[18] According to 1 Samuel 17:25, King Saul said that he would make whoever killed Goliath a very wealthy man, give his daughter to him and declare his father's family exempt from taxes in Israel.

[23] David then took wives in Hebron, according to 2 Samuel 3; they were Ahinoam the Yizre'elite; Abigail, the widow of Nabal the Carmelite; Maacah, the daughter of Talmay, king of Geshur; Haggith; Abital; and Eglah.

In Hebron, David had six sons: Amnon, by Ahinoam; Daniel, by Abigail; Absalom, by Maachah; Adonijah, by Haggith; Shephatiah, by Abital; and Ithream, by Eglah.

David's sons born in Jerusalem of his other wives included Ibhar, Elishua, Eliphelet, Nogah, Nepheg, Japhia, Elishama and Eliada.

God is angered when Saul, Israel's king, unlawfully offers a sacrifice[29] and later disobeys a divine command both to kill all of the Amalekites and to destroy their confiscated property.

[40] From there he goes to seek refuge with the king of Moab, but the prophet Gad advises him to leave and he goes to the Forest of Hereth,[41] and then to Keilah, where he is involved in a further battle with the Philistines.

[45] A similar passage occurs in 1 Samuel 26, when David is able to infiltrate Saul's camp on the hill of Hachilah and remove his spear and a jug of water from his side while he and his guards lie asleep.

To further ingratiate himself to Achish and the Philistines, David and his men raid the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites, but lead the royal court to believe they are attacking the Israelites, the Jerahmeelites, and the Kenites.

[67] In response, Nathan, after trapping the king in his guilt with a parable that actually described his sin in analogy, prophesies the punishment that will fall upon him, stating "the sword shall never depart from your house.

[80] David dies at the age of 70 after reigning for 40 years,[81] and on his deathbed counsels Solomon to walk in the ways of God and to take revenge on his enemies.

[88] According to the parallel narrative in 1 Samuel 21, instead of killing the man who had exacted so many casualties from him, Abimelech allows David to leave, exclaiming, "Am I so short of madmen that you have to bring this fellow here to carry on like this in front of me?

Originally an earthly king ruling by divine appointment ("the anointed one", as the title Messiah had it), in the last two centuries BCE the "son of David" became the apocalyptic and heavenly one who would deliver Israel and usher in a new kingdom.

This was the background to the concept of Messiahship in early Christianity, which interpreted the career of Jesus "by means of the titles and functions assigned to David in the mysticism of the Zion cult, in which he served as priest-king and in which he was the mediator between God and man".

[101] In European Christian culture of the Middle Ages, David was made a member of the Nine Worthies, a group of heroes encapsulating all the ideal qualities of chivalry.

A number of scholars consider the David story to be a heroic tale similar to the legend of King Arthur or the epics of Homer,[117][118] while others find such comparisons questionable.

[12] Other scholars argue that, notwithstanding the apologetic tenor of the story, the authors of Samuel were also critical of David in several respects, suggesting that the text presents a complex portrait of him rather than a purely propagandistic one.

[87] Joel S. Baden has called him "an ambitious, ruthless, flesh-and-blood man who achieved power by any means necessary, including murder, theft, bribery, sex, deceit, and treason".

[128] Two epigraphers, André Lemaire and Émile Puech, hypothesised in 1994 that the Mesha Stele from Moab, dating from the 9th century, also contain the words "House of David" at the end of Line 31, although this was considered as less certain than the mention in the Tel Dan inscription.

[132][133] Later that year, Michael Langlois used high-resolution photographs of both the inscription itself, and the 19th-century original squeeze of the then still intact stele to reaffirm Lemaire's view that line 31 contains the phrase "House of David".

[133][134] Replying to Langlois, Na'aman argued that the "House of David" reading is unacceptable because the resulting sentence structure is extremely rare in West Semitic royal inscriptions.

"[139] In 2007, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman stated that the archaeological evidence shows that Judah was sparsely inhabited and Jerusalem no more than a small village.

[146] According to William G. Dever, the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon are reasonably well attested, but "most archeologists today would argue that the United Monarchy was not much more than a kind of hill-country chiefdom".

[147][148][149] Avraham Faust and Zev Farber argue that David managed to establish a mini-empire through multiple conquests which are archaeologically attested in destruction layers of many urban centers dating to his time.

[151] Isaac Kalimi wrote in 2018, "No contemporaneous extra-biblical source offers any account of the political situation in Israel and Judah during the tenth century BCE, and as we have seen, the archaeological remains themselves cannot provide any unambiguous evidence of events.

Mazar supports this dating with a number of artifacts, including pottery, two Phoenician-style ivory inlays, a black-and-red jug, and a radiocarbon-dated bone, estimated to be from the 10th century.

[161] Aren Maeir said in 2010 that he has seen no evidence that these structures are from the 10th century BCE and that proof of the existence of a strong, centralized kingdom at that time remains "tenuous.

"[158] Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa by archaeologists Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor found an urbanized settlement radiocarbon dated to the 10th century, which supports the existence of an urbanised kingdom.

The Israel Antiquities Authority stated: "The excavations at Khirbat Qeiyafa clearly reveal an urban society that existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE.

"[162] But other scholars have criticized the techniques and interpretations to reach some conclusions related to Khirbet Qeiyafa, such as Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin of Tel Aviv University, who have instead proposed that the city is to be identified as part of a northern Israelite polity.

[163] In 2018, Avraham Faust and Yair Sapir stated that a Canaanite site at Tel Eton, about 30 miles from Jerusalem, was taken over by a Judahite community by peaceful assimilation and transformed from a village into a central town at some point in the late 11th or early 10th century BCE.