David
c. 1040–c. 970 BCE · Ancient Israel
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
1 work in canonPoetry
Influence
The lineage through David
Inspired(7)
who David shaped
- The model for the entire book — Herbert built The Temple as a Protestant Psalter of his own, taking the Psalms as his pattern for the soul speaking to God
- He matched the structure to the source: "The Church" holds the same number of poems as the Psalms divided across the Church of England's liturgical calendar
- He even paraphrased Psalm 23 directly — "The God of love my shepherd is"
Augustine of HippoAncient Rome
via Confessions
- The prayer-book Augustine reaches for when he invents the autobiography
- His Confessions opens inside the Psalter and stays there — David's Psalms are quoted more than every other Old Testament book put together
- Augustine shapes the whole work as psalmic prayer: not a story told about God but one addressed to him, in David's borrowed voice
Dante AlighieriMedieval
- Dante turns the Psalms into the soundtrack of Purgatory — penitent souls climb the mountain singing them, from the Miserere of Psalm 51 to the Asperges me and Labia mea Domine
- Psalm 114, "In exitu Israel de Aegypto," mattered most: in his Letter to Cangrande Dante names it as the very model of his fourfold allegory
- The Comedy isn't quoting scripture so much as living inside its liturgy
- The original devotional voice — penitent, raw, addressing God directly — and the model Donne reaches for in the Holy Sonnets
- Donne recited five Psalms daily as Dean of St Paul's and preached on them systematically; he even wrote a poem praising the Sidneys as 'David's Successors' for their verse Psalter
- The metrical-Psalm tradition shaped his inventive stanza structures — read the Psalms and you hear the source of his religious music
John BunyanEnlightenment
- Bunyan built his allegory on the Psalms line by line, citing them in his margins
- The Slough of Despond resolves on Psalm 40:2 — Help sets Christian on 'sound ground,' the verse's 'feet upon a rock'
- And Christian survives the Valley of the Shadow of Death by reciting Psalm 23 — the verse quoted on the page becomes the literal landscape he walks through
Daniel DefoeEnlightenment
via Robinson Crusoe
- The line that converts a castaway
- Defoe hangs Crusoe's entire spiritual turn on one quoted verse — Psalm 50:15, "Call upon me in the day of trouble" — opened at random from a salvaged Bible
- The Psalms reframe the whole novel: shipwreck and survival seen suddenly in the light of Providence
William ShakespeareShakespeare
via Henry V
- After Agincourt, Shakespeare crowns the victory with the Psalms — Henry calls by name for Psalm 115's "Non nobis"
- The king's "O God, thy arm was here; not to us... ascribe we all" is Psalm 44 turned into a battlefield prayer: give God the glory, not ourselves
- Shakespeare quotes the Psalms more than any biblical book but Matthew — Henry V is one of the clearest places you hear it
In their words
Famous Quotes
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
Biography
About David
Israel's greatest king, warrior, and poet. Traditionally credited as the primary author of the Psalms, David established Jerusalem as the capital and united the Israelite tribes into a kingdom whose memory shaped Jewish identity for millennia.
1 work