People of the Bible

David

King about 1010 to 970 BC · Bethlehem, Hebron and Jerusalem

The shepherd who faced Goliath and became king of Israel. He fell hard, repented, and is remembered as a man after God's own heart.

Picture: King David Playing the Harp, Gerard van Honthorst, 1622. Centraal Museum, Utrecht. Public domain.

His path, in order

1. ShepherdHis father's sheep, at Bethlehem
2. HarpistPlaying for King Saul
3. WarriorGoliath, then Saul's battles
4. OutlawFour hundred men, on the run
5. KingForty years, in Hebron and Jerusalem
6. ForefatherOf Jesus, the Son of David

in numbers

• Smooth stones he chose5
  • From the brook, for his sling
  • One was enough to bring Goliath down
  1 Samuel 17:40, 49
• Times he spared Saul2
  • In a cave, then in Saul's camp
  • His reason: Saul was “the LORD's anointed”
  1 Samuel 24; 26
• Years he reigned40
  • Seven and a half in Hebron
  • Thirty-three in Jerusalem
  2 Samuel 5:4-5
• Psalms headed with his name73
  • Of the 150, in the Hebrew Bible
  • Psalms 23 and 51 among them
  Psalms 3 to 145; Catholic Encyclopedia

did you know?

• No one else in the whole Bible is called David. The name belongs to the king alone, says the Catholic Encyclopedia.

  Catholic Encyclopedia, “King David”

• At the cave of Adullam he longed for water from the well by Bethlehem's gate. Three of his mighty men broke through the Philistine camp to fetch it. He poured it out to the LORD instead: “Is this not the blood of the men who risked their lives?”

  2 Samuel 23:13-17

• The early Church Fathers read his life as a picture of Christ's, says the Catholic Encyclopedia. The shepherd of Bethlehem pointed to the Good Shepherd, and his five stones to the five wounds. Fleeing his son Absalom, he crossed the Kidron Valley, as Jesus did on the night He was betrayed.

  Catholic Encyclopedia, “King David”; 2 Samuel 15:23; John 18:1

• Psalm 72 ends, “Thus conclude the prayers of David son of Jesse.” Yet more psalms headed with his name come later in the book.

  Psalm 72:20; Catholic Encyclopedia, “Psalms”

Born

In Bethlehem of Judah, the youngest son of Jesse. He was thirty when he became king. The Lutheran Missouri Synod dates his reign about 1010 to 970 BC.

Family

His father Jesse was the grandson of Ruth and Boaz. His sister Zeruiah was the mother of Joab, his army commander. His wives included Saul's daughter Michal, Abigail and Bathsheba. Chronicles names nineteen sons, among them Absalom and Solomon, and a daughter, Tamar.

Work

A shepherd, then Saul's harpist and armour-bearer, a commander in his army, an outlaw captain, and king.

Anointed

Three times: by Samuel at Bethlehem, by the men of Judah at Hebron, and by the elders of all Israel at Hebron.

Capital

Jerusalem. He took its fortress, Zion, from the Jebusites and named it the City of David.

Also called

The son of Jesse. The sweet psalmist of Israel, in his last words. The Prophet-King, in the Orthodox Church. King and prophet, in the Roman Martyrology.

Died

In Jerusalem, at seventy, after forty years as king.

Buried

In the City of David. The Catholic Encyclopedia places the grave on Mount Zion. The Jewish historian Josephus says great riches were buried with him.

Wrote

73 psalms are headed with his name in the Hebrew Bible. The Lutheran Missouri Synod calls him “the author of no less than 73 psalms”. 2 Samuel keeps his laments for Saul and his son Jonathan, and for Abner, the commander of Saul's army. It also keeps a song of victory and his last words. More on the psalms below.

In art

With a harp and a crown. As a young man, with a sling, or with Goliath's sword.

feast days

East and West, side by side

West

• Dec29

  Holy David, king and prophet, in the 1916 Roman Martyrology. Lutherans in the Missouri Synod keep the same day.

East

• Jan1

  The Coptic Church, on 23 Kiahk in its own calendar: the departure of David, the Prophet and King.

• Dec26

  The Sunday after Christmas, with Joseph the Betrothed and James the Brother of the Lord, for the Orthodox Church in America. It falls between 26 and 31 December.

Churches on the old calendar keep the Sunday after their own Christmas, which falls on 7 January on today's calendar. The Coptic 23 Kiahk falls on 2 January in the winter before a leap day.

