The story of the rise of David, a shepherd boy, into a hero, a king and one of the great religious lyricists, is a phenomenal drama that Hollywood has fumbled again and again. For different reasons.

1951’s ‘David and Bathsheba’ was the typical clunky overdramatized spectacle of the era and the less said about Richard Gere as David the better. NBC’s Kings was an interesting, but baffling TV series, setting the struggle between Saul and David in a modern-day New York City ruled by kings.

Amazon Prime ‘House of David’ is more repugnant, but that has more to do with our own age than anything else. Our age is woke, Amazon Prime’s originals are particularly woke and ‘House of David’ starts out by jettisoning the Jewishness of the story in the most woke way possible by replacing both Saul and David with Arab Muslim actors.

David, traditionally seen as a redhead, becomes the latest ‘ginger’ to bite the dust and be replaced by what woke Hollywood decided is a more diverse appearance.

I recently wrote about a William Tell adaptation bringing in Muslim characters to show how diverse 14th-century Switzerland was. Biblical Israel was also apparently a very diverse place. But in typical woke DEI fashion, that diversity only goes one way, sidelining people who ‘look’ the wrong way and replacing them with more ‘diverse’ Arab Muslims who look the right way.

Woke replacement theology stems from the conviction that Jews are colonial invaders in Israel and the Arab Muslim invaders are the legitimate residents. Having transformed Jesus into a ‘Palestinian’, the next inevitable stage is an Islamic reading in which King David is ‘Daoud’, a Muslim, not Jewish figure.

There is no reason why King David needs to be played by a Jewish actor and the role rarely has been played that way. No more than Saul needs to be played by a Jewish actor. But replacing them both with  Arab Muslim actors in a movie that was filmed in Greece and was certainly not a case of staffing lead roles with locals is not a coincidence, it’s a deliberate statement of the woke view of history.

Amazon Prime has long made a point of its diversity quotas which are even more militant than those of any other streamer leading to Rings of Power, a Lord of the Rings multicultural knockoff series, and now a King David story with the protagonist recast to symbolize the replacement of the Jewish population.

What’s at stake in such narratives is that they deny cultural history. The conviction that people in the Middle East must have looked like the Arab Muslims who would later go on to conquer it reverses history. It also covers up the Islamic conquests that actually made much of the Middle East look the way that it does.

An Islamic ‘David’, like an African Cleopatra, also pushes the false genocidal notion that ‘native peoples’ are more authentic as they get darker, and more invasive as they get lighter. This kind of thinking helped justify the ISIS atrocities against the Yazidis, who in many cases had light hair and eyes. It’s used to justify a good deal of the woke racism today.

Woke replacement theology feeds racism and antisemitism. It justifies genocide. And it shows a complete disrespect for the culture and the biblical narrative that it claims to be interested in.