House of David (2025) s1e01

This is the first in a series of posts exploring House of David
You can view them all here. (Image courtesy of Prime Video)

On Friday night I wrote a review of the first part of this series and then, just as I was about to hit publish, got struck by a Blogger glitch that magically deleted all your work in a way that means that you can't get it back. So apologies that this isn't very good, but I've now missed the slot I had to write this and the details are fading fast so this is a little hasty.

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Having recently acquired rights to The Chosen Amazon Prime have just released a new series on Jesus' most famous ancestor, King David. While this stands as an entirely separate production, the connections between the two go well beyond that. Series creator Jon Erwin, best known for a couple of relatively big faith-based hit films I Can Only Imagine (2018) and The Jesus Revolution (2023) is friends with The Chosen's showrunner Dallas Jenkins and even admitted to consulting with him on House of David in an interview with my friends Peter Chattaway. And The Chosen's Jonathan Roumie played The Jesus Revolution's charismatic leader. Meanwhile Erwin's co-director Jon Gunn is best known for another popular faith-based film The Case for Christ (2017).

Yet right from the start House of David brings in other creative influences as well. The show has a very different feel to The Chosen. In that interview with Peter Erwin also talks about the mythical elements of the story and I think he does well to capture that here. There's something about it that seems more, well Old Testament.* Goliath, for example, is not only a giant, but one whose height is significantly greater than the 9'9" mentioned in most translations.^‡ It's apt I suppose because there's a sense in which the characters here are all slightly larger than life. Characteristics and events are exaggerated, in a way that wouldn't work in something like The Chosen.

 

Another influence on the series, which also adds to this sense of the mythical, is the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03). There's a certain circularity here: Tolkein was influenced by the larger than life stories in the Hebrew Bible and the informed his novel, which informed the film adaptations, which is now back influencing this adaptation of David. Another moment that gives these opening sequences a more mythical quality is that some of the battle shots are shown as silhouettes against a coloured background, which was a technique Darren Aronofsky used in his mythic-feeling Noah (2014).

These influences show from the very earliest scenes. The series starts with the first part of the famous fight between David (Michael Iskander) and Goliath (Martyn Ford), before cutting back to David's days as a shepherd boy. This is quite a smart move. While you might imagine that much of the film's Christian audience would know and be interested in some of the other events of David's life, to the casual, less-acquainted viewer, they might only know the David and Goliah story. This potentially draws them in before going back to build the characters.

The story goes back to Bethlehem months earlier and finds David looking after sheep rather than planning on slaying giants. The biggest surprise here is that David is something of a social outcast (he's even defined as such in the opening narration). It turns out that while David is still the son of Jesse (Louis Ferrera) he is only the half brother of Eliab and the others. And while David's mother, Nitzevet (Siir Tilif) has been killed by a lion, that is not the reason he is only a half brother: He's called a "bastard" and described as "illegitimate".

This has been one of the show's most talked about points in the discussion I've seen, as it seems like a bit of a curve ball. It's something that comes out of passages in the Psalms (51:5 "in sin did my mother conceive me." and 69:8 "I am a foreigner to my own family") and was developed in Jewish tradition such that the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Batra 91a) to say Jesse and her were not married. You can read more on that here. The lion has returned to threaten both Jesse's stock and his household and David decides enough is enough and heads off to seek his revenge.

Meanwhile the reigning King Saul (Ali Suliman) has become popular with most (though not Jesse who complains about him in a similar fashion to Samuel's warnings about having a king in the text). He's just defeated the apparently cannibalistic Amalekites and their "blood drinking" King Agag (more larger than life exaggeration of the text). To Saul's mind the utter defeat of the Amalekites and way he has divided the spoils between his men constitute "destroying" them, as he was instructed. 

Unfortunately that's not how God sees things. On this occasion he's in follow-things-literally mode, so he instructs Samuel (Stephen Lang^†) to bring his word to Saul. I won't spoil the climax of the episode for those who haven't seen it, but it makes Samuel the most fascinating character in this opening episode. "Old Testament" in every sense of the word. We have no idea what Samuel would have worn or how he would have looked, but as he stands there with his long white plaited beard, blood-splatted face and defiant stare he makes quite the impression.

The other character who has a significant role in this opening episode is Jonathan (Ethan Kai), who's portrayed as a handsome but wholesome warrior prince. He's one of his father's most trusted military leaders, who Saul sends to investigate an apparent slaughter in an outlying village some way into Saul's territory. There's a pivotal scene here where we see both his tough side, and his sensitivity in how he treats a young boy who is one of the few survivors of the massacre. The scene also reveals a huge bloody hand-print a long way up a wall, foreshadowing the arrival of a foe who has apparently ripped apart some of the bodies with his bare hands.

It's interesting that the actual massacre itself takes place off camera. Partly, I imagine, this is down to budgetary constraints. Such scenes are expensive and complicated to film. But actually I think this aesthetic works well for the series. Back in 2016, I wrote a chapter about David in film for the book The Bible in Motion which I ended by looking at the (then) most recent on-screen David from 2013's The Bible. While the David episode of that series was not the most extreme example, the series seemed to go out of its way to introduce some fairly extreme gratuitous extra-biblical violence.

Now House of David is not made for kids, and people that don't like onscreen violence should be cautious, but I do think the violence that is such an integral part of this story (that Old Testament vibe again) is handled really well, in this episode at least. There is violence, and it's clear that it's a violent time and context, but a lot of the worst moments are kept off-screen or out of shot. The camera doesn't seem to dwell on the violence. It's reminiscent of the way Hitchcock shot the shower-scene in Psycho (1960) without ever showing the knife going into the body.

All in all, then, this is quite a positive first instalment, which actually makes me keen to see the rest of series. We'll see how that bears up as the series progresses, but hopefully it can build on the promise here and give this collection of stories the kind of treatment they really deserve.

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*Whilst I usually prefer the term Hebrew Bible, in the modern vernacular being a bit "Old Testament" has come to convey a sort of larger than life violence in some circles, so I'm using that term in the relevant places on this occasion.  

‡ Though the more reliable manuscripts suggest this was originally 6'9" a similar height to Saul.

† I assume this is not the author of "The Bible on the Big Screen", but it would be fun if it were.