His father, Jacob Biale, an immigrant from Poland, was a professor of biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his mother, Evelyn, was a teacher who held a master’s degree in mathematics.

After a year as a visiting graduate student at the Hebrew University, he earned his PhD in Jewish History at UCLA in 1977, with Amos Funkenstein.

A third monograph, Eros and the Jews (1997, University of California Press), examined issues of sexuality, gender and marriage from the Bible through the Talmud, the Middle Ages and modern Jewish history.

He served as project director and lead author for a collaborative history of Hasidism, Hasidism: A New History (2018, Princeton University Press), with David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodziński.

He was awarded UC Davis’ highest professional honor, the Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.

David Biale was married for 51 years to Rachel Biale, a writer and social worker (Women in Jewish Law: Their Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance For Today [1984, Schocken Books], Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood [2020, Mandel Vilar Press], What Now: Two-Minute Parenting Tips [2020, Koehler Books], and others).