King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (14 page)

“All hail! and peace be both unto thee, and peace be to thy house, and peace be unto all that thou hast,” one of the young men addressed Nabal in ornately respectful words, perhaps resting his hand ever so casually on the hilt of his sword. “For we come on a good day—give, I pray thee, whatsoever cometh to thy hand, unto thy servants, and to thy son David.” (1 Sam. 25:8–9)

One phrase that fell from the lips of the young men—“For we come on a good day”—may have been a reference to the sheep-shearing festival then in progress on Nabal's estate, but the words might be taken as an unspoken threat: “You should see us on a bad day.” Yet Nabal, whose name means “foolish” or “churlish,” rejected their demand with bold but foolhardy contempt.
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“Who is David?” Nabal replied dismissively. “In these days, every slave who breaks away from his master sets himself up as a chief! Shall I then take my bread, and my wine, and the meat I provided for my shearers and give it to men who come from I know not where?” (1 Sam. 25:10–11)
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When these defiant words were reported back to David, he issued an order to his army—“Let every man strap on his sword!”— and four hundred of them set off in the direction of Nabal's estate. As they approached their target, David complained out loud
about Nabal's appalling ingratitude and scolded himself for failing to take the flocks and herds when he first had the chance.

“He has repaid me evil for good,” muttered David, as if to convince himself he was justified in carrying out the rough justice that he intended to visit on Nabal and his household.

The Bible depicts David as a man acting out of righteous necessity. God had anointed him to be king but had done nothing at all to put a crown on his head. Instead, David had been forced into flight by King Saul, and he was responsible for the sustenance of his men and their camp followers, including women and children. Nabal was a rich man with far more than he needed, and they were desperate fugitives who survived on what they were able to scare up.

At this moment, David appears as a kind of Robin Hood, or a Che Guevara. If the churlish Nabal will not give him what he needs to feed his people, David reasons, then he has no choice but to take it by force of arms. And it is a measure of David's charisma that the Bible reader is invited to see him as a heroic figure even when he is acting brutally and criminally. Even on a purely theological plane, David is depicted as a wholly sympathetic figure— after all, he did not
ask
to be anointed as the future king of Israel, and now he has been left to his own devices. To the biblical author who stamped a divine seal of approval on the life story of David, the ends always justify the means: “And David had great success in all his ways, and the Lord was with him.” (1 Sam. 18:14)

Still, the bloodcurdling threat that fell from David's lips seems more appropriate to a bandit or terrorist than a man on a mission from God.

“God do the same thing to me and more,” vowed David as he and his army approached the estate of Nabal, “if I leave alive until morning a single one who pisses against the wall!” (1 Sam. 25:22)
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At least one person in the household was quick to grasp the point of the impending visit by David and his men—Nabal's wife, Abigail, a woman “of good understanding, and of a beautiful form.” Without telling Nabal, she ordered a gift-offering to be prepared for the approaching raiders: “two hundred loaves, and two skins of wine, and five sheep, slaughtered and dressed, and five measures of parched corn, and a hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs,” all of it to be loaded on asses and sent ahead as if to encourage David and his men to just take the stuff and go away. (1 Sam. 25:18)
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Perhaps to mitigate the horror of the threatened atrocity, one of Nabal's shepherds is made to deliver an address justifying David's demands. “David and his men were very good to us, and we were not hurt, neither did we miss anything, when we were in the open country,” the shepherd told his mistress, “they were as good as a wall around us, night and day, while we were minding the flocks.” The real evildoer was Nabal, who “flew upon” David's men when they attempted to “salute our master” and solicit some humble gift in return for their protection. If David now approached the estate with evil intentions toward Nabal and his household, the fault lay with Nabal. (1 Sam. 25:14–17)
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“He is such a good-for-nothing,” the shepherd complained, “that it is no good talking to him.” (1 Sam. 25:17) (NEB)

Abigail's curiosity about David seems to have outweighed any fear she may have felt, and so she mounted an ass and rode out to greet him with the bounty she had prepared. Surely she already knew of his considerable reputation as a war hero and high-ranking officer in the king's army—ruddy, handsome, and fit— who had turned to banditry. There is something of Lady Chatterley in Abigail, who finds a dashing young outlaw more intriguing than her rich but stingy and ill-tempered husband. The fact that one of her servants felt free to refer to her husband as a “good-for-nothing” suggests that Nabal was held in contempt by everyone
in his household. So the Bible allows us to understand that Abigail was already inclined to blame her husband and side with the outlaw.

