Young David – episode two
Young David – episode two
In which David, a good shepherd, saves a scared sheep from a bad shepherd.
Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5
The second episode of Young David is now playing on the Minno and Angel streaming services. Like the first, it’s only about six minutes with credits, and once again, it packs quite a few interesting details into its very-brief runtime.
A few quick notes:
We’ve all heard about “good shepherds”, but this episode—in which David saves a frightened sheep from an abusive shepherd—reminds us that there can be bad shepherds, too.
The abusive shepherd in question is Doeg, who says he works for the king—and if you know your Bible, you might recognize Doeg as the guy who snitches on the priests of Nob and then slaughters them for helping David in the early days of David’s fugitive status under King Saul (I Samuel 22:6-23).
In fact, the biblical Doeg doesn’t merely slaughter the priests of Nob, he slaughters the entire town, including “its cattle, donkeys and sheep” (I Samuel 22:19). So, the frightened animal in this episode has reason to be worried about this guy.
I must admit I had never really noticed before that the biblical Doeg is identified in the text as “Saul’s chief shepherd” (I Samuel 21:7)—and I certainly hadn’t thought about the fact that being a shepherd was something he had in common with David. So, points to the Young David team for connecting those dots.
As soon as this episode revealed that the abusive shepherd was Doeg, I started to notice how hairy he was. The hair is significant, because the biblical Doeg was an Edomite (I Samuel 21:7; 22:9, 18, 22), and the Edomites were descended from Jacob’s brother Esau (Genesis 36), and Esau—whose name means “hairy”—is said to have been very hairy from the moment of his birth (Genesis 25:25), so much so that when Jacob pretended to be Esau to deceive their blind father, Jacob had to wear goat skins on his arms and neck to complete the effect (Genesis 27:11, 16, 22-23). So apparently the Doeg of this episode has inherited Esau’s hairiness.
When Doeg first appeared in this episode—and before he identified himself—I wasn’t sure I liked the idea that King Saul’s people would come across as such obvious villains, so early in the story. Why not have David be a patriotic supporter of Saul’s who doesn’t see the royal family’s darker side until he’s on the inside, etc.? But once Doeg said who he was, I was more okay with this. I appreciated the foreshadowing, and I guess it stands to reason that some of the people who did evil things under Saul were already pretty menacing long before that.
This episode also introduces us to David’s sister Zeruiah. The biblical David was the youngest of seven or eight brothers (I Samuel 17:12-14 says he was the youngest of eight, I Chronicles 2:13-15 says he was the youngest of seven), and anyone who has been to Sunday School might remember the story about how the prophet Samuel examined all of David’s brothers before finally anointing David the next king of Israel (I Samuel 16:1-13)—but David had at least two sisters, too, and Zeruiah was one of them (I Chronicles 2:16).
The biblical Zeruiah was the mother of some of David’s chief officers, including his general Joab, so I had always imagined that she was one of David’s older siblings, and that she started having kids around the time that David was born. I imagined, in other words, that David was more or less the same age as Joab and the other officers even though he was their uncle, which wouldn’t be all that uncommon in traditional cultures of this sort, where families tended to be large and people tended to marry early. (Even in my own family tree, I have found examples of families with ten siblings or so, where the oldest sibling had gotten married and started having kids by the time the youngest sibling was born.) But in this episode, Zeruiah is even younger than David, which makes you wonder if there’s even time for Zeruiah to grow up and have kids, and for her kids to grow up and join David’s army, by the time David is hiding from King Saul.1
I honestly can’t recall if we’ve ever seen David’s sisters in a movie before. Also: Zeruiah tells David their mother is calling for him, and I can’t recall if we’ve ever seen her in a movie before, either. (In 2016’s Of Kings & Prophets, which I wrote about at length last year, David says his mother was murdered when he was a boy. But in the Bible, she was still alive when the adult David was hiding from Saul, as per I Samuel 22:3-4.)
David hears Doeg’s sheep from a distance and immediately recognizes that that sheep is “not one of mine.” Hmmm. Jesus talks about sheep recognizing human voices (John 10:2-5), but do humans recognize sheep “voices” too?
David sings in Hebrew to soothe Doeg’s sheep. The words he sings are from the first three verses of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd,” etc.).
Gibor, one of David’s sheep, keeps trying to eat David’s lyre for some reason.
And that about covers it for now, I think.
You can watch a teaser for this episode here:
There are three more mini-episodes coming out over the next three months:
January 12 — “Shepherd”
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)
The biblical David was 30 years old when he became king (II Samuel 5:4), and he has to be at least 10 years old in this episode—probably older—so there is, at most, 20 years in which Zeruiah would have to grow up and have kids, and then her kids would have to grow up and join David’s band, and then they’d have to hide from Saul for a while until David becomes king. There simply isn’t time for all that here. For what it’s worth, the first reference to Zeruiah and her children in the Bible is in I Samuel 26:6-11, when “Abishai son of Zeruiah, Joab’s brother” helps David sneak up on Saul and steal his spear and water jug.