Amanda Cheatwood
Jun 1, 2026
Michael-David is Restoring What the Church Forgot it Lost—The Harp as an Instrument of Prophecy, Intercession, and Spiritual Warfare.
The living room in a quiet Kansas City neighborhood is not where you expect to find a biblical revolution in progress. The furniture has been moved to the walls to make room. A group of women from across the U.S. sit cradling harps of various sizes, their expressions somewhere between attention and awe. The late-winter sun slants through the windows. A small Yorkshire Terrier investigates from the hallway.
At the front of the room, Michael-David is showing everyone how to tune. He explains the mechanics patiently, then pivots without pausing into a meditation on Ecclesiastes, the perfumer's ointment, and the reason one sour note ruins a whole chord. His students follow the turns of his thinking with surprising ease. He has been doing this long enough that the seams no longer show.
This is the Global School of the Prophetic Harp, and it has been convening in classrooms, churches, synagogues and prayer houses — for almost two decades, currently landing in his Kansas City living-room. The curriculum covers scales and chord inversions, yes. It also covers the Melchizedek priesthood, quantum entanglement (the subject of his book Frequency of the Supernatural), and the book of Amos.
“You have come here for combat training,” he tells his students. “I'm going to train your fingers for battle.”
Michael-David is a classically trained musician, inventor, composer, and what he calls a prophetic psalmist. His wife Zsiporah, born Jewish and found faith in Yeshua through a chain of events she describes as unmistakably divine, is his partner in all of it. Together they have built something that resists easy category — part school, part prayer ministry, part ongoing archaeological project into the musical culture of ancient Israel.
And after more than two decades, he believes what he has been doing is only the beginning.
A Man After a Sound
Michael-David grew up in Canada with a gift for music that became apparent early. He trained classically on piano, picked up a Paraguayan Harp one day at a friend’s home and spent a decade playing his harp with a Latin jazz group in the Toronto area. That season left him with strong fingers, an encyclopedic ear, and some useful experience in talking to witches about the nature of God during set breaks.
His faith came dramatically. As a young man, sitting on the steps of a church that preached the social gospel without the living God, he wept and told the Lord he needed to find Him. The encounter that followed — what he describes as a dramatic infilling of the Spirit — changed the trajectory of everything. He eventually joined the staff of Canadian Christian television, working under broadcaster David Mainse, whose discipline of praying one minute for every minute of broadcast time left an impression Michael-David carries to this day.
He saw in the harp a spiritual technology — an instrument woven through the Psalms, present around the throne of God in Revelation.
The harp entered his life as a calling before it became a craft. He encountered the instrument, began to study its presence throughout Scripture, and felt something click into place. He saw in the harp a spiritual technology — an instrument woven through the Psalms, present around the throne of God in Revelation, used by the prophet Elisha to create an atmosphere where the Spirit could move. Second Kings 3:15, which became the logo text of his school, states it plainly: “But now bring me a harpist. And while the harpist was playing, the hand of the Lord came on Elisha."
He began to teach. The school grew. His travels expanded. And, in the way that callings accumulate their own momentum, the harp began to find him as much as he found it.
The Theology Behind the Strings
To sit in one of Michael-David's harp schools is to receive an education in what he calls the paradigm shift from the Levitical priesthood to the Melchizedek priesthood — the shift that, he argues, the church has largely failed to absorb. The Levitical model, he says, created a clergy class, a select few who performed the sacred work while everyone else watched. The Melchizedek model, inaugurated in Christ and available to every believer, makes all of us priests and calls us into the work of intercession, prophecy, and spiritual dominion.
The harp, in his theology, is a primary instrument of that dominion. He cites the twenty-four elders around the throne in Revelation 5, each holding a harp and a golden bowl full of incense — and then shares from the Bible that the incense is the prayers of the saints. The harp, in that picture, is what moves those prayers. Playing the instrument in worship and intercession is not decorative. It is functional.
He grounds this in Amos 9, which prophesies the restoration of the Tabernacle of David in the last days. David's Tabernacle, unlike Moses's, placed the Ark of the Covenant in an open tent, accessible day and night to the Levites and other worshipers who stood before it prophesying with harps. Michael-David sees the twenty-four-seven prayer house movement — thousands of prayer rooms now operating continuously around the world — as a fulfillment of that prophecy in process.
He spent some time at the Jerusalem House of Prayer for All Nations, training their staff and watching the harp become their primary instrument. He took his school to Singapore, where students went home and established harp-led prayer houses in their various towns throughout Asia. He taught in Barbados, in a four-hundred-year-old synagogue where, during a renovation, workers had unearthed a marble carving of the Amos 9 restoration passage — a text not commonly quoted in Jewish liturgy, hidden in stone for centuries and uncovered just as the movement it describes was gaining momentum.
