I wear a Star of David pendant which, occasionally, I twist round so that the star is at the back and not visible. This happens only when I judge discretion to be the better part of valour, for example, when I last had a covid vaccination. The chances that the kindly clinician will give me a vicious jab with the syringe are vanishingly remote but one does not want to arouse hostility in this situation.

It is sometimes argued that a placard often held aloft at pro Palestinian demonstrations depicting a Star of David being thrown into a rubbish bin is merely criticism of Israel which does of course display the star on its national flag. In support of this position, it is then argued that the Magen David is not an authentic Jewish symbol. It is not biblical, they say.

It should be noted that the Hebrew word magen means shield, not star, and magen is attested frequently in the Hebrew bible as a metaphor for the Almighty, who tells Abraham, ‘Fear not Abram, I am thy shield.’¹ This was before the childless Abram received a theophoric syllable, making his name Abraham, father of many.

Moses, in his long address to the Children of Israel, the content of the book of Deuteronomy, tells them that God is ‘the shield of your help.’ ²

David, in his Psalms, sings ‘You O Lord are a shield about me,’ ³ ‘my strength, in whom I will trust; my shield, and the horn of my salvation’⁴ ‘…for the Lord God is sun and shield,’⁵ ‘Israel, trust in the Lord; He is their help and their shield.’ ⁶ There are many more instances of David using magen – shield – as a metaphor for God and an illustration of his relationship with God.

In the liturgy too, the first paragraph of the Amidah prayer concludes, ‘Blessed are You God, the Shield of Abraham,’ and the blessings after the haftarah, the reading from the Prophets, include ‘Blessed are you God, the Shield of David,’ in Hebrew, Magen David.

There are many more biblical and liturgical instances of this phrase, which account for the attachment to the symbol of the six pointed star, bearing the name, ‘Shield of David.’ As for the shield which David carried into his many battles, we do not know what it looked like. The bible is not as descriptive as, for example, the works of Homer, except in the case of the building of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, the template for the later Temples in Jerusalem and here it is a case of specific instructions rather than description: the passages known as the DIY chapters of Exodus. Rarely is there a description of a person beyond the hint of their being well-favoured or tender-eyed, ruddy or tall or, in the case of the Moabite King Eglon, obese.

The six pointed star appears on the cover of the Leningrad Codex, the earliest extant version of the Masoretic text, which is to say a Hebrew bible with the vocalizing marks not found on the scrolls from which biblical passages are read in the synagogue. Housed at the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, the Leningrad Codex was produced in Cairo according to a colophon at the end of the book, in the early eleventh century. It also appears on the mosaic floor of a third century synagogue in Galilee but usage of the symbol occurs also in other cultures.

In Kabbalistic thought, the two intersecting triangles were symbolic of people reaching towards heaven and heaven reaching out towards earth.

In seventeenth century Prague, the Jewish community adopted the six pointed star as their symbol. It appeared on the Altneuschul and across Central Europe, the hexagram was used widely in synagogal decoration and on Jewish gravestones. It appears on most tombstones in Jewish cemeteries.

In 1897 at the First Zionist Conference in Basel, it was chosen as the symbol to be displayed on the flag of the future Jewish State. Blue and white alluded to the blue and white of the traditional tallit, the fringed prayer shawl. The image below is headed, ‘Herzl’s flag’. The Lion of Judah is positioned at the centre of the star. This was dropped from the Israeli flag which centres the intersecting triangles of the Star of David but appears on contemporary municipal seals in Jerusalem.

Notoriously, a yellow Star of David inscribed Jude meaning Jew was the obligatory badge to be worn by Jews in German occupied lands in World War Two. This was used to facilitate segregation, exclusion, ghettoization and eventually the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps.

On Independence in 1948, the star on a blue and white background was chosen as the State of Israel’s national flag. Just as the Jewish star was used in the Third Reich for the ostracism of Jews, the star is used in anti Zionist culture to ostracize Israel, depicted not just discarded in a bin but dripping with blood, sometimes with a different vice named for each of the six points. This, they say, is merely criticism of Israel.

The symbol remains ubiquitous in Jewish communal locations and wearing it as jewellery or on clothing has a stronger pull than ever, despite the arguable risk of arousing hostility.

The word magen, shield, is derived as is gan, garden from the root letters גנן, GNN, to defend. In European languages too, there are etymological connections of gardens with guarding. A garden is an enclosed area, defended by fences or walls.

The Talmud refers to the phrase ‘Shield of David,’ in connection with the verse from the second book of Samuel: ‘I have made for you a great name, like the names of the great ones that are in the earth.’⁷

״וְעָשִׂיתִי לְךָ שֵׁם גָּדוֹל כְּשֵׁם הַגְּדוֹלִים״, תָּנֵי רַב יוֹסֵף: זֶהוּ שֶׁאוֹמְרִים ״מָגֵן דָּוִד״

‘Rabbi Yosef teaches, “This means that people will say, the Shield of David.’⁸

When I was born, here in London, my aunt in Australia sent me a little gold Magen David. I wore it often and somehow lost it, when I was a adult. When I turned seventy, I asked my children to buy me a Magen David on a chain, which they did and I never take it off. It is a star, a shield, a promise and continuity of both time and space.

1. Genesis 15:1 ↩︎
2. Deuteronomy 33:29 ↩︎
3. Psalm 3:4 ↩︎
4. Psalm 18:3 ↩︎
5. Psalm 84:12 ↩︎
6. Psalm 115:9 ↩︎
7. 2 Samuel 7:9 ↩︎
8. Pesahim 117b ↩︎