🔼The name David: Summary
- Meaning
- Beloved
- Weak, Flowing
- Etymology
- From the noun דוד (dod), beloved.
- From the verb דוה (dawa), to flow with disease.
🔼The name David in the Bible
David is the youngest of eight (1 Samuel 16:10-13) or seven (1 Chronicles 2:15) sons of Jesse the Bethlehemite, and the first king of the united Kingdom of Israel. He was not the first king of Israel because that was Saul (1 Samuel 10:1). Saul, however, never managed to make peace in Israel.
Popular as this name is nowadays, in the Bible there is only one person named this way. Many names occur more than once, but David's name was never repeated. Perhaps it was for venerative reasons that nobody named their child after the great king David of Israel. The Bible also only lists one Adam, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the list goes on.
The name David (Δαβιδ; Dabid) appears frequently in the New testament, but solely in constructions: Both Joseph and Jesus are called "son of David" (Matthew 1:20, 9:27, Mark 10:47), and Jesus is additionally called the "root of David" (Revelation 5:5, 22:16). The Messiah's reign is referred to as the "kingdom of David" (Mark 11:10) and the "throne of David" (Luke 1:32), and his reign would rebuild the "tent of David" (Acts 15:16). He who is holy can open and no one will shut and vice versa, using the "key of David" (Revelation 3:7). And once Paul refers to a statement occurring in Psalm 95:7, as being "in David," meaning the work of David (Hebrews 4:7).
The name David occurs 59 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.
🔼Etymology and meaning of the name David
Most Bible translators and commentator will render the name David as Beloved, but as always with important names, the etymology of the name David is disputed. But we can't help noticing the distinct similarity of this name with the Hebrew root דוד (dwd) that yields דוד (dod), generally meaning beloved. This word is also the Hebrew word for uncle — 1 Chronicles 27:32, for instance, speaks of דוד־דויד (dod dawid), or "David's uncle":
ידד
The root ידד (yadad) has to do with love, and that mostly in the affectionate, physical sense. Adjective ידיד (yadid) means beloved or lovely. Noun ידידות (yedidot) means love, as in "a song of love" and noun ידידות (yedidut), meaning love in the sense of beloved one.
Curiously, an identical verb ידד (yadad II) means to cast a lot and instead of being kin to the previous, it appears to be related to the verb ידה (yada), which originally meant to cast but which evolved to mean to praise.
That our root has to do with physical fondling and love-making is demonstrated by the verb דדה (dada), which means to move slowly. Noun דד (dad) denotes a women's nipple or breast specifically as object of one's husband's interest.
Unused verb דוד (dwd) probably meant to gently swing, dandle, fondle. Noun דוד (dod) or דד (dod) means beloved or loved one, and may also describe one's uncle. The feminine version, דודה (doda), means aunt. Noun דודי (duday) literally means a "love-bringer" and describes a mandrake. Noun דוד (dud) refers to a kind of pot or jar (perhaps one that was rocked or stirred?).
It may or may not be that the noun יד (yad), meaning hand, also has something to do with this root.
The distinct difference between the name דוד (David) and the word דוד (dod) is that in the name David the letter waw counts for a consonant, while in the word dod it counts for a vowel. A consonant and a vowel are completely different entities and they'll never mean the same, no matter how many times you write them with the same symbol (in this case the waw). If the name was meant to mean Beloved, then it was perhaps given to David after he became king and beloved. In his father's household he wasn't much of a hit, after all.
But then, if this name was meant to mean Beloved, why hasn't history given us the tales of King Dod?
HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament lists David under dod but admits that "the name is conjectured to come from dod, beloved, but the etymology is uncertain. It has been compared with the Mari term dawidum, 'leader,' but this too is unsure".
BDB Theological Dictionary too lists the name David under the derivations of the root dod, but also makes mention of A.H. Sayce's note of a sun-god named Dodo — דודה — which was worshipped in East-Jordan Israel. Zion, now known as the city of David, was then apparently known as the city of the god Dod. But where Dod went the way of the dodo, king David is eternally remembered as the beloved king. And this is curious for more than one reason.
As Joel M. Hoffman writes in his riveting book In The Beginning — A Short History of the Hebrew Language, the Hebrews were the first to use symbols for vowels, and that carried the art of reading and writing off the stage of esotericism and into the common household. It may very well be that at the time of David, the waw still always counted as a consonant, while the use of the waw for the vowel u came after David, and altered the pronunciation of everyday words such as dod but not that of the name David. Oddly enough, the exact opposite happens with the word בית, meaning house, which is now pronounced as the disyllabic bayit but lives on as the monosyllabic beth in names such as Bethlehem and Bethel.
When we assume that the Bible as we know it was grafted upon older sources but was edited to its final form at some time during the Babylonian exile, the Psalms of David are among the oldest original texts in the Bible. Though certainly proud of their country, the Word of God was Israel's most defining cultural element. For many decades now, archeology has looked for traces of the Davidic-Solomonic empire as described in the Bible, but it simply isn't there (see for instance the book What Did The Bible Writers Know & When Did They Know It? by William G. Dever). Perhaps the greatness of David and Solomon was in their contributions to language, and especially written language (see our article on the name Exodus for a more elaborate discussion of this).
But whatever the reason, Israel's identity of a Kingdom is associated with a king whose name is not a regular Hebrew word, but which is spelled identical to the word for Beloved, and pronounced completely different.
Perhaps, and this is a wild guess, the name Dod was altered to David to charge it with the tone of the word דוה (dawa), meaning infirmity, or having the flows:
דוה
The verb דוה (dawa) means to be ill. Noun דוי (deway) means illness. Adjectives דוה (daweh) and דוי (dawway) mean faint. Noun מדוה (madweh) means disease.
This core meaning of this verb probably has to do with a flowing of fluids, and the observation that "someone was ill" literally conveyed that "someone had the flows." The noun דיו (deyo) means ink, which at first glance appears to be due to the fluidic nature of ink. But ink was hardly the only fluid, and this word appears to rather stem from the notion that a solitary human is woefully weak and man's strength lies in his network, which in turn is strengthened both by correspondence and by the preservation of man's collective wisdom in his library.
This curiously connects writing to menstruating (literally "the flow"), which in turn relates the need for written revelation to mankind's failure to conceive; two issues which will both be remedied when the Word is fully revealed within mankind.
King David's legacy obviously has much to do with his contributions to mankind's great library, which would help to explain a connection between his name and the verb to flow with sickness. Furthermore, David's life was tainted with impurities and grief. He was a persecuted fugitive for years, first hunted by his king and father-in-law, and then by his own son. That son was subsequently murdered. Another son raped his sister. David himself killed to get his hands on a woman. Their child died.
King David is remembered as the beloved king, but today he would be reckoned a genocidal maniac, a dictator and a terrorist. With many millions of copies of his lyrics in print, and performances of his work all over the world, any day of the week, King David also holds the distinction of being the best-selling musician of all time.