David

When Samuel arrives at Bethlehem to anoint the future king, Jesse presents seven sons and forgets the eighth, who is out with the sheep. Someone has to go and fetch him. Out of that comes the line that sums up the whole chapter: man looks on the outward appearance, the Lord looks on the heart. David goes back to the field and nothing happens for a while; what pulls him out is a stalled war and a Philistine giant who has spent forty days taunting an entire army.

After the victory comes the long, rough part: Saul, jealous, hunts him for years through the hills of Judah. David lives in caves, feigns madness before a foreign king and leads a band of the discontented and the indebted. Twice he has Saul at his mercy and twice he lets him walk away. Many of the psalms now read in hospital rooms come out of those years — written in the open, not in a palace.

He reigns seven years in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem, which he takes and makes his capital. He brings the ark up into the city dancing before it. And then comes the fall: Bathsheba, and the order to leave Uriah to die in the front line to cover the adultery. The prophet Nathan stands in front of him with a parable about a lamb and takes him apart in five sentences. David's answer — I have sinned against the Lord — and Psalm 51 are the reason his figure does not collapse: the story does not acquit him, but it does not discard him either.

His last years are spent paying for it inside his own house: the rape of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, Absalom's rebellion and death. He dies leaving the throne to Solomon and the plans for the temple he was not allowed to build. The promise of 2 Samuel 7 — a throne established for ever — is the one the New Testament picks up when it calls Jesus «son of David».

David teaches that prayer does not have to be polite. In the psalms that carry his name there is jubilation and there is reproach, there is «the Lord is my shepherd» and there is «how long?». That range is why they still work three thousand years later: they give words to states of mind that usually have none.

And he teaches that repentance is measured by what you do once you are caught. David does not negotiate with Nathan or look for someone to blame: he admits it and he writes. The Bible does not hide his worst chapter — the adultery and the killing are on the record for good — and still calls him a man after God's own heart. Both things stand together.