696 



DAVID 



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 

 i 600, and with which he ranged through the countiy 

 between Philistia and the Dead Sea, never attack- 

 ing his king or countrymen, but always their 

 enemies on the west and south, and levying con- 

 tributions from the people of Judah for his protec- 

 tion 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 

 i 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 independ- 

 ent 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 gibborim 

 ( 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 coun- 



, try. There was an additional regiment of life- 

 guards, mostly foreigners ( ' Crdthi and PISthi ' ). 

 In the course of a few years the conquest of the 

 Philistines, Moabites, Arameans, Edomites, 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, 



rof 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 govern- 

 ment, and his readiness to sacrifice merely personal 

 ends to the welfare of his whole people are especially 

 jconspicuous. 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 aftei; God's own heart.' He was 

 no saint in the Christian sense, and in his lapses 

 .from veracity, his polygamy, and his cruel treat- 

 ment 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 presenta- 

 tion 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 produc- 

 tions of the Davidic spirit than of David's own 

 Een. 'At an earlier date,' says Cheyne, 'much 

 ibour was rather unprofitably spent in defending 

 the Davidic authorship of psalms transpai'ently non- 

 Davidic. An opposite tendency now prevails. Of 

 the three most distinguished writers, Ewald acknow- 

 ledges only eleven entire psalms and some frag- 

 ments 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 con- 

 servative 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 pro- 

 totype for the Messianic hope that Jehovah would 

 send a son of David, who should redeem Israel. 



David, or DEWI, ST, the patron saint of Wales, 

 first mentioned in the Annales Cambrice ( 10th 

 century) as having died in 601, Bishop of Moni 

 Judeorum, or Menevia, afterwards St David's. 

 He presided over two Welsh synods, at Brefi and 

 at ' Lucus Victorife. ' A rich legendary history 

 supplements these meagre but authentic details. 

 Rhygyfarch tells that he was grandson of King 

 Ceredig, and a pupil of Paulinus, that he journeyed 

 through Wales preaching and working miracles, 

 visited Jerusalem, and denounced Pelagianism at 

 Brefi with such triumphant loudness that he was 

 made by acclamation metropolitan Archbishop of 

 Wales. Giraldus follows Rhygyfarch in his life, 

 and Geoffrey of Monmouth supplements it further 

 by making David the uncle of King Arthur, and 

 locating the metropolitan see first at Caerleon, 

 whence it was transferred by David, with the sanc- 

 tion of Arthur, to Menevia. 



David I. (often called ST DAVID), king of 

 Scotland, was the youngest of the six sons of 

 Malcolm Ceannmor and Sb Margaret (q.v.). Born 

 in 1084, he was sent in 1093 to England along with 

 his sister Matilda (who in 1100 married Henry I. of 

 England), and remained for several years at the 

 English court a residence that powerfully affected 

 his after career. There, as his contemporary 

 William of Malmesbury puts it, he was ' polished 

 from a boy ' until he ' had rubbed off all the rust of 

 Scottish barbarity.' 



In 1107, when his elder brother Alexander suc- 

 ceeded to the throne, David, by express bequest 

 of Eadgar, became Prince of Cumbria, a territory 

 which, besides part of the modern shire of Cumber- 

 land, included the whole district between the 

 Tweed and Solway and the Firths of Forth and 

 Clyde, except the shires of Haddington, Edin- 

 burgh, and Linlithgow. Over the greater part of 

 this domain he appears to have held absolute sway. 

 Alexander seems at first to have been inclined to 



