5 min read

David Climbed a Unicorn Before He Became King

Before David faced Goliath, Jewish legend placed him on the horn of a giant re'em, trapped between a mountain-sized beast and a lion below.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. A Mountain With a Pulse
  2. The Re'em Stands Up
  3. The Promise David Made
  4. Training for What Came After
  5. What the Re'em Was Doing in the Tradition

A Mountain With a Pulse

David was still a shepherd when he climbed a hill and discovered the hill was asleep.

This is not the David most people encounter first. Not the boy with the sling, not the king with the harp, not the sinner or the poet or the fugitive. This is David before the throne, young enough to wander into wonder without recognizing it as something he should run from, walking in the wilderness and paying attention to what the wilderness contained.

He saw a barren hill rising from the plain. The ground looked hard like hide. No flowers grew on it. No roots broke through. The summit had something that looked like a horn. He climbed toward it.

The Re'em Stands Up

The re'em is preserved in Talmud Bavli Bava Batra 73a, the same tractate that holds Rabba bar bar Hana's sea voyage tales, compiled in Babylonia in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The creature is so enormous that a newborn re'em reaches the height of Mount Tabor. The tradition read the re'em as the creature of scripture called the wild ox, translated in some ancient versions as unicorn, a beast of such ferocity that no yoke could hold it and no cage could contain it.

The hill David had climbed was a re'em sleeping in the desert. When it stood up, David was on its back, or on its horn, clinging to the highest point of a creature whose next step would cover the distance of a day's journey. Below him, the ground was impossibly far away. Between him and the ground, a lion had appeared to feed on whatever fell from the re'em's path.

The Promise David Made

The tradition preserved in Gertrude Landa's Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends (1919 CE), drawing on the Talmudic creature lore and the Midrash Tehillim's treatment of Psalm 22, records what David did in this moment. He made a prayer and a vow. If God would bring him safely down from the re'em, he would build a house for God as large as the re'em was tall. The vow is the measure of his terror and his faith together: he named the creature as his standard for the Temple he would not live to build but that his son would complete.

God answered. The re'em knelt, or the re'em passed near enough to a hill that David could step from its horn to solid ground. The lion below, which had been waiting, was no longer a threat once David was on the earth again. He walked away from the re'em and the lion both.

Training for What Came After

The Midrash Tehillim, the aggadic commentary on the Psalms compiled in the Land of Israel between the 3rd and 10th centuries CE, places the re'em story in the context of Psalm 22. The psalm opens: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The tradition heard David composing it on the back of the re'em, with the lion circling below, the feeling of abandonment that comes from being impossibly high with nothing to hold and nothing to fall on safely.

Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, synthesizing the earlier sources, keeps the re'em story adjacent to the Goliath narrative. The wilderness encounters trained David for the battlefield. The bear, the lion, the re'em. Each one larger than the last. Each one survived not through superior size but through the same combination that would later serve him at Elah: alertness, prayer, and the willingness to stay in the moment rather than calculate the odds.

What the Re'em Was Doing in the Tradition

The re'em, the Ziz, the Leviathan, the island-whale of Rabba bar bar Hana: these creatures share a function in the tradition. They are remnants of the original scale of creation, the world as it was made before human dominion reduced it to something navigable. When David climbed a hill and found it alive, he was touching the edge of that original world, the world before the world became ordinary.

The tradition kept these creatures present in its storytelling for the same reason it kept the twilight creations of the sixth day, the ram made before the Akeidah, the mouth of the earth made before Korah: to preserve the knowledge that the world contains more than what is ordinarily visible, that the scale of creation is larger than the scale of daily life, and that occasionally a shepherd boy climbing a barren hill will discover that what looks like geography is actually breathing.

DavidCreaturesPsalmsKingshipMiracles
← All myths

From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends, From Shepherd-Boy to KingJewish Fairy Tales and Legends (Landa, 1919)

David thought he had climbed a barren mountain. Then the mountain stood up.

Landa's 1919 retelling imagines David before the throne, still a shepherd boy with music in his ears. He wanders onto a plain, sees a high hill with a horn at its summit, and climbs. The ground is too hard for soil. No branch grows from the horn. Then the earth beneath him rises and falls like breath.

David is not standing on a hill. He is clinging to the horn of a sleeping re'em, the giant wild creature often rendered as a unicorn in older English Jewish folklore. When it wakes, it lifts him toward the clouds.

The danger changes shape. A lion appears below and roars that it is king of the beasts. The re'em lowers its head in submission, giving David his chance to slide down. But now the boy is face to face with the lion. He draws his knife and steps forward.

A deer breaks into the scene and calls him onto its back. It carries him away faster than the lion can follow, then tells him he is safe because he is destined to become king. Years later, the story says, David remembered the terror of that day in the words of the psalm: "Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns" (Psalms 22:21).

Full source
Bava Batra 73aTalmud Bavli, Bava

Rabbah said: I myself saw a one-day-old wild ox, and it was as big as Mount Tabor. And how big is Mount Tabor? Four parasangs. And the length of its neck was three parasangs, and the resting place of its head was a parasang and a half. It cast forth a ball of dung, and it dammed up the Jordan.

Full source
Legends of the Jews 4:8Legends of the Jews

Before he was battling Goliath or leading armies, David spent a lot of time alone in the desert. The midbar, the wilderness, can be a pretty intense place, but it’s also where heroes are forged. It was during this time, according to Legends of the Jews, that David’s incredible strength really came to the fore. This is David taking on four lions and three bears.. unarmed!

The most incredible story of all involves a re'em. Now, the re'em is a bit of a mythical beast. Some even translate it as a unicorn, though the image of David battling a unicorn seems a little… off.

In Ginzberg's retelling in, Legends of the Jews, David stumbles upon this massive re'em while it’s asleep. Mistaking it for a mountain (can you imagine?!), David starts climbing it. Suddenly, the re'em wakes up, and David finds himself stranded high in the air, clinging to its horns!

In this moment of extreme peril, David does what he knows best: he turns to God. He makes a vow, a neder. If he is saved from this precarious situation, he promises to build a Temple to God that is one hundred amot (ells, a unit of measure) in height – as high as the horns of the re'em itself!

And then, things get even wilder. God sends a lion. Yes, a lion. But this isn't just any lion; this is the king of beasts, radiating an aura of raw power that even the mighty re'em can sense. The re'em, terrified, prostrates itself, giving David the chance to climb down.

Just when you think he’s safe, a deer appears, and the lion, naturally, gives chase. David is saved, not just from the re'em, but from the lion, too!

What does this story tell us? Is it just a tall tale meant to showcase David’s strength? Maybe. But I think it's more than that. It's a story about being humbled, about recognizing our limitations, and about turning to something greater than ourselves when we're faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. It’s also a reminder that even the most fearsome creatures can be awed by something even more powerful. And sometimes, salvation comes from the most unexpected places.

Full source