National David Day

The David in the marble was the David of scripture: the youngest son of Jesse, a shepherd who killed the Philistine giant Goliath with a sling and a stone. The victory made him a hero. The crown came later.

As the second king of Israel, he captured Jerusalem and made it his capital. Tradition credits him with composing much of the Book of Psalms, where almost half the entries are headed "A Psalm of David."

The name's biggest run came much later, and far from the Holy Land. David first appears in US Social Security records in 1880 at 18th place. It climbed for decades, then surged after World War II.

In 1960 it reached number one, the most popular boys' name in the country. It stayed in the national top five every year into the late 1980s, a grip on the chart that few names have matched.

The observance that honors all of this is the one part of the story no one can date. National David Day has no founder on record and no establishment document. It lives on holiday-listing sites and in social posts each September 8, an undocumented coda to a name three thousand years old.