ABSTRACT
Pictorial narratives depicting the life of King David are rare in third-century art and appear primarily in the baptistery and synagogue found in the Syrian city Dura-Europos. In contrast, Byzantine art features a wider array of David images. As Henry Maguire has shown, these images are structured according to the rules of rhetoric to make politically charged comparisons between the biblical king and the current emperor. Though less often considered in this light, the synagogue images can also be understood in connection to the Jewish messianic politics of the Late Antique period. Unlike the later Byzantine images that tend to balance peaceful and warlike aspects of David’s character as a point of comparison for the emperor, the synagogue images present a peaceful, pious figure who eschews violence. Some scholars have assumed that the David images are therefore unrelated to the expectation for a messiah, a saviour figure who would defeat the Romans and restore Israel to its former glory. But an alternate reading suggests that the images respond to a different kind of messianic expectation: a political quietism in the wake of the dramatic Bar Kokhba defeat that emphasized passive, pious expectation for divine intervention and privileged a humble messiah, installed as king by God himself.