God's word, the Scriptures, the Jewish historian Josephus and the early Church, in their own words.

1. Bethlehem

   His father's youngest son

   Anointed among his brothers

   God sent the prophet Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse's sons as king. Samuel saw the eldest, Eliab, and thought this must be the one. But the LORD said, “Do not consider his appearance or height.” And then: “For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.” Seven sons passed before Samuel, and none was chosen. “There is still the youngest,” Jesse said, “but he is tending the sheep.” They sent for David, and Samuel anointed him in front of his brothers. “And the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward.”

   1 Samuel 16:1-13

2. King Saul's court

   A troubled king

   The harp

   A spirit of distress tormented King Saul, and his servants looked for someone who could play the harp. One of them knew a son of Jesse: “a mighty man of valor, a warrior, eloquent and handsome, and the LORD is with him.” So David came to court. Saul loved him very much and made him his armour-bearer. Whenever the distress came on Saul, David took up his harp and played. “Then Saul would find relief and feel better.”

   1 Samuel 16:14-23

3. The Valley of Elah

   Forty days of taunts

   Goliath

   The Philistine champion, Goliath of Gath, came out every morning and evening to challenge Israel, and no one would face him. David came to the camp with bread for his brothers, and heard him. He offered to fight the giant. “You are just a boy,” Saul said. But David had killed lions and bears to save his father's sheep. He tried on Saul's armour, but could not walk in it. He chose five smooth stones from the brook and ran toward the battle line. “The battle is the LORD's,” he told Goliath. His stone sank into the giant's forehead, “and he fell facedown on the ground.”

   1 Samuel 17

4. Saul's house

   After the victory

   Saul's spear

   After David killed Goliath, women came out dancing and singing: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” Saul was furious. “What more can he have but the kingdom?” From that day he kept a jealous eye on David. While David played the harp, Saul hurled his spear at him, twice. Later Saul sent men to kill him at home. David's wife Michal, Saul's daughter, let him down through a window. Then she laid a household idol in his bed, with goat hair on its head.

   1 Samuel 18:6-12; 19:9-17

5. A field outside Gibeah

   The feast of the New Moon

   Jonathan's arrows

   Saul's son Jonathan loved David “as himself”. He promised to learn whether his father meant to kill David. David would hide in a field. Jonathan would shoot arrows and call to the boy who ran for them. If he called out that the arrows were beyond him, David must flee. Saul did mean to kill him. Jonathan shot, and called, “Isn't the arrow beyond you?” When the boy had gone, the two friends “kissed each other and wept together—though David wept more.”

   1 Samuel 20

6. Nob

   Alone, on the run

   The holy bread

   David fled to the priests at Nob. He asked the priest Ahimelech for five loaves. There was no bread but the consecrated bread, taken from before the LORD, and the priest gave it to him. There too, wrapped in a cloth, was the sword of Goliath. “There is none like it,” David said. “Give it to me.” Jesus later reminded the Pharisees of that day: “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?”

   1 Samuel 21:1-9; Matthew 12:3-4

7. Gath, then the cave of Adullam

   An outlaw

   A madman, then a captain

   He fled to Gath, Goliath's own city, and its king's servants recognised him. So he pretended to be mad. He scratched on the doors of the gate “and let his saliva run down his beard.” The king drove him away. He hid in the cave of Adullam, and his family came to him there. “And all who were distressed or indebted or discontented rallied around him, and he became their leader.” There were about four hundred of them. The headings of Psalm 34 and Psalm 142 set those psalms in these days.

   1 Samuel 21:10 to 22:2; Psalm 34:1; 142:1

8. En-gedi

   Saul hunts him with three thousand men

   The corner of Saul's robe

   Saul went into a cave, not knowing that David and his men were hiding deep inside it. David's men said this was the day God had promised him: his enemy was in his hands. David crept up and cut off a corner of Saul's robe. Then his conscience struck him. “The LORD forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the LORD's anointed.” When Saul left, David called out after him and bowed to the ground. He showed him the corner of his robe. Saul wept aloud. “You are more righteous than I.”

   1 Samuel 24

9. Carmel

   Sheep-shearing time

   Abigail

   David's men had guarded the flocks of a rich man named Nabal. When they asked him for food, Nabal sneered, “Who is David?” David told his men to strap on their swords. Nabal's wife Abigail, “an intelligent and beautiful woman”, loaded donkeys with bread, wine, meat, raisins and figs, and rode out to meet David. She fell at his feet and took the blame. David blessed God, and blessed her: “Blessed is your discernment, and blessed are you, because today you kept me from bloodshed and from avenging myself by my own hand.” Ten days later Nabal died, and David asked Abigail to be his wife.

