King David
"This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the Earth may know that there is a God in Israel."
- 1 Samuel 17:46
In the late 11th century BCE, young David of Bethlehem wasn't exactly on the fast track to babes, riches, and using the skulls of his enemies as ornamental wine goblets adorning a table filled with messing badass lemon meringue pies, ostrich burgers, and other delicious stuff along those lines. No, instead the man who would become King David of Israel was stuck tending sheep on his father's crappy farm in the middle of nowhere, kind of like Luke Skywalker messing tooling around Tatooine when he should have been out there slicing the faces off of weird disgusting aliens and crushing peoples' colons with his mind. This kind of work didn't really give David an opportunity to showcase his powers of Yahweh-powered, Philistine-smashing badassitude, but he did develop a reputation for being kind, charismatic, strong, and brave enough to fight off rabid, sheep-eating wolves with little more than a giant messing stick and a disregard for the slavering fangs of nature's most perfect predators.
Pretty much everybody who met him realized that there was something special about this kid, even if they didn't exactly realize that the Jehovah Force was strong with this one.In addition to being able to smash coyotes and other lupine/canine sheepavores over the head with a stick until they started convulsing, David also had a reputation for being a pretty ultra-bitchin' lyre player. One day King Saul of Judah was bumming hard about some stupid crap that was pissing him off, so he called David in to wail out a couple of flaming solos and cheer up the depressed monarch. David busted out some insane Van Halen shit, and Saul was so pumped up by this kid's sick chops that he hired him on as his personal house musician.
David hung out for a while, learning the ways of war and impressing hot babes with his awesome and inspirational power ballads, until one day Israel went to war with a group of people known as the Phlistines.In case you're not down with the Old Testament, the Philistines were basically a bunch of jackasses who spent the better part of the Bible messing with the Israelites, killing their people, and exerting their will over the Chosen People of God for no reason at all. The toughest and most hardcore of these guys was a dude named Goliath of Geth - a gargantuan, scrotum-crushing maniac who was like a Biblical mix between Chewbacca and a planet-eating robot.
Basically, Goliath was a messing dickhead who thought he was the baddest shit ever created. Before the war even got started, this monster of a man stepped forward wearing a full suit of spiked metal armor and carrying a sword large enough to slice open the space-time continuum, thumped his chest, and dared anybody in Israel to heck with him Even though nobody really wanted a piece of this roid-raging psycho, David was not impressed. He called Goliath's bluff, walked out to meet the bastard, and prepared to give this guy the righteous assbeating he was obviously asking for. This kid probably looked like Adam Sandler going up against Ivan Drago when he stepped out onto the battlefield, but David didn't even give a shit.
He took two steps forward, pulled out his messing sling, and winged a goddamned rock into Goliath's face with enough force to explode the giant's brains out the back of his head. After watching this heinous shit go down, the Philistines quickly decided that they didn't want anything to do with a guy who could use a messing rock to generate the same force as a twelve-gauge shotgun, so they dropped their spears and ran for it like a bunch of bitches. David hacked the giant's head off with his own sword and carried his hard-earned trophy around to impress the ladies and show his friends who the toughest motherheck er in the Middle East really was.
David pawns Goliath by stepping on his face St. Michael-style.
David's improbable, badass, "Appalachian State defeats Michigan"-style victory earned him the respect of his people, and he soon became incredibly popular and universally recognized as an ultimate Israelite badass. Dudes dug the fact that he went on to become a General and lead Israel's armies to victory on numerous occasions, while chicks were all about his movie star good looks.
Even King Saul's daughter was all about David - when she basically threw herself at the Hero of Israel, he asked for the chick's hand in marriage. King Saul told David that he could only marry his daughter if he killed 100 Philistines. David went out, killed them all, cut off their junk, and brought a huge sack of severed dongs back to Saul. Saul, for his part, had a tough time turning down the request when presented with such compelling evidence.
Eventually Saul got jealous and drunk and pissed and tried to assassinate David, but our hero escaped and fled into the Wilderness. He went on some RPG video game-style adventures out there, championing the underprivileged, defending Jewish settlements from desert raiders, and plundering the camps of marauding Dark Elf tribesmen, and became so popular with the people that when King Saul was killed in battle with the Philistines the Hero returned home and was placed on the throne of Judea.As the totally righteous King of Israel (and I use the term "righteous" to mean both "holy" and "bitchin"), David did a bunch of awesome shit like conquer/build Jerusalem, bring the Ark of the Covenant into town, and marry a shitload of hot Jewish bikini babes. When he wasn't overthrowing the Philistines, conquering any neighboring civilization stupid enough to alert him to their presence and forging a massive empire from the blood of his enemies, he also found time to write pretty much all the Psalms in the Bible.
Psalms is like the hugest section of the entire Good Book (there are like a thousand of them or some shit), so you know this guy was so face-meltingly eloquent it made Shakespeare look like an off-the-boat New York cabbie with a speech impediment and a very rudimentary understanding of the English language. David kind of pissed God off when he banged some guy's wife and then sent the dude off to die on the front lines of a war, but eventually it was all good in the hood - David married the chick, knocked her up, and their second kid went on to become King Solomon, the dude who built the Temple and apparently some mines or something as well. Solomon was kind of a big deal.
King David ruled Israel for 40 years, brought his people to prominence as a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East, and is now remembered as a kind, just, and respected ruler who administered his court with honor and crushed his enemies by smashing them repeatedly in the face with a Medieval cattle prod cranked up to ten billion jiggawatts. He established the first Jewish Kingdom in Israel, died peacefully of old age on a gold-encrusted bed surrounded by thousands of hot women, and is now considered a total badass by all three Abrahamic Traditions.Shit, even the Mormon's think he's cool.
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