David Climbed a Unicorn Before He Became King

David climbed a mountain and found out it had a pulse.

This is not the David most people meet first. Not the boy with the sling. Not the king with the harp. Not the sinner, poet, fugitive, or warrior. This is David before the throne, still young enough to wander after wonder and brave enough not to run when the ground under him moves.

The Babylonian Talmud's Bava Batra 73a, compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, preserves the giant creature called the re'em. Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 22 expands the image around David. Gertrude Landa's 1919 public-domain Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends retells the scene in David Climbs the Unicorn and Escapes the Lion. Our database also preserves the Talmudic creature tradition in The Re'em, where the beast is so large that a newborn re'em can be mistaken for Mount Tabor.

What Did David Think He Was Climbing?

Landa's David is a shepherd boy listening to birds, brooks, and wind. He hears the world as music before he ever writes royal psalms. Then he sees a barren hill with a horn rising from its summit. The ground is hard like hide. No flowers grow there. No roots break through. Still, he climbs.

At the top, the hill breathes.

The horn is not a tree. The hill is not a hill. David has climbed onto the head of a sleeping re'em, the immense horned beast older English retellings often call a unicorn. When the creature wakes, David rises toward the clouds.

The terror is precise. David is not swallowed. He is not chased. He is lifted beyond any human control. The boy who will later be anointed king of Israel is forced to learn what height feels like before power belongs to him.

Why Does a Lion Appear Beneath the Re'em?

The Talmudic and midrashic versions place David between two forms of strength. Above, the re'em is vast beyond measure. Below, the lion is king of beasts. In Landa's telling, the lion roars that all must bow to him. The re'em lowers its head. That submission gives David a path down, but it also places him in front of the lion.

This is where the story becomes a kingship lesson. David cannot defeat either creature by size. He cannot command the re'em. He cannot overpower the lion. He survives because God arranges a third creature, a deer or gazelle, to draw the lion away and carry him to safety.

The future king's first lesson is dependence. Before David rules, before he writes, before he defeats Goliath, he learns that courage is not the same as control. He draws a knife, but deliverance arrives on hooves.

How Did This Become a Psalm?

Psalm 22 contains the strange plea: "Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns" (Psalms 22:21). The Hebrew term is re'emim, horned wild creatures. Older English translations often used "unicorns," and Jewish folklore leaned into the image.

Midrash Tehillim reads the verse not as metaphor alone but as memory. David calls out from between the lion and the re'em because, in the legend, he has been there. The psalm is not just poetry after danger. It is testimony from a body that once shook on the horn of a living mountain.

That is how rabbinic imagination treats a difficult verse. It does not flatten it. It asks what kind of life would make those words literal. Then it gives David that life.

Why Give David This Story Before Goliath?

David's later battle with Goliath in (1 Samuel 17) is the famous giant story, preserved in our collection as David and Goliath and the Wilderness. The boy faces the armored warrior, rejects Saul's armor, and brings him down with a stone. But the re'em legend gives David an earlier encounter with impossible size. He has already stood on something too large for him. He has already watched God turn danger into escape.

That earlier lesson changes the later one. Goliath is huge, but not larger than the beast that lifted David into the sky. A royal threat is frightening, but not stranger than a mountain with breath. David can walk toward the Philistine because the world has already taught him that size lies.

The shepherd boy climbed what he thought was a hill. He came down knowing that kings are not made by height, force, or roar. They are made by the God who hears from the horns of the re'em.