I wrote this introductory piece to the life of King David for St John’s Bible Study Group. It is reproduced here in the hope that others might find it useful.
Introduction
Reported to have reigned in the first decades of the 10th Century BC (roughly 1000-962 BC), the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible says that King David was “Celebrated in the Old Testament as Israel’s ideal king and in the New Testament as an ancestor of the Messiah, though David’s personal life did not seem to portend such a status.” Yet far from having a background one might expect from a king, David was the great‐grandson of a foreigner (Ruth the Moabite) and the youngest of eight brothers. The biblical narrative celebrates David as a poet and musician, but does not pull any punches about his complex and contradictory character.
King David (1951) by Mark Chagall
Some scholars even argue that David wasn’t a real person, but a mythical personification of the national character of the Jewish people, sort of like King Arthur or Achilles, although others argue archaeological evidence shows him to be a real figure. The 10th Century BC was certainly a time of prosperity and political power for the people of Central Palestine, and also of artistic and architectural achievement.
Whatever the truth, David was still the central figure in the Jewish people’s understanding of their own history at the time of Christ, as far away from his lifetime as William the Conqueror is from ours.
For Christians, this is particularly important as Jesus was identified as the direct descendent of David in the Gospel of Matthew – David’s political kingdom is replaced by Christ’s spiritual kingdom.
What is the biblical story of David’s life?
There are no actual dates recorded for David’s life and, as noted, some argue he may not have existed, as the only certain evidence for his life comes from the books of Samuel and Kings (Chronicles is a much later rewrite of these texts), and possibly some evidence in the archaeological record, although this is contested.
The Biblical narrative indicates he was being born in the years before 1030 BC in the town of Bethlehem, as a youngest son who worked as a shepherd. Samuel the prophet anointed the boy as future King of Israel at around the age of ten – needless to say, this was a controversial choice. Soon afterwards, David’s musical talents were discovered to have the capacity to calm the volatile King Saul’s spells of psychological disturbance and he was recruited as a minstrel in his court.
Israel was then at war with the Philistines, and this shepherd boy became a legend when he killed their gigantic champion warrior Goliath with a single sling-shot. Saul, worried about David’s talent and popularity, fired from his court but made him a commander in his army. It was thanks to his success in soldiering that the king offered his daughter in marriage to David, while Jonathan, a son of Saul, became his best friend.
Despite all this, Saul became so jealous of David that he threatened to harm him and David had to go on the run for some years, ca. 1008-1000 BC. Yet, after Saul died in battle, David took charge, won a remarkable military victory, and was eventually anointed king of Judah in Hebron around 1000 BC. Seven years later, David completed his conquest the state of Israel to its north, united the people who looked to Yahweh as God in a single state, and moved his capital to Jerusalem. Aiming to build a great temple for Yahweh, David brought the ancient Ark of the Covenant to his new base, and installed it on the planned temple site.
War was a constant during David’s reign, but it was an activity he seems to have excelled at. Between war and clever alliances, he vastly expanded his territory, ruling directly or through puppet states most of what is now Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the most populous parts of Jordan and the southern half of Lebanon.
In around 963 BC, with his health deteriorating, David passed responsibility for building the Temple to one of his sons, Solomon. After some violent fraternal squabbling over the succession, David asks Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet to ensure Solomon would succeed him. This came to pass on David’s death in 961 BC.
What sort of person was David?
David was a skilled rather than a physically powerful warrior, a wise ruler, a clever and inspirational general, someone with a deep concern for spiritual and moral truth, and a musician and poet, with what might controversially be described as a classically artistic volatile temperament to match. For beyond the sort of violence probably necessary for any ruler in a fractious political environment the Ancient world, the biblical narrative says much about his misdemeanours and family feuds, notably the killing of Uriah the Hittite, his deathbed wish for the murder of Joab and Shimei, and his constant philandering.
At the same time, this contradictory figure bravely confronted the Philistine champion Goliath, played music so beautiful it assuaged Saul’s mental illness, was capable of deeply loving friendships, and often refused opportunities for violent revenge.
What parts of the bible talk about David?
David’s story in biblical literature begins with the journey of Samuel to Bethlehem in 1 Samuel 16. His rise to popularity and consequent flight from a jealous Saul is the overriding plot arc in the last sixteen chapters of the First Book of Samuel, which concludes with Saul’s death in battle. The Second Book of Samuel begins with David’s solidification of power and his successes as the second king of Israel (2 Sam 1-10). The second portion (2 Sam 11-14) recounts David’s sins of murder and adultery and the tragedies that result, from the death of his beloved son, to a civil war, the loss of his wives to another man, a second civil war, a famine, and a plague.
