David the Prophet in Saʿadya Gaon’s Commentary on Psalms and its Syriac and Karaite Contexts (original) (raw)
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King David is one of the most colorful heroes of Jewish myth. Warrior and poet, sinner and penitent, conqueror and musician, adulterer and Messiah. The many facets of his character are rooted in biblical scripture, and continue to develop in the literature of the Midrash and the Kabbalah. Each generation has added new layers to David’s portrait, sketching him in a new light. Indeed, David’s personality reflects the characters and hopes of his interpreters throughout generations. Embodying the hero “with a thousand faces” and representing the messianic idea, David is not only a private character but a collective entity, wearing many different forms. The paper aims to examine the identification of David with Jerusalem and with the figure of the Shekhinah, from Psalms to the book of the Zohar.
David (Daud) is revered in the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam variously as a king, prophet, and musician, providing the inspiration for what can be called the “Davidic tradition,” expressed in text, sound, ideology, and image. The scriptures associated with David are central to this tradition: within Judaism and Christianity they are the Psalms, human praises or entreaties to God; within Islam, the Zabūr is revered as a divine prophecy revealed to the prophet Daud, according to the Qurʾān. David’s musicianship and the identity of his instruments are understood differently in Jewish-Christian and Islamic traditions, and are interpreted in accordance with contrasting theological precepts of music and sound. A number of Christian-Muslim encounters in the seventeenth century resulted in dialogue, debate, and observations about the divergent religious interpretations of David, and the relation of these to music. This article examines accounts of such encounters invoking David, from Aceh, Spain, Hungary, Socotra, Turkey, and the Maldives, and explores aspects of the complex relationship between Psalms, Islam, and music, from Christian and Islamic viewpoints.
Reading and Remembering: Approaches to the Prophet David in the New Testament and the Qur'an
The king-prophet David is a very important figure in both Christian and Muslim religious perspectives. Yet the stories recorded in these traditions are quite different from one another. This difference sheds light on the different approaches of the New Testament and the Qur'an to the previously revealed Scriptures. For the comparative theology approach used in this study, the place of narratives or story fragments in the texts is important. After introducing the key role of narratives in both shaping and illustrating worldviews, we examine in detail the David material in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), the New Testament and the Qur'an. This examination includes both the Tanakh chapters that record the life of David in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles and the Qur'anic stories about David. In addition, the place of David's Psalms or the Zabur in each book is examined. Then, by juxtaposing these partially overlapping accounts of David, we see how each fits into the two different worldviews of the Bible and the Qur'an. Much of the comparison involves arguments that arise from the fact that some of the Davidic themes emphasized in the stories told on one side are absent from the stories told on the other. In particular, it is clear that the Qur'an does not use the Messianic content of the Davidic material found in the Psalms and the Later Prophets. At the same time, this comparison shows that the concept of the "Messiah" son of David and David's prophecies foretelling the Messiah are central to the New Testament, whereas they are downplayed or absent in the Qur'an. We also see the difference between the New Testament's direct quotation of many Davidic passages (and the Psalms) in relation to the Messiah and the Qur'an's "invoking" David to support its own different agenda. Where New Testament readers also read the book of David, Qur'anic readers remember David. To what extent do Muslims and Christians "remember" the same David? Like many other characters referred to in the Qur'an, Dawud appears to have a very limited resemblance to his biblical counterpart.
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The main purpose of this article is to portray King David as a prophet in the Targum Jonathan to the Books of Samuel. We first analyze the question where and how David's prophetic character is shown implicitly in the texts of the Hebrew Bible. We also ponder when the concept of David as a prophet was born. Against this background, the paper analyzes the pericopes in the Targum Jonathan to the Books of Samuel that explicitly mention David as a prophet (TgJ 2 Sam 18:3; 22:1-51; 23:1-7). The targumist's alteration of the Masoretic Text was intended not only to portray David as a prophet, but also to reinforce the authority and stature of his statements.