Of all the characters in the Hebrew Bible, few rank higher in our collective consciousness than David, the first king of Israel. David is truly beloved by all, Jews and Christians alike. We revel in the tale of David defeating Goliath, we hear David's voice in the Psalms he is said to have written, and we see in David all the things we want our forefathers to be, as the ancestor of the messiah. And yet for all the glory we attribute to David's legend, the historical reality tells a different story. The truth about David is far less pretty. Here, Joel Baden reveals the historical David by delving beneath the biblical stories about him--themselves early attempts to portray David in an unrealistically positive light. The biblical account of David is an attempt to shape the events of his life politically and theologically. Once these aspects of the biblical text are understood, we can begin to reconstruct the events that lie behind it, events that are grounded in the context of the ancient Near East and continue to inform modern Israel.