Young David – episode three
In which David looks for a lost sheep during a storm.
Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5
The third episode of Young David is now playing on the Minno and Angel streaming services. Like the first two, it’s only about six minutes with credits.
This episode isn’t as jam-packed with interesting details as the first two were, but it does do a few things worth noting. And so, note them I shall:
The basic story this time is that David plays hide-and-seek with his sheep, and then he has to rescue one of them from a storm. (This episode works really well as a showcase for the animators and the environments they’ve created.)
We are introduced to a new character: David’s brother Eliab.
Eliab looks a lot older than David here, which presumably reflects the fact that the biblical Eliab was the oldest of seven or eight brothers, while David was the youngest (I Samuel 17:12-14 says there were eight brothers, I Chronicles 2:13-15 says there were seven). We don’t know for a fact that David and his brothers all had the same mother—in a polygamist culture like theirs, it’s quite possible they didn’t—but if they did have the same mother, the age gap between Eliab and David could have easily been a decade or more. And that’s before we take into account any sisters who might have been born between them!1
The Eliab of this episode is tall, strong, and handsome—and that seems to have been true of the biblical Eliab, too. In the first story that mentions him, God told the prophet Samuel not to be impressed by Eliab’s “appearance or height” (I Samuel 16:1-13).
The Eliab of this episode also appears to be wearing some sort of military outfit—look at his shoulders, in particular—and it is implied that he spends most of his time away from home. This presumably reflects the fact that the biblical Eliab served in Saul’s army before David did (I Samuel 17:12-31).
Side note: the last reference to Eliab in the Bible describes how his descendants were married to David’s descendants. Eliab’s daughter Abihail married David’s son Jerimoth, and their daughter Mahalath married King Rehoboam, who was the son of Solomon and thus also a grandchild of David’s (II Chronicles 11:18).
At one point in this episode, David looks for the missing sheep in a cave, and he prays. I doubt the filmmakers intended this, but I found myself thinking of the ancient tradition that Jesus was born in a cave near Bethlehem, and I wondered if the cave we were seeing might be that future birthplace.
More sheep names! We met Tali and Gibor in the first episode. This episode introduces Abira (which means “strong” in Hebrew), Yalla (an Arabic word with many meanings that has been adopted into modern Hebrew slang), Nes (which means “miracle” in Hebrew), Tobiah (“God is good”), and Asher (“happy” or “blessed”; it is also the name of one of the twelve tribes of Israel).
As David calls to the sheep, I found myself thinking of the passage in the gospels where Jesus says the good shepherd “calls his own sheep by name” (John 10:3)—and it wouldn’t surprise me if the filmmakers had been thinking of that passage when they made this episode.
And that about covers it for now, I think.
You can watch a teaser for this episode here:
There are two more mini-episodes coming out over the next two months:
February 9 — “Poet”
March 8 — “Worshiper”
These will then be followed by a feature film, called simply David, in 2025.
Past posts on David and Young David:
‘Three — maybe four — Bible-themed projects look for crowd-funding’ (October 24, 2021)
‘Young David animated series coming in 2023’ (June 8, 2022)
‘Livestream news: The Chosen, Testament, The Shift, and more’ (July 6, 2022)
‘Young David series to start streaming next month’ (October 25, 2023)
‘Young David – episode one’ (November 18, 2023)
‘Young David – episode two’ (December 13, 2023)
We know that David and Eliab had at least two sisters, i.e. Zeruiah and Abigail (I Chronicles 2:16-17), but we don’t know where they fit into the family’s birth order.
Within this series, Episode 2 has already revealed that Zeruiah is even younger than David, but that seems implausible to me, for reasons I spelled out in my notes on that episode.
Regarding David’s mother, I am aware of one reference to her in the text—in a passage that tells us David’s mother and father stayed with the king of Moab while David and his brothers were hiding from King Saul (I Samuel 22:1-4)—but the passage in question does not specify whether she was mother to any of David’s brothers, as well.