A woman named Linda left a five-star review on our King David course on Bible Plus this past week. She wrote: “I absolutely love the study of King David, Israel’s greatest warrior king from the tribe of Judah. What an inspiration!”
What an inspiration.
I smiled when I read that, because Linda may not have realized just how precisely she chose her words. The book of Psalms — 150 prayers that have sustained Jews and Christians through exile, grief, illness, war, and wonder for three thousand years — exists precisely because King David needed inspiration. Not the warm, motivational kind. The desperate kind. The kind you reach for when you are hiding in a cave, hunted by the king you served, with no clear end in sight.
That is where the Psalms were born.
After David’s stunning victory over Goliath, his career should have launched into a clean upward arc. He married the king’s daughter. He became the king’s son’s best friend. The people loved him. He had every reason to expect that the throne was simply a matter of time. Instead, King Saul — consumed by jealousy and increasingly unhinged — turned on David entirely, and drove him into the wilderness.
For years, David lived as a fugitive. He hid in caves. He built a ragged band of followers. He never knew if today would be his last. And yet, in all of that — he wrote.
I have set the Lord always before me, he wrote: “I used to set the Lord before me, back when life made sense.”
Always. From the cave. From the wilderness. From the place where God felt most absent, David addressed God most directly.
Rabbi Tuly Weisz, who served as a consultant on the new Angel Studios film about King David, poses a striking question in our Bible Plus course on David’s life: what would we have lost if David had simply received the kingdom on a silver platter? If Saul had recognized David’s greatness early, handed over the crown, and spared everyone the drama?
The answer is devastating in its simplicity: we would have lost the Psalms.
Because the Psalms are not the poetry of a man whose life went smoothly. They are the prayer book of a man who experienced abandonment, betrayal, fear, and grief — and refused to stop talking to God through all of it. David’s suffering did not interrupt his relationship with God. It deepened it. It gave it vocabulary. It gave the rest of humanity vocabulary too, for every moment when our own words run dry.
This is what makes David singular among Israel’s kings. Saul built the political architecture of the monarchy — he unified the tribes, established legitimacy, secured Israel’s borders. That was essential work. But David, as Rabbi Tuly puts it, breathed a soul into the body Saul had built. And that soul came directly from the years Saul spent trying to destroy him.
There is something almost unbearable in that irony. The very persecution that was meant to break David produced the most enduring spiritual literature in human history. The caves became a cathedral. The exile became a seminary. The hunted man became the voice of every human soul that has ever felt hunted, lost, or forgotten by God.
Linda called David an inspiration. She is right, of course. But the Psalms invite us to ask: inspired by what, exactly? Not by his victories. Not by the crown. By the wilderness. By the waiting. By the years of not-yet, when God’s timing had not arrived and David chose — against every human instinct — to trust it anyway.
If you want to go deeper into the life of King David — the shepherd boy, the exile, the dancer before the Ark, the man after God’s own heart — Rabbi Tuly Weisz’s three-part course is waiting for you on Bible Plus. He brings to it not only decades of biblical scholarship but the unique perspective of someone who helped shape the new David film, and who lives, teaches, and breathes this material in the land where David himself once ran.
The course is available now, exclusively for Bible Plus subscribers — $5 a month, and the Psalms alone are worth it.
3,000 years of inspiration. In-depth Bible study right at your fingertips.
