Religious role and significance.
In Israel’s religious tradition the royal line, or “house,” of David became a primary symbol of the bond between God and the nation; the king was the mediator between the deity and his people. As in many ancient traditions, the king was thought of as both divine and human. The English word messiah is derived from hameshiach (“the anointed one”), the title of the kings of the line of David. Thus, in later times of disaster, Israel began to wait for a messiah, a new mediator of the power of God that would redeem the people and its land. By designating Jesus as the son of David, Christianity dramatized its conviction that this hope had been fulfilled. David lived in the memory of his people in a double way: as the great founder of their political power and as the symbol of a central facet of their religious faith.
The process by which David achieved this status for himself, his house, and his city may be traced in II Samuel 5–8. When David took Jerusalem, he assumed the rule over its inhabitants and their religious institutions with the cult centred on Mt. Zion. The previous (Jebusite) ruler had been both king and high priest, and played the role of mediator between the city and its deity. There was no precedent for such a mediative and priestly role of kings in Israelite religion, nor of walled cities as the seat of government and worship. Apparently, David simply took over the Jebusite cult on Zion and adapted it to his own (and Israelite) use. Beginning with David and throughout the entire period of the monarchy, for about four centuries, Israel’s worship on Zion gave a central place to the king, not simply as officiant but substantively, as the figure who in his office and person embodied the relationship between God and the nation. In contrast, the premonarchic worship of Israel, at Shechem and elsewhere, had featured a Covenant between God and the people, through their tribal heads, as the bond in the relationship. By taking over and adapting Jerusalem’s ancient cult, David provided Israel with a new worship, one that featured his own status and its sacral significance.
Israel’s God was named Yahweh. David made this name the supreme name for deity in Jerusalem (previously perhaps “Salem”), to indicate his conquest of the city. All former names and titles of deity became attributes or titles of Yahweh, the God of Israel, the conqueror—for example, El ʿElyon (God Most High). While the Israelite name for God displaced all others, the substance of the worship remained similar: Yahweh had created the world and ruled the nations; he had established kingship as the sign and means of his universal rule; and Zion was the seat of his chosen king, David, his anointed. Yahweh himself was enthroned on Zion, and his king sat at his right hand as his regent. David thus continued the line of king-priests that had reigned in Jerusalem from the founding of the city, and, according to a legend that may have developed in this context, the patriarch Abraham had been blessed by Melchizedek, an earlier representative of the line, when he had presented tithes to him.
Having adopted the ancient cult of Jerusalem as a means of giving sacral significance to his royal status and having renamed it the cult of Yahweh, by whose power he had conquered, David also made an important move to make the new shrine and its worship relate to the premonarchic experience of Israel. He brought the ark to Jerusalem and established it as the central object of the cult. According to tradition, it had travelled with Israel in the wilderness and led the way into the land. It was a rectangular wooden box, originally without a cover, that established and located the presence of Yahweh with the people of Israel. So close was the connection that the ark could be addressed as Yahweh. The ark was carried into battle to demonstrate that Yahweh fought for Israel; and it was carried in the wilderness, to show that he travelled with his people. In worship, it was apparently carried in procession in the pilgrimages that were features of the annual feasts. It was a sign and even the embodiment of Yahweh’s presence. David could have chosen no better way of making premonarchic Israelites accept the royal cult on Zion than by incorporating the ark, with all its ancient associations, into the new ceremonial.
David’s adaptation of the Zion cult, with its understanding of kingship as the substance and means of the presence of God on earth, was to have momentous consequences for the religious history of mankind, notably for the experience of the entire Western world. Because of it Jerusalem became the Holy City and David became the prototype of an awaited messiah. As symbol of the Messiah, the return of David, or the coming of David’s “son” stood for the reassertion of the divine rule and presence in history: to judge it, to redeem it, to renew it. David thus became the symbol of a fulfillment in the future, final peace.
In the apocalyptic developments in Judaism that mark the last two pre-Christian centuries, the symbolic role of David stressed his status as divine mediator. The son of David became more emphatically a heavenly figure, the son of God enthroned to rule over the nations of the world. This was the matrix for the rise of Christianity. The new faith 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.