Rabbi Moshe David Valle (or Vali), son of Rabbi Shmuel, was born in Padua, Italy, at the end of the seventeenth century. A Bible commentator, physician, scholar and kabbalist, he was one of the leading figures of eighteenth-century Italian Jewry.

He studied under the rabbis of Padua together with the Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto), and both received rabbinic ordination on the eve of Sukkot 5486. He lectured on Kabbalah in the Paduan society known as "Mevakshei Hashem," whose sessions the Ramchal attended; according to the scholar Joseph Almanzi, he was in fact the Ramchal's first teacher in Kabbalah. When the Ramchal founded his study circle in 5487, Rabbi Moshe David was one of its leaders and later headed it.

A man of vast learning, he had studied medicine at the University of Padua and was well versed in Scripture and philosophy. In medicine he remained loyal to the tradition of Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna, holding that truth does not change from one generation to the next. At the age of twenty-five he wrote an Italian polemical work against Christianity, "I Sette Giorni della Verità."

His main work is a kabbalistic commentary on the entire Tanakh, spread over dozens of volumes totalling some 15,000 pages, which long remained in manuscript and was later published by Rabbi Yosef Spinner. His method links each verse to the next so that a book reads almost as a single continuous discourse, and it joins the plain meaning and the hidden meaning, the sod extending the pshat without altering it. Works: commentary on the Torah and Prophets, Sefer HaLikkutim (on various subjects, including medicine), and a diary of visions partly published by Isaiah Tishby.

He passed away on Tuesday, 7 Tevet 5537 (December 17, 1776), and was buried in the Jewish cemetery on Via Campagnola in Padua. His tombstone describes him as "the sage, the physician, the divine kabbalist."