   1 Samuel 25

10. Ziklag

    News from Mount Gilboa

    “How the mighty have fallen!”

    Saul and Jonathan died fighting the Philistines on Mount Gilboa. When the news came, David tore his clothes, and he and his men wept and fasted until evening. He wrote a lament for them, the Song of the Bow. “How the mighty have fallen!” it cries, three times. Of his friend he wrote, “I grieve for you, Jonathan, my brother.” Then the men of Judah came to Hebron and anointed David king.

    1 Samuel 31; 2 Samuel 1:11-27; 2:4

11. Hebron, then Jerusalem

    King of all Israel

    The City of David

    He was thirty when he became king. He reigned in Hebron over Judah for seven and a half years. Then all the tribes came to him: “Here we are, your own flesh and blood.” They anointed him king over all Israel. He marched on Jerusalem, whose people boasted that even the blind and lame could keep him out. He took the fortress of Zion, named it the City of David, and made it his capital.

    2 Samuel 5:1-9

12. Jerusalem

    The ark comes home

    Dancing before the LORD

    David brought the ark of God, the ark of the covenant, up to his city with shouting and the sound of the ram's horn. Wearing a linen ephod, he “danced with all his might before the LORD”. His wife Michal watched from a window and despised him. She mocked the show he had made of himself before the servant girls. “I was dancing before the LORD,” he told her. “I will celebrate before the LORD, and I will humiliate and humble myself even more than this.”

    2 Samuel 6:12-22

13. Jerusalem

    A word to Nathan by night

    A house for God

    “Here I am, living in a house of cedar,” David told the prophet Nathan, “while the ark of God remains in a tent.” He wanted to build God a temple. That night God sent Nathan back with a promise. David would not build a house for God. God would build a house for David, a line of kings: “Your house and kingdom will endure forever before Me, and your throne will be established forever.” David went in and sat before the LORD. “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far?” Later he told his son Solomon why he could not build it: God had said to him, “You have shed much blood.”

    2 Samuel 7; 1 Chronicles 22:7-8

14. Jerusalem

    In the spring, when kings march out to war

    Bathsheba and Uriah

    David sent his army to war and stayed in Jerusalem. From the palace roof he saw a very beautiful woman bathing. She was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his soldiers. David sent for her and slept with her, and she conceived. He called Uriah home from the war, but Uriah would not go to his own house while the army camped in the open field. So David sent him back with a letter for Joab, his commander: “Put Uriah at the front of the fiercest battle.” Uriah was killed, and David married Bathsheba. “But the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the LORD.”

    2 Samuel 11

15. Jerusalem

    The prophet comes

    “You are that man!”

    The LORD sent the prophet Nathan to David with a story. A rich man had many flocks. When a traveller came, he did not take one of his own sheep. He took a poor man's only lamb, a pet that “was like a daughter to him”, and served it. David burned with anger. “The man who did this deserves to die!” Nathan said, “You are that man!” David said, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Nathan replied, “The LORD has taken away your sin.” But the child Bathsheba had borne him would die. David fasted and lay on the ground for seven days. When the child died, he got up, washed and worshipped. “I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”

    2 Samuel 12:1-23

16. The Mount of Olives

    His son's revolt

    Barefoot and weeping

    His son Absalom stole the hearts of Israel and had himself proclaimed king in Hebron. David fled Jerusalem. He crossed the Kidron Valley and went up the Mount of Olives, “weeping as he went up”, barefoot, his head covered. On the road a man of Saul's family, Shimei, threw stones and cursed him. One of his men, Abishai, offered to cut off Shimei's head. David said, “Leave him alone and let him curse me, for the LORD has told him so.”