He tells that story with the pleasure of a man who has watched God leave a paper trail.
Kansas City and the Long Prayer
Doors opened for them and they moved to Kansas City. He holds a weekly worship set at the Prayer House every Friday night playing with the group he calls the ‘Three Davids’ — himself and two friends, both named David, who have been studying the harp with him for over a year.
Recently the ‘Three Davids’ took a road trip to the “Communion of America" gathering on the Washington Mall, where more than a hundred thousand people gathered for sustained prayer and intercession, each state represented by its own tent. He had been specifically asked to play in the tent representing Israel. He played sets covering roughly twelve hours over three days. He describes it as a highlight for the three men.
He has taught dozens of harp schools globally — Israel, Singapore, Guatemala, Barbados, Canada, and the U.S., including on the studio grounds where The Chosen was filmed. Each school has this in common — students arrive, each by a different route and each carrying a different thread of the larger story he believes is being woven together. Some have owned harps for months without knowing what to do with them. Some have never touched one. By the end of the week, all of them could play.
The Harpella: Light, Color, and the Circle of Fifths
Alongside his teaching ministry, Michael-David is an inventor, and his most significant invention to date is the Harpella — a patented electronic harp that changes keys at the touch of a button, using MIDI technology and a system of lit strings that visually indicate which strings are active. Unneeded strings are muted, which means, as the company literature puts it, the player cannot make a mistake.
The late David Van Koevering, who worked alongside Bob Moog in the early days of marketing the Minimoog synthesizer and became a mentor and collaborator to Michael-David, called the Harpella “a new kind of musical instrument. There's never been anything similar." The endorsement was not casual. Van Koevering had spent decades thinking carefully about what instruments could do spiritually and sonically, and he saw in the Harpella a genuine innovation.
The Harpella is a new kind of musical instrument. There's never been anything similar.
The practical advantage of the Harpella is accessibility. A player who might spend months learning to flip levers to change keys on an acoustic folk harp can simply click a wheel on the Harpella and land in a new key instantly. For someone who wants to worship, to intercede, to bring the sound of heaven into a room — but who has not yet built the technical vocabulary to do it on a conventional harp — the Harpella removes the barrier.
What the Bible Sounds Like
One of the stranger and more beautiful threads running through Michael-David's work is his engagement with what scholars call the trope system — a set of ancient musical markings embedded throughout the Hebrew Bible, sitting in plain sight for centuries and largely misread as breath marks or punctuation by the cantor tradition.
The Jewish musicologist Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura spent twenty years working through those markings in the twentieth century, eventually concluding that they were a complete melodic notation system, and that the melodies she decoded matched the ancient liturgical traditions of Syrian and Persian Jewish communities whose practices had been preserved in isolation. The book she produced is out of print and worth hundreds of dollars when copies surface. Michael-David found one a long time ago.
In his school, he teaches the Shema — ‘Hear, O Israel’ — using the scale that the trope system produces: a minor key with a flattened second, the haunting half-step interval that characterizes traditional Jewish music and that he calls, simply, the scale of David. He sings it over his students and watches their faces change. The interval carries something old in it. People who have encountered Jewish liturgy recognize it. He believes they are hearing what the Scriptures actually sounded like, and that this matters in ways that are still unfolding.
The skill that was set down in Babylon is being taken back up.
“If I forget you, O Jerusalem," he tells them, quoting Psalm 137, “let my right hand forget its skill." For him, the return of the harp to Jerusalem — and to the prayer houses, and to the church — is a fulfillment of that ancient oath's release. The skill that was set down in Babylon is being taken back up.
The Room and What It Holds
By the last day of the March school, the living room had been reorganized a dozen times. Tables had been moved in and out for meals, chairs rearranged for prayer, harps tuned and retuned and tuned again. A broken lever had been dispatched and replaced. One student had been given a harp by a dying woman who wanted someone to play it well. Another had driven eleven hours and flown through two weather delays to be there. Harps were anointed with oil.
In the final session, before the Shabbat meal and the Friday night worship set at IHOP, Michael-David spoke about the making of a shofar — how the ram's horn is heated until it softens, hollowed out, and twisted into shape — and used it as a picture for the making of a Levite. Heat. Hollowing. The mold of God's purposes. He is not sentimental about difficulty. He has been through enough of it to know what it produces, and he teaches from that knowledge without performing it.
He then blew the shofar over his students. The sound in the small room was enormous and old.
Outside the window, the Kansas City spring was arriving in stages. The tree across the street — the one in front of a building that had been a church, now abandoned — was coming into bud.
