The Shepherd King is a 1923 American silent biblical epic film directed by J. Gordon Edwards and starring Violet Mersereau, Nerio Bernardi, and Guido Trento.

The film depicts the biblical story of David (Bernardi), a shepherd prophesied to replace Saul (Trento) as king.

In part due to direct competition from another biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, The Shepherd King was not considered successful.

[1] Generations later, King Saul of Judea defies prophecy by making a burnt offering to prepare for an attack against the Philistines without waiting for the arrival of the prophet Samuel.

David prepares to face the Philistines with only a small military force, while Doeg, a member of Saul's court, warns them of the impending attack.

[2][6] Wright Lorimer and Arnold Reeves wrote a play based on the biblical story of David, titled The Shepherd King ... a Romantic Drama in Four Acts and Five Scenes.

[16] As with many historical films produced by Hollywood studios in the 1920s, including Edwards's earlier Nero (1922), an Italian crew was used;[17] actor Henry Armetta accompanied the production as an interpreter.

[19] Because it was produced largely for promotional purposes, it is unrelated to the rest of the film, although Edwards did provide intertitles that attempted to frame it as a background for the story of David.

Photoplay reported that Edwards's crew avoided potential religious conflict while filming in Jerusalem by having British troops costumed as Arabs.

[26] Moving Picture World's C. S. Sewell also reviewed the film favorably, praising the battle scenes and Bernardi's role as David.

[4] Laurence Reid, writing for Motion Picture News, also considered the film too slow and complained that too much of the plotline was conveyed in intertitles rather than action.

[28] Agnes Smith of Picture-Play Magazine compared The Shepherd King to a "third-rate" Italian opera and deemed it inferior to Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923).

[29] The Shepherd King performed poorly at the box office, primarily due to competition with The Ten Commandments,[30] however other factors contributed to its commercial failure.

[19] The Shepherd King was also marketed as "the World's greatest romance", a tagline recycled from The Queen of Sheba, but the biblical relationship between David and Michal is not overall a romantic one.