How many are the ways we remember David – that striking, brash lad who strides confidently upon the stage of history and, with one well-aimed shot of the sling, launches a career that has bedazzled generations for 3,000 years. We know David as majestic king and lowly shepherd boy, as valiant warrior and soothing singer, as ruthless killer and passionate lover, as enraptured dancer and pious saint.

No other figure has the mysterious magnetism that makes David such a beloved hero. His are tales of intrigue and adventure, tenderness and pain. Courageous, cunning, and complex, David lives life to the hilt. He exudes vitality and vulnerability. Whatever he does, he does with all his might. No wonder it has been said that Israel revered Moses but loved David.

“David in his faults and attainments, his losses and victories, embodies on a scale almost beyond imagining the action of living a life.” So captures the poet Robert Pinsky the meaning of David. Paving the way for Pinsky’s appreciation, the literary critic Harold Bloom observed, David “had exhausted every human possibility yet went on in fullness of being – open to more experience, more love, more grief, more guilt and suffering, more dancing in exuberance before the Ark of Yahweh.” David’s all-eclipsing vitality and passion prompted Bloom to assert famously that the woman who authored the oldest biblical source (“J” or the “Yahwist”) created Yhwh in the image of David.