At first sight of David, she hastened toward him, alighted from her ass, and bowed her forehead to the ground in greeting.

“Let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak in thine ears,” pleaded Abigail in phrases that are both formal and yet flirtatious, “and hear thou the words of thy handmaid.” (1 Sam. 25:24)

Abigail unburdened herself to David, calling her husband a “base fellow” and blaming him for insulting David. “Nabal is his name, and churlishness is with him,” Abigail said. She was careful to let David know that
she
had not received the ten young men he had sent to their estate, as if to suggest that she would have shown generosity from the first.

“And now this present which thy servant hath brought unto my lord,” she said, referring to the bounty she had prepared, “let it be given unto the young men that follow my lord.” (1 Sam. 25:27)

Abigail now delivers a sermon that was surely scripted by one of the more pious biblical sources and inserted into the text to prefigure David's rise to kingship and, at the same time, to soften some of his rough edges. If only David would refrain from the slaughter he intended to carry out—“withhold thee from blood-guiltiness,” as Abigail put it—and if, instead, he used his sword in “the battles of the Lord,” he would be rewarded with “a sure house” and he would be raised to be “prince over Israel.” The soul of David would be “bound in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God,” she predicted, and “the souls of thine enemies shall he sling out, as from the hollow of a sling”—a flattering allusion to the humble weapon that David had used to defeat Goliath. (1 Sam. 25:25–31)

“And when Yahweh shall have dealt well with my lord,” concluded Abigail, calling his attention back to her, “then remember thy handmaid.” (1 Sam. 25:31)
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The florid language of Abigail's address to David cannot quite conceal the romantic and even erotic undercurrents of their encounter—and it seems that David was smitten, too.

“Blessed be Yahweh, God of Israel, who sent you to meet me this day,” he replied, still speaking in the coarse tongue of a bandit rather than the exalted phrases of a psalmist. “If you had not come so quickly to meet me, not a single one of Nabal's household who pisses against a wall would have been left alive by morning.”

David, handsome and dashing, was surely accustomed to the yearnful attention of flirtatious women, and he knew how to flirt back in a manly way. And he must have understood that some women would be aroused rather than put off by his swagger and his crude language. Abigail was one such woman.

“A blessing on your good sense,” said David to Abigail, “a blessing on you because you have saved me today from the guilt of bloodshed.” (1 Sam. 25: 32–35)
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David accepted Abigail's gift of food and wine, and then, signaling his men to turn back in the direction of his camp, he saluted her. “Go up in peace to thy house,” he said. “I have harkened to thy voice, and I have accepted thy person.” (1 Sam. 25:32–35)

That night, as David and his men feasted on Abigail's bounty somewhere in the wilderness, a celebration “like the feast of a king” was held in the grand house of Nabal. Abigail had not yet told Nabal of her encounter with David—so bold and so thrilling—and her husband must have congratulated himself on his own courage in turning away David's men: “Nabal's heart was very merry within him, for he was very drunken.” (1 Sam. 25:36) But she burned to reveal to her foolish husband how close he had come to death, and how it was only her charm and savvy that had spared him from David's sword. And surely Abigail wanted her churlish husband to understand how little she thought of him, and how much she thought of David. So she waited until Nabal had slept off the effects of a night of feasting and drinking.

