jewish tradition David is the ideal king, the sweet psalmist of Israel, and the ancestor of the Messiah; large portions of the Book of Psalms are ascribed to him, though modern scholarship regards many psalms as later compositions. In Christianity he is venerated as a saint and prophet, a type of Christ, and an ancestor of Jesus according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. His feast is kept on 29 December in the Roman Martyrology and in the Byzantine calendar, where he is commemorated together with Joseph the Betrothed and James the Brother of the Lord, often on the Sunday after the Nativity; he also appears among the Holy Forefathers in the pre-Nativity Sundays of the East. He is invoked as a patron of musicians, poets, singers, choirs, and kings, reflecting the tradition of his skill with the harp and his composition of psalms.

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