Where is the story of david in the bible

Where does the story of david start in the bible
The life of david in the bible in summary pdf
David children

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Author argues for a more realistic portrait of David than the one found in tradition.

By Steven McKenzie
Associate Professor,
Rhodes College,
Memphis, Tennessee
2000

Western art and literature evince an enormous fascination with the figure of King David. The trend begins with the Bible itself, which devotes more literature to David than to any other character (including Moses and Jesus!), and continues to the present. The last decade has witnessed the publication of at least six books on David (Halpern, Kirsh, Landay, Steussy), including my own, King David: A Biography, and a heated debate on the question of his very existence. Contending that no one had yet undertaken to write a real biography of David (purported biographies tended to be devotional retellings of the biblical story), I set out to fill that void. I did so recognizing that any such biography was actually a portrait or holograph based on my interpretation of the available sources.

The evidence for the historical David outside of the Bible is meager. A fragmentary Aramaic inscription found at Tel Dan

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Who was David?

He had it all: good looks, musical talent, physical strength, and boundless bravery. He slew a fearsome giant when he was just a young shepherd. Later in life, as king, David unified Judah and Israel under the united monarchy. But did he have it all? The biblical texts themselves, from 1 Samuel through 1 Kings, complicate our answer. They portray David uniting the tribal cultures of his time but harboring only division in his family life. He sleeps with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, then sends Uriah off to battle, where David knows he will die. Adultery, rape, incest, and murder happen on his watch in his household, yet psalms of incredible pain and beauty are attributed to him (though history does not affirm Davidic authorship of any psalms). Later, the New Testament writer Luke was keen to point out Jesus’ genealogical ties to David.

Different parts of the Hebrew Bible offer varying views of David—the youth, the man, father, husband, king, political force, and legend. The main narrative about David (in 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel and 1 Kings) tells of David’s ascension

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King David

Ruth Margalit noted:

In the long war over how to reconcile the Bible with historical fact, the story of David stands at ground zero. There is no archeological record of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. There is no Noah’s Ark, nothing from Moses. Joshua did not bring down the walls of Jericho: they collapsed centuries earlier, perhaps in an earthquake. But, in 1993, an Israeli archeologist working near the Syrian border found a fragment of basalt from the ninth century B.C., with an Aramaic inscription that mentioned the “House of David” – the first known reference to one of the Bible’s foundational figures. So David is not just a central ancestor in the Old Testament. He may also be the only one that we can prove existed.

The biblical King David of Israel was known for his diverse skills as both a warrior and a writer of psalms. In his 40 years as ruler, between approximately 1010 and 970 B.C.E., he united the people of Israel, led them to victory in battle, conquered land and paved the way for his son, Solomon, to build the Holy Temple. Almost all knowledge of him is de