1 Kings 1-2 recall a power-struggle to succeed an elderly and bedridden David, who makes his preference for Solomon clear before making a deathbed speech. The rest of Kings follows the stories of Solomon and his successors until the death of the last Davidic monarch in exile in the mid-6th Century.
Samuel and Kings were almost certainly brought together in something approaching their current form during the Babylonian Exile (587-537 BC), although they were based on earlier sources and sometimes make explicit reference to them (see e.g. 1 Kgs 14:29).
Chronicles tells the same story, using Samuel and Kings as its primary source, but was written somewhat later, after the exiles had returned to Jerusalem after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 538 BC, probably in the 5th Century or early 4th Century, when ‘Yehud’ was a quiet backwater province of the prosperous Achaemenid Empire, and the religion of the Second Temple at least tolerated and possibly supported by Persian authorities as an element in the social order.
Chronicles makes only the briefest of mentions of Saul and begins its story of David only at Saul’s death in 1 Chron 10:13; its David narrative concludes at the end of the First Book of Chronicles. Chronicles removes some sections of the Samuel-Kings narrative, but adds some details on administrative divisions and hierarchies, e.g. on musicians and temple guards in 1 Chron 25-26.
Although David was traditionally considered the author of the psalms and 73 of them actually indicate he was their author, it is likely that they were written after his death.
Was David a real person and does it matter if he wasn’t?
The only literary evidence we have for David’s existence is the Bible – although the number of written sources surviving from 3,000 years ago is extremely limited, so we should not be surprised at that. Nor should we dismiss the Bible as a valuable historical document in its own right. There are number of events in the early 1st Millennium BC which are referenced by both the Bible and Assyrian or Babylonian sources: these are not enormous in number but overwhelmingly congruent.
The archaeological evidence is rather conflicted: there is no sign of a vast Babylon-like city at Jerusalem in the 10th Century BC, but nor is one claimed in the biblical texts themselves. There are at least a few remnants (the “Stepped Stone Structure” and “Large Stone Structure”) of substantial 10th Century works in what has always been assumed to be the oldest part of Jerusalem. There have also been extensive excavations of modest, but definitely urban, sites from this period in other parts of the Holy Land. So the idea of David presiding from a capital in Jerusalem is historically plausible.
What is not compatible with the archaeological record, however, is David or Solomon ruling over a wealthy, lavish, empire. The majority position of scholars is that while the biblical stories of David and Solomon may well have been based on the lives of historical figures, they were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Palestine which may have for a time dominated vassals in the region, and were not kings over states with lots of centralised political power.
The period of David and Solomon’s reign may well have become so fondly remembered because it represented a passing but real era of stability, prosperity, and cultural richness for the people of the interior of the Holy Land. Before it came the Late Bronze Age collapse, which brought political chaos, violent population movements, and material poverty around the eastern Mediterranean in the 12th Century BC. Afterwards, from the 9th Century BC, came increasing dominance by imperial powers in Egypt and Mesopotamia, with their constant demands for taxation, tribute, and labour.
For what it’s worth, I think it is overwhelmingly likely that David was a real historical figure. However, I am not sure that it would particularly matter for Christians if that weren’t the case: David’s kingdom remained, after a thousand years, the central myth of the Jewish society of Jesus’ time. It was against this idea of kingship that the Gospels record Jesus defining himself.
Why Was David Important?
Both accounts of David’s life looked back to a Golden Age of power and creativity from a standpoint of national and religious weakness. The Samuel-Kings story did so from a time of utter bleakness – read the final chapter of 2 Kings for a sense of just how black the mood of its compilers was in the 6th Century! Chronicles was written from a time of material comfort and social privilege for the clerical class in Jerusalem, but also of political powerlessness.
The Messiah was understood as being a figure who would restore political power, religious purity, and cultural greatness to the Jewish people just as in David’s story. The very different monarch that Jesus represents is a radical departure from that vision of what it means to be a great nation or a great religious community.
Beyond that, David is a figure both of redemption and of realism about the human condition. His many flaws do not cancel out the undoubted good he does, nor do they prevent God from using David to play a historically important role in His plan for the world. Nor does the fact that he is a low-born younger son of partly foreign ancestry prevent him achieving greatness. Beyond its wider importance to Christianity, therefore, in our own time and place the Davidic story is a powerful one for a society that claims to have a great concern for equality and social justice, but sometimes struggles to deal with its own flaws and indeed the inherently flawed nature of humanity.
Recommended Reading
In Search of King David’s Lost Empire
“The Biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.” by Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker, 29 June 2020
Gerry Lynch
14th October 2022
