David (Heb., 'beloved'), the second king over Israel. He sprang from a family of Judah, and was the youngest son of Jesse, a man of some substance at Bethlehem. He is described as a handsome youth, 'red-haired, with beautiful eyes, and fair of face,' when he first distinguished himself in Israel by slaying the Philistine giant Goliath. After this heroic deed, Saul took him to his court, and appointed him to a military command. According to another account (1 Sam. xvi. 14-23) it was his skill in playing the harp, and his being sent for to banish the melancholy of Saul by that means, that first led to his coming into contact with the moody king. He had soon to flee from Saul's court, as the king's jealousy of his supposed rival led him to seek David's life; but, by the craft of his wife Michal, Saul's daughter, and the friendship of Jonathan, Saul's son, he escaped, and fled to the country of the Philistines, where, however, he found refuge only for a short time. In the cave (or hill-fort) of Adullam, near Gath, he gathered a troop of 400 freebooters, which afterwards increased to 600, and with which he ranged through the country between Philistia and the Dead Sea, never attacking his king or countrymen, but always their enemies on the west and south, and levying contributions from the people of Judah for his protection of their flocks. The expeditions which Saul led against him frequently put him to great straits, and the difficulty of controlling his irregular force without assuming the offensive against 'the Lord's anointed' becoming ever greater, David left Judah, and became a vassal of the Philistine king of Gath, occupying for a year and four months the town of Ziklag in the desert to the south. After the death of Saul and Jonathan at Gilboa, he reigned seven and a half years in Hebron over the tribe of Judah, while Ishbosheth, Saul's son, ruled the rest of Israel with the help of Abner—probably as a vassal of the Philistines. On the death of Ishbosheth, all Israel chose David as king. He conquered the independent city of Jebus (Jerusalem), the strongest natural fortress in the country, and made it the political and religious centre of his kingdom, building, with the help of Tyrian artificers, a palace for himself on its highest hill Zion (the 'city of David'), and placing the Ark of the Covenant (q.v.) there under a tent—to be replaced under his successor by a temple, for which large collections of materials were made in David's reign. The nucleus of his army consisted of his old bodyguard of 600 gibbōrim (or 'heroes'), from which the officers of the general levy were drawn. A plan is described in Chronicles by which 24,000 were put under arms each month out of the 288,000 able-bodied men who were the fighting strength of the country. There was an additional regiment of life-guards, mostly foreigners ('Crēthi and Plēthi'). In the course of a few years the conquest of the Philistines, Moabites, Arameans, Edonites, and Ammonites reduced the whole territory from Egypt to the Euphrates. During the siege of Rabbah, the Ammonite capital, David committed the greatest sin of his life, his adultery with Bathsheba and indirect murder of her husband. Henceforward 'the sword never departed from his house.' The last years of his long reign of thirty-two years in Jerusalem were troubled by popular disaffection, of which his favourite son Absalom availed himself to attempt a revolution, which nearly succeeded in placing him on the throne, but cost him his life, to David's excessive grief; and shortly before David's death—which was at earliest 1018, at latest 993 B.C.—another such unsuccessful attempt was made by another son, Adonijah, who was aggrieved at the choice of Solomon as his father's successor.
David is by far the greatest of the kings of Israel. The spirit of his rule is beautifully expressed in his 'last (poetic) words,' in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1-7. His personal courage, his skill and unvarying success in war, his foresight and circumspection in government, and his readiness to sacrifice merely personal ends to the welfare of his whole people are especially conspicuous. He 'executed judgment and justice unto all his people.' The foundation of his rich and complex character was his strong faith in Jehovah his God. It was this that distinguished him from Saul as 'the man after God's own heart.' He was no saint in the Christian sense, and in his lapses from veracity, his polygamy, and his cruel treatment of conquered enemies, he followed the customs of his time. But the same unvarnished history which is the sole authority for the dark sides of his character is equally to be believed in its presentation of the brighter sides, and does not support the unfavourable judgment of David expressed by
Bayle, Voltaire, Renan, and others, who would make him out either a licentious, cruel, and hypocritical despot, or simply a child of nature gifted with an equal share of great virtues and great vices.
The historical picture of David fully supports the tradition that 'the sweet singer of Israel' was the greatest poet of his time, and the founder of the sublime religious lyric poetry of the Hebrews, though many of the Psalms are rather productions of the Davidic spirit than of David's own pen. 'At an earlier date,' says Cheyne, 'much labour was rather unprofitably spent in defending the Davidic authorship of psalms transparently non-Davidic. An opposite tendency now prevails. Of the three most distinguished writers, Ewald acknowledges only eleven entire psalms and some fragments of psalms as Davidic, Hitzig fourteen, and Delitzsch forty-four. All of these agree as to the Davidic authorship of Psalms iii., iv., vii., viii., xi., xviii., xix. 1-7, and two out of three as to that of Psalms ix., x., xii., xiii., xv.-xviii., xix. 8-14, xxiv., xxix., xxxii., ci. Kuenen, however, will admit no Davidic psalm, though Davidic passages may have been inserted. In any case, it is quite certain that there are none in the last three books, and the probability is that Ewald's is the most conservative view of the headings at present tenable.'
The reign of David not only determined the political life of Israel, but also its conception of ideal glory. As the succeeding ages grew darker and more troubled, believing hearts in Israel turned back to those days of the kingdom's glory; men felt that only a king like David could restore the theocracy ordained of Jehovah; he formed the prototype for the Messianic hope that Jehovah would send a son of David, who should redeem Israel.