Star of David, Star of Solomon, or Star of Sheriff?

As someone living in a country that has the Star of David on its flag, the furor over the Trump campaign’s re-tweet of an anti-Hillary Clinton graphic image strikes me as farfetched. Taken by itself, the original tweet’s image of a solid red hexagram wouldn’t have made me think of such a star had I spent a whole day staring at it. It simply doesn’t look like one. The six points of a Star of David are the vertices of two interlocking and fully visible equilateral triangles, the sides of which are clearly delineated; in an ordinary hexagram like that shown in the tweet, this is not the case. Saying that every hexagram is reminiscent of a Star of David is like saying that every circle calls to mind a nuclear-disarmament symbol, even though the latter is bisected, as is no other circle, by a vertical line met by two shorter lines running symmetrically to it from the circumference.

But let us go from geometry to philology. What does the biblical David have to do with the hexagram named for him?

The first thing to observe is that in Hebrew, in which the expression apparently originated, the Star of David is not called a Star of David. It is a Shield of David, magen David. Nor is this a biblical expression, even though the word magen appears dozens of time in the Bible, sometimes in a literal sense (as when David laments, in his elegy for Saul and Jonathan, “The shield of the mighty has been tarnished, the shield of Saul”), and sometimes in a figurative one (as in Psalm 144, which begins “A psalm of David: blessed be the Lord my strength . . . my shield, and He in whom I trust”).