David ben Amram Adani (14th-century CE) was a Yemenite Jewish scholar renowned for his authorship of Midrash HaGadol,^{[1][2][lower-alpha 1]} a collection of homiletical expositions drawn from ancient rabbinic sources. Adani is believed to have descended from a line of prominent Jewish leaders in Aden,^[3] as he is referred to in one ancient source as "David b. Amram, the nagid from the city of Aden."^[1] Nagid is a title borne by the leader of the Jewish community of Aden from the 12th century.^[1]

Little is known of Adani's life, except that he was a gifted poet. All that which remains of his poetry, however, are the rhymed Hebrew poems which he penned at the introduction to each biblical parashah in the Midrash HaGadol, and one poem written for the liturgies cited on the Day of Atonement, entitled Naḍid er-Raḥamīm (נצ'ד אלרחמים‎), in Judeo-Arabic.^[3] Other poems of his which have survived are a poetic introduction to the Jewish laws of ritual slaughter (Shechita) and a poem in Aramaic signed with his acrostics.^[4]

In his capacity as community leader, he had access to rare books of Jewish literature and oral traditions, of which he frequently cites in his Midrash HaGadol.^[3] Adani's Midrash HaGadol is the most disseminated of all midrashic literature found in Yemen, all of which being hand-made copies of Adani's work, written before the introduction of the printing press in Yemen.^[4] Many of these works are now housed in the manuscript department of major libraries in New York, London and Berlin.

The rhymed poetic openings used by David Adani at the start of each parashah in the Midrash HaGadol are reminiscent of Rabbi Hai ben Nahshon Gaon's midrash Pitheron Torah (Torah Solution), a work thought to have been compiled about 886–896 CE. Their primary intent is to grace the midrashic works under discussion.