Who Is King David
The short answer
Ask "who is King David?" and you'll get two true answers at once. He is the man God chose: as a young shepherd, David was anointed by the prophet Samuel long before anyone else recognized him. And he is the man Israel eventually accepted: a king made through years of exile, alliance-building, civil conflict, and hard political work. The Bible refuses to separate those two stories, and that refusal is the key to understanding him.
The first movement is quiet and private. Samuel anoints David while Saul still sits on the throne, so in one sense David is already king in God's eyes. But nothing about his life changes overnight. He spends years as a fugitive, leading a band of fighters on the run from Saul. From the standpoint of the reigning government and its loyalists, David looks less like a king-in-waiting and more like the head of an insurgency. When Saul dies, David is not simply handed the crown; he is first anointed by his own tribe of Judah, and only gradually does the rest of Israel come around.
So who was King David, finally? Not a static icon, but a flawed, ambitious, gifted man whose messy rise the biblical narrators tell with unusual honesty. Yet the books of Samuel frame all that human ambiguity with poetry. Hannah's song near the beginning and David's last words near the end both insist that God is resolved to raise up an anointed king for the good of his people. The narrative shows us the man in all his complications; the poems show us the office he carries and the divine purpose behind it. David is both at once: the person and the promise, the politician and the anointed one.
What scholars say
These two excerpts answer the question from opposite ends: Goldingay traces how David actually becomes king, through both God's anointing and a gradual, conflict-ridden process of public acceptance, while Brueggemann shows how the poems that bracket the books of Samuel set David's ambiguous rise within God's resolve to raise up an anointed king for his people's well-being.
“David’s story as a whole offers some support for both understandings of how someone becomes king of Israel. It involves both God’s anointing and people’s acceptance. Long ago, God sent Samuel to anoint David as the person who was to replace Saul. Henceforth you could perhaps say that in God’s eyes David is king. But David becomes king in practice, in Israel’s life, only when the people accept him. That will turn out to be a gradual, human, political, messy, conflictual process. Politically, David’s position overlaps with that of the leader of an opposition group that has been seeking to overthrow the government. From the government’s viewpoint and now from the viewpoint of Saul’s supporters, he is a terrorist. Because his base lies in Judah , where he comes from, that is where he goes for his first human anointing.”
“The two poems stand together at the center of the appendices and serve as a critical summary of royal ideology. As noted earlier, this poem and the song of Hannah (I Sam. 2:1–10) serve as lyrical-theological affirmations that bracket the entire story of David and kingship. In the narrative account of the books of Samuel, we are given access to the ambiguity of David’s rise and rule. The poems at beginning and end, however, place all of that historical concreteness under the discipline and affirmation of royal certitude. The poems at beginning and end articulate God’s resolve to have “an anointed king,” God’s resolve to use the anointed one to bring well-being, and God’s power to raise up a king congenial to God’s purpose (I Sam. 2:10; II Sam. 23:1).”
What it means for you
David's story is a comfort for anyone living in the gap between what God has said and what life currently looks like. God's choice of David was real long before it was visible, and the road from anointing to throne ran through misunderstanding, opposition, and years of waiting. If you feel called to something you cannot yet see, David suggests that delay and mess are not signs of God's absence.
It also invites honesty. Scripture doesn't airbrush its greatest king; it trusts God's purpose to hold even a deeply flawed life. You don't have to hide your complications to be usable.
In context
David's story unfolds across 1 and 2 Samuel. He enters as a shepherd boy anointed by Samuel in 1 Samuel 16, rises in Saul's court, then spends long chapters as a hunted outlaw. After Saul's death, 2 Samuel traces his step-by-step path to the throne: anointed first by Judah, then by all Israel, followed by his reign, his failures, and his family's turmoil. Bracketing the whole account are two poems, Hannah's song in 1 Samuel 2 and David's last words in 2 Samuel 23, which frame the entire messy narrative theologically.