David (Hebrew: דָּוִד, דָּוִיד, David Dāwîḏ; Dawid; Arabic: داود Dāwūd) was a culture hero, and according to the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an, the second king of the United Kingdom of Israel and according to the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke an ancestor of Jesus. His life is conventionally dated to c. 1040–970 BCE, his reign over Judah c. 1010–1002 BCE, and his reign over the United Kingdom of Israel c. 1002–970 BCE.
The Books of Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles are the only sources of information on David, although the Tel Dan stele (dated c.850–835 BCE) contains the phrase ביתדוד (bytdwd), read as "House of David", which some take as confirmation of the existence in the mid-9th century BCE of a Judean royal dynasty called the House of David. The Mesha Stele from Moab, dating from approximately the same period, may also contain the name David in line 12, where the interpretation is uncertain, and in line 31, where one destroyed letter must be supplied by conjectural emendation.
David is very important to Jewish, Christian and Islamic doctrine and culture. In the Bible, David, or David HaMelekh, is the King of Israel, and the Jewish people. Biblical tradition maintains that a direct descendant of David will be the Messiah. In Islam he is considered to be a prophet and the king of a nation. He is depicted as a righteous king, though not without faults, as well as an acclaimed warrior, musician, and poet, traditionally credited for composing many of the psalms contained in the Book of Psalms.
Read more about David: Legend and Legacy
Famous quotes containing the word david:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharp’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit,—the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)