A Real King (1 Samuel 16: 1-20: 42‪)‬

As Saul crumbles under the weight of kingship, a young man rises to take his place: David. As Jonathan Kirsch observes in King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), the story of David is “a work of genius that anticipates the romantic lyricism and tragic grandeur of Shakespeare, the political wile of Machiavelli, and the modern psychological insight of Freud. And just as much as Shakespeare or Machiavelli or Freud, the frank depiction of David in the pages of the Bible has defined what it means to be a human being.” King David is “a symbol of the complexity and ambiguity of human experience itself.”

In
The History of the Jews, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967, p. 34), historian Abram Leon Sachar adds: “[David] played exquisitely, he fought heroically, he loved titanically.” God said of David: He is a “man after [my] own heart” (1 Samuel 13: 14). David is one of the greatest characters in world literature; he is also my favorite character in the Bible.