David is described in the Hebrew Bible as the second king of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. In the biblical narrative, David is a young shepherd who first gains fame as a musician and later by killing Goliath. He becomes a favorite of King Saul and a close friend of Saul's son Jonathan. Worried that David is trying to take his throne, Saul turns on David. After Saul and Jonathan are killed in battle, David is anointed as King. David conquers Jerusalem, taking the Ark of the Covenant into the city, and establishing the kingdom founded by Saul. As king, David arranges the death of Uriah the Hittite to facilitate his adultery with Bathsheba. According to the same biblical text, God denies David the opportunity to build the temple and his son, Absalom, tries to overthrow him. David flees Jerusalem during Absalom's rebellion, but after Absalom's death he returns to the city to rule Israel. Before his peaceful death, he chooses his son Solomon as his successor. He is mentioned in the prophetic literature as an ideal king and an ancestor of a future Messiah, and many psalms are ascribed to him. Historians of the Ancient Near East agree that David probably existed around 1000 BCE, but that there is little that can be said about him as a historical figure. There is no direct evidence outside of the Bible concerning David, but the Tel Dan Stele, an inscribed stone erected by a king of Damascus in the late 9th/early 8th centuries BCE to commemorate his victory over two enemy kings, contains the phrase ביתדוד‬, bytdwd, consisting of the Hebrew words "house" and "David", which most scholars translate as "House (Dynasty) of David". Ancient Near East historians generally doubt that the united monarchy as described in the Bible existed. David is richly represented in post-biblical Jewish written and oral tradition, and is discussed in the New Testament. Early Christians interpreted the life of Jesus in light of the references to the Messiah and to David; Jesus is described as being descended from David. David is discussed in the Quran and figures in Islamic oral and written tradition as well. The biblical character of David has inspired many interpretations in fictional literature over centuries. […] Intertextuality in the Hebrew Bible: The Book of Samuel calls David a skillful harp (lyre) player and "the sweet psalmist of Israel." Yet, while almost half of the Psalms are headed "A Psalm of David" (also translated as "to David" or "for David") and tradition identifies several with specific events in David’s life (e.g., Psalms 3, 7, 18, 34, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63 and 142), the headings are late additions and no psalm can be attributed to David with certainty. Psalm 34 is attributed to David on the occasion of his escape from Abimelech (or King Achish) by pretending to be insane. According to the parallel narrative in 1 Samuel 21, instead of killing the man who had exacted so many casualties from him, Abimelech allows David to depart, exclaiming, "Am I so short of madmen that you have to bring this fellow here to carry on like this in front of me? Must this man come into my house?"

Note: The Book of Psalms (Tehillim, or "praises"), commonly referred to simply as Psalms, is a book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. Taken together, its 150 poems "express virtually the full range of Israel's religious faith". Jewish tradition posits that the Psalms are the work of David (seventy-three Psalms are with David's name), based on the writings of ten ancient psalmists, including Adam and Moses. Muslim tradition maintains that the Psalms, known as Zabur in the Quran, were revealed to David by God in the same way that the Torah was revealed to Moses and the Quran to Muhammad. Many modern scholars see them as the product of several authors or groups of authors, many unknown.

Note: Solomon, according to the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles, a King of Israel and according to the Talmud one of the 48 prophets, is identified as the son of David, also called Jedidiah in 2 Samuel 12:25, and is described as the third king of the United Monarchy, and the final king before the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah split; following the split his patrilineal descendants ruled over Judah alone. The Hebrew Bible credits Solomon as the builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem, and portrays him as great in wisdom, wealth, and power, but ultimately as a king whose sin, including idolatry and turning away from Yahweh, leads to the kingdom being torn in two during the reign of his son Rehoboam. Solomon is the subject of many other later references and legends. In the Qur'an, he is a Prophet, known as Sulaiman. Solomon is also noted as one of many authors of Wisdom Literature. The apocryphal / deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon, along with the books of Sirach, "are the familiar personalities and the events of Israel's history combined with the wisdom tradition. Much of this literature, however, is attributed to Solomon." Solomon became a favorite author and contributor of different kinds of wisdom literature, "including not only the collections of proverbs, but also of Ecclesiates and the Song of Solomon and the later apocryphal book the Wisdom of Solomon." Rabbinical tradition attributes the Wisdom of Solomon to Solomon although this book was probably written in the 2nd century BC. In this work Solomon is portrayed as an astronomer. Other books of wisdom poetry such as the Odes of Solomon and the Psalms of Solomon also bear his name. The Jewish historian Eupolemus, who wrote about 157 BC, included copies of apocryphal letters exchanged between Solomon and the kings of Egypt and Tyre. The Gnostic Apocalypse of Adam, which may date to the 1st or 2nd century, refers to a legend in which Solomon sends out an army of demons to seek a virgin who had fled from him, perhaps the earliest surviving mention of the later common tale that Solomon controlled demons and made them his slaves. This tradition of Solomon's control over demons appears fully elaborated in the early pseudographical work called the Testament of Solomon with its elaborate and grotesque demonology.