    2 Samuel 15:1 to 16:13

17. The forest of Ephraim

    The day of the battle

    “My son, my son”

    David's army met Absalom's in the forest of Ephraim. The king had ordered his commanders, “Treat the young man Absalom gently for my sake.” Riding under a large oak, Absalom caught his head fast in its branches, and his mule went on without him. David's commander Joab found him hanging there and killed him. When David heard, he went up to the room over the gate and wept: “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

    2 Samuel 18

18. Araunah's threshing floor

    After the count of the people

    “Offerings that cost me nothing”

    David ordered his fighting men counted. His commander Joab tried to talk him out of it. Afterward David's conscience struck him: “I have sinned greatly in what I have done.” A plague fell on the land. When David saw an angel striking the people, he prayed, “Surely I, the shepherd, have sinned and acted wickedly. But these sheep, what have they done?” He was told to build an altar on the threshing floor of Araunah. Araunah offered it as a gift. David would not take it: “I will not offer to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” There the plague stopped. There, too, Solomon later built the temple.

    2 Samuel 24; 2 Chronicles 3:1

He wrote no book of his own. His words are kept in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, and in the psalms headed with his name. Outside the section on where the Bible figure quiz places him, every Bible line on this page is from the Berean Standard Bible. The exceptions are Sirach and Psalm 151, from the World English Bible.

Ruth

His great-grandmother, a woman of Moab. Her son Obed “became the father of Jesse, the father of David.”

Ruth 4:17 Jonathan

Saul's son and David's closest friend. On the day they met, he gave David his own robe, tunic, sword, bow and belt. He died beside his father on Mount Gilboa.

1 Samuel 18:1-4; 20; 31:2 Abigail

The wise wife of Nabal. She rode out with food and kept David from taking revenge. After Nabal died she became David's wife, and bore him a son, Chileab.

1 Samuel 25; 2 Samuel 3:3

Saul

Israel's first king. He loved David at first and made him his armour-bearer. Then a song that praised David above him made him jealous, and he hunted David for years. Wounded on Mount Gilboa, he fell on his own sword.

1 Samuel 16:21; 18:6-9; 31:3-4

Samuel

The prophet who anointed him at Bethlehem. When David first fled from Saul, he ran to Samuel at Ramah.

1 Samuel 16:13; 19:18

Michal

Saul's daughter, who loved David and became his first wife. She saved his life by letting him down through a window. Saul then gave her to another man, and David later took her back. When he danced before the ark, she despised him.

1 Samuel 18:20, 27; 19:12; 25:44; 2 Samuel 3:13-16; 6:16

Bathsheba

The wife of Uriah the Hittite, and after his death David's wife. She was the mother of Solomon. In David's old age she and the prophet Nathan made sure Solomon took the throne. Matthew's list of Jesus' ancestors names her as Uriah's wife.

2 Samuel 11 and 12; 1 Kings 1:11-31; Matthew 1:6

Nathan

The prophet who brought him God's promise of a lasting house, a line of kings. Later, after David sinned with Bathsheba, he told him the story of the poor man's lamb: “You are that man!” He helped to crown Solomon.

2 Samuel 7; 12:1-14; 1 Kings 1

Joab

His nephew, the son of his sister Zeruiah, and the commander of his army. He led David's wars and carried out David's order to put Uriah at the front, where he was killed. He also killed Abner, who had led Saul's army, and David's son Absalom. Then he killed Amasa, whom David had made commander in Joab's place. “These men, the sons of Zeruiah, are too fierce for me,” David said.

1 Chronicles 2:16; 2 Samuel 2:8; 3:27, 39; 11:14-17; 18:14; 19:13; 20:10

Absalom

His third son, the most handsome man in Israel. He had his half-brother Amnon killed, for Amnon had violated his sister Tamar. Later he turned Israel's hearts to himself and rose against his father. He died in the forest of Ephraim.

2 Samuel 3:3; 13:1 to 18:15

Solomon

His son by Bathsheba. The prophet Nathan named him Jedidiah, “because the LORD loved him.” David had him anointed king before he died. Solomon built the temple David had planned.

2 Samuel 12:24-25; 1 Kings 1:39; 1 Chronicles 22

Mephibosheth

Jonathan's son, lame in both feet. For Jonathan's sake David gave him back Saul's land. He ate at the king's table “like one of the king's own sons.”

2 Samuel 9

Quiz Who in the Bible are you most like? Answer eighteen plain statements about you, none of them about the Bible, and see how near you land to David. Start Quiz Christian Personality Test Which of eight types are you? Find your own. Start

Peter

He denied Jesus three times, then “went outside and wept bitterly.” Forgiven, he was given the Lord's sheep to feed.

Luke 22:61-62; John 21:15-17 Augustine of Hippo

Dying, he had David's psalms of repentance copied out and hung on the wall by his bed. He read them, and “wept freely and constantly”.

Possidius, Life of Augustine, chapter 31