You're listening to the Bible for normal people the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete ends and I'm Jared bias.

Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast today we are talking about the historical David not to be confused with the not historical day that I guess.

Yeah, you'll have to just listen to the podcast professor Joel Baden. Yeah, Joel teaches at Yale and you know he's a big guy in Hebrew Bible and he writes all sorts of stuff and including a book that's relevant for today's episode.

It's called the historical David the real life of an invented hero. There's your hint exactly if that's not a provocative lead in to the six. I don't know what it really is. All right, let's get to it.

You know our modern idea of history, you know, quote unquote as it actually was or this sort of objective. I'm just going to tell the facts, ma'am sort of historical writing. That's not something that existed. I don't know probably until a couple hundred years ago.

All right, Joel. Thanks for being here. It's great to have you on the podcast. My pleasure. Well, let's let's talk about David.

Shall we? That's the David and the Bible and just give us a 30,000 foot overview of where the story is found first of all and and just what this long story of David contains generally.

Sure. So we pick up the story of David appearing on the scene right in the middle of the book of first Samuel.

So and it's going to last through the rest of first Samuel, all of second Samuel and and trail off into the first couple of chapters of first kings. So we're talking about actually almost unthinkably large amount of text devoted to really the biography of one character.

There's really nothing else like it in the Bible. Moses has got a bunch of stuff obviously in the in the Torah or the Pentateuch, but it's not biographical so much.

This is really David's story. It places him as really the central character of the entire Hebrew Bible where we are, of course, is that you know we've we've we've gotten being in first Samuel.

We've left the world of the judges of Samson and Deborah and all of them and we've come to Israel's first thing resembling a king in Saul, David's predecessor and Saul has had his ups and downs mostly downs.

And we know already from the Saul story that God is upset at Saul and is going to raise up as the text famously says a man after my own heart to replace Saul and that's going to be David.

And so David enters the scene in the middle of Saul's reign just as God has turned his affections away from Saul incomes David to to step up to the plate as it were.

The story itself it's a ramble. It's an epic. It's it's it's kind of amazing in its scope. We've got David as a youth in the David and Goliath story famously.

You know you picture this little this teenage kid. You know I think he should be scrawny even if the paintings don't always make him that way.

You got the this kid facing off against the giant. He's got battles that he wins. He has marriages multiple marriages more than you'd think one guy would need but I'd not want to judge.

And he's got kid problems story about who's going to succeed him.

Which one of his sons is it going to be it ends up being Solomon that's a whole story unto itself.

There's rebellions against him by his own kids. Absalom most most famously. He's in power. He's out of power. He's back in power.

He's hated by the people. He's loved by the people. And in the end you know he dies a happy death of old age.

You know not before he's passed on some advice to Solomon on how to you know keep the family in power.

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