A human upper-limb endoskeleton has 7 degrees of freedom to achieve various tasks dexterously. Therefore, the biological structures of human arm are attractive to researchers, and in this paper, a 7-DOF (degree of freedom) humanoid arm with cable-driven is presented. For CDHA inheriting the human arm's natural features, it is expected to possess the remarkable advantages of a human arm. Then a critical issue, i.e., the dynamic modeling of the CDHA is conducted based on Lagrangian formulation. For more effective tension control, the optimization method of cable tension distribution is addressed with some restrictions, that is, limiting torque constraints of actuators, tension constraints, controllable workspace and motion performance. At last, several simulations in MATLAB of the dynamic model and tension optimization algorithm are illustrated.