What He Is Building
Michael-David is now well into what he describes as a new season of the work.
The Harp of David — his course and ten-string instrument based on the biblical kinnor, like the harp King David actually played — launched publicly in April 2026, arriving at a moment when his thinking about accessible entry points into Davidic worship has crystallized into something he can hand to someone the first day. The Harp of David is a lyre and is paired with an accompanying course built specifically for it, designed so that a complete beginner, even a ten-year-old child can learn the instrument alongside the Biblical stories, the scales, and the spiritual context that make the whole thing coherent. He envisions all generations of a family being able to learn together.
The School of the Prophetic Harp continues to move forward with three upcoming schools this summer. London, England at the end of July, Kansas City at the end of August and finally a mid-September Fall school and retreat in beautiful Muskoka Canada. All the schools are available by Zoom. The students, men and women who have joined in person or on Zoom are tuning their instruments and practicing their scales and, when the moment comes, play over someone who needs it.
Every Monday evening there are weekly online Zoom classes available for those who have already attended the ‘boot camp’ school.
This is how the sound spreads. Not through marketing strategy or institutional backing, but through a living room full of adult students and one harpist who has been at this long enough to trust the process entirely.
The Harp of David: A Biblical Instrument Returns
For years, Michael-David has told his harp school students that the instrument King David actually played — the kinnor of the Hebrew Scriptures — was not the large floor harp of classical orchestras. It was smaller. Portable. The instrument a shepherd boy could carry to the field and play for an audience of one sheep and the Lord of the universe.
The kinnor, which the Bible elsewhere names alongside the nevel as one of two primary harp forms in ancient Israel, is a ten-string instrument. Psalm 33:2 specifies it directly: “Praise the Lord with the harp; make melody to him with the instrument of ten strings." The Sea of Galilee, called Kinneret in Hebrew, takes its name from the kinnor's harp shape. The instrument is woven into the geography of the Holy Land as much as its music.
Michael-David launched his new 10 String initiative publicly in April 2026 in a video announcement from his YouTube channel The Harp of David: a ten-string harp with or without levers, small enough to carry, built to pair with an entry-level course he designed specifically for it.
Why Ten Strings?
The choice of ten strings is not aesthetic. Michael-David reads many of the Psalms references as instruction, and he believes that the ten-string kinnor carries a particular spiritual weight that the full-scale folk harp, for all its beauty, was not designed to carry. The Harp of David is meant to be an on-ramp — an instrument that lets a complete beginner engage with Davidic worship in its most essential form before deciding whether to pursue the full lever-harp curriculum.
“Most people who want to worship with the harp," he explains, “don't need twenty-six strings on the first day. They need to understand why the harp matters and to feel what it sounds like to play before God." The Harp of David course, written to accompany the instrument, covers the pentatonic scales, basic chord positions, and the theological framework of prophetic psalmistry — all calibrated to a ten-string instrument, available with levers that allow key changes.
A Course Built for the Threshold
Unlike the Global School of the Prophetic Harp, which runs as an intensive five-day immersion, the Harp of David course is designed for self-paced learning. Michael-David spent much of early 2026 writing the twelve lessons that form its curriculum, working against a May 1 release date while simultaneously teaching the Kansas City school, running his Friday worship sets at IHOP, and coordinating the planned England harp school.
The course companion has no prerequisites. A student who has never touched a string instrument can work through it and come away with the ability to play basic worship songs, and understand the prophetic and intercessory significance of what they are doing. Michael-David is explicit that the goal of the Harp of David is not to stop at ten-strings but to begin there — to give someone the experience of playing before God on the instrument the shepherd-king carried, and let that experience do its own work.
For those who ask whether the Harp of David lyre is the “real" harp of the Scriptures, he is both careful and enthusiastic. No instrument builder today can reconstruct David's exact kinnor with certainty. What Michael-David is building is a modern instrument in that spirit — ten strings, with or without levers, portable, designed for worship and intercession rather than concert performance. He calls it a “farm team" instrument with a straight face and complete affection. He believes it will produce players who love the harp enough to go further.
He has been watching that happen for almost twenty years. He expects it to accelerate.
The Harp of David is available through harpofdavid.com also michael-david.com The accompanying twelve-lesson course is designed for complete beginners and requires no prior musical training.
Learn more about the School of the Prophetic Harp, the Harpella, and The Harp of David at michael-david.com and harpofdavid.com. Michael-David’s weekly Friday night worship set streams live on his YouTube channel beginning at 9 p.m. Central.
For harp-themed gifts by Zsiporah visit symphonyboutique.shop.