“And it came to pass in the morning, when the wine was gone out of Nabal, that his wife told him these things,” the Bible reports, “and his heart died within him, and he became as a stone.” (1 Sam. 25:37)

Ten days after his attack of apoplexy—or was it heartbreak
over his wife's infatuation with the bandit-chieftain?—Nabal was out of the way. “The Lord smote Nabal,” the Bible reports, putting a proper theological spin on Nabal's convenient death (1 Sam. 25:38). David thanked God for his good fortune—and then he sent a hasty but confident proposal of marriage to his benefactress: “David has sent us to take you to be his wife,” his messengers explained. Just as quickly, Abigail accepted. “And she arose, and bowed down with her face to the earth,” the Bible reports, “and said: ‘Behold thy handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord’ ”—which David's messengers understood to mean “yes.” (1 Sam. 25:41)

Then Abigail rose to her feet, mounted her ass, and rode away from her dead husband's estate in the company of David's men and five of her maidservants. Promptly upon her arrival at David's encampment, the widow Abigail and the handsome outlaw who had come so close to killing her first husband were wed.

Abigail was only the latest of David's wives—David was still married to Michal, whom he had left behind in Gibeah, and later he managed to pick up another wife in the nearby village of Jezreel,
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a woman named Ahinoam. As befits a king, David was already assembling what would one day become his harem.

Now David and his band and their camp followers sought refuge in a place called Ziph, a remote stretch of wooded hill-country in the land of Judah. But the locals were no more enamored of David than Nabal had been, and they sent a delegation all the way to Gibeah to petition the king to rid them of him. They informed Saul exactly where David was hiding out—“The hill of Hachi-lah,” they reported with military precision, “which is on the south of Jeshimon”
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—and begged the king to march against him. (1 Sam. 23:19)

“O king, come down,” pleaded the men of Ziph, “and our part shall be to deliver him up into the king's hand.” (1 Sam. 23:20)

“Perhaps he is planning some trickery!” the king fretted to himself, and so he insisted on confirmation of David's whereabouts before committing himself to a campaign. (1 Sam. 23:22) (AB) “Go, I pray you, and make yet more sure, for it is told me that he deals very subtly,” King Saul told the delegation. “Find out all the lurking-places where he hides himself, and come back to me—then I will go with you, and if he be in the land, I will search him out among all the thousands of Judah.” (1 Sam. 23:23)
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Whether inspired by his old paranoia or his grasp of strategy and tactics, Saul's demand for a fresh intelligence report turned out to be a sound move. For just as Saul had feared, David had already slipped out of Ziph and headed into the wilderness of Maon.
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When Saul learned of David's latest “lurking-place,” he mustered three thousand picked men and marched toward the mountain stronghold.

The king's army approached the mountain from the side opposite David's encampment. Saul divided his men into two units, sending them around both sides of the mountain in a classic pincer movement. Before he was able to close the circle and cut off any chance of escape, a courier from the royal headquarters appeared with an alarming message.

“Haste thee, and come,” the messenger told Saul, “for the Philistines have made a raid upon the land.”

With the capture of David so tantalizingly close, Saul was forced to break off his attack, turn his army around, and march back to face the Philistines. By the time he returned to the wilderness to resume his pursuit of David, the fugitive was on the run again. But, yet again, David's enemies among his own people betrayed his whereabouts to the king.

“Behold,” the latest informer addressed Saul, “David is in the wilderness of En-gedi.”

En-gedi was (and is) an oasis near the western shore of the Dead Sea, an idyllic place where shepherds watered their sheep at the spring-fed pools of sweet water and wild goats gamboled among the cliffs and outcrops. There Saul ran David
to ground, and the young man seemed within the king's grasp. (1 Sam. 24:3)

A coarse but colorful tale is preserved in the Book of Samuel about the encounter between Saul and David at En-gedi. At an awkward moment during the search-and-destroy mission, the king sought out a cave among the rocks in order to defecate.
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By chance, David and his men were hiding in the deeper reaches of the same cave, and they watched in amazement as the king of Israel squatted on the cave floor and relieved himself in supposed privacy. How easy it would be for David to slip up behind the king at this vulnerable moment and strike him down once and for all!

“The day has come!” whispered David's henchmen in excitement. “Yahweh has put your enemy into your hands, as he promised he would, and you may do what you please with him!” (1 Sam. 24:5)