1 Samuel 21 — There Is None Like That; Give It Me
David comes alone to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest, who trembles: Why art thou alone? David answers that the king has sent him on secret business and his servants are waiting elsewhere. He asks for five loaves; there is no common bread, only the hallowed bread, which the priest gives on condition that the young men have kept themselves from women — the shewbread taken from before the LORD that day. A servant of Saul is there, detained before the LORD: Doeg, an Edomite, chief of the herdmen. David asks for a weapon, and is given the sword of Goliath, wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod: There is none like that; give it me. Then he flees to Achish king of Gath. The servants of Achish know him — Is not this David the king of the land? did they not sing, Saul his thousands, David his ten thousands? Sore afraid, David feigns madness, scrabbles on the gate and lets spittle run down his beard; and Achish asks whether he has need of mad men, that this fellow should be brought into his house.
“So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was no bread there but the shewbread, that was taken from before the LORD, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away.”
— 1 Samuel 21:6
- v.1-6 Alone at Nob — the king's business, and the hallowed bread
- v.7-9 Doeg the Edomite; the sword of Goliath behind the ephod
- v.10-15 To Achish of Gath — the song remembered; David feigns madness
The hallowed bread is the shewbread of Leviticus 24:5-9 — twelve loaves set before the LORD each sabbath, then eaten by Aaron and his sons... in the holy place. By the letter of the Law it was priests' food only. Ahimelech weighs the need against the rule and gives it, asking only the ordinary ritual purity required of men on a campaign (Exodus 19:15; 2 Samuel 11:11). The priest is not careless about holiness; he judges that hunger in God's servant is a holy claim.
David's reply (v. 5) is obscure in places — the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in a manner common — and readers take it variously: that the men's bodies or gear are clean, or that bread already removed from the table is no longer strictly sacred. Whatever the precise sense, Jesus took this scene as settled teaching: have ye not read what David did... how he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread? (Matthew 12:3-4). Mercy, He said, is what the sabbath and its rules were for.
The narrator explains: the loaves had just been changed, so what David received was the week-old bread taken from before the LORD — still holy, but on its way to the priests' table. Jesus cited this in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 12; Mark 2; Luke 6) when His disciples were accused of breaking the sabbath by plucking corn. His point was not that David was above the Law but that the Law's rules about holy things serve human need, not the reverse; the sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27).
One difficulty should be named. Mark 2:26 says this happened in the days of Abiathar the high priest, whereas the priest here is Ahimelech, Abiathar's father (22:20). Proposed explanations include that the Greek phrase means in the passage about Abiathar, that Abiathar was the better-known name and already served with his father, or that in the days of covers a lifetime. None is certain; the reader should know the question exists rather than be told it does not.
A single sentence placed in the middle of the scene, like a stone in a shoe. Doeg is an Edomite — a descendant of Esau in Saul's service — and the chiefest of the herdmen, a man of standing. Detained before the LORD is unexplained: a vow, a purification, a sabbath, a sanctuary obligation of some kind; the Hebrew does not say, and guesses should be held loosely. What matters is that Saul's man saw everything, and David saw him seeing it (22:22).
The narrator plants him here so that chapter 22 will not surprise us. Doeg will report the bread and the sword to Saul and then do with his own hand what Saul's Israelite guards refused to do (22:17-18). Psalm 52's heading ties that psalm to his report — when Doeg the Edomite came and told Saul — and its opening, why boastest thou thyself in mischief?, has long been read as David's verdict on the man. Here he is merely a servant standing in a sanctuary, saying nothing.
The sword David had drawn from the giant's own sheath (17:51) has been laid up at the sanctuary as a trophy of the LORD's victory, wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod — how it came from David's tent (17:54) to Nob the text does not say. Now the weaponless fugitive receives it back from a priest. There is none like that — not only because of its size, but because of what it remembers: the day the battle was the LORD's.
There is an irony the narrator surely intends: in the next verse David carries Goliath's sword into Goliath's own city. Achish is the king of Gath (v. 10), and David arrives with the blade that killed Gath's champion. Whether he hoped to be unknown there, or thought a king at war with Saul would welcome Saul's enemy, we are not told; the plan, if it was one, fails within a verse. Years later Achish will take him in (27:2-6), but not today.
The women's song (18:7) has crossed the border. Philistine courtiers know it, and they draw from it the conclusion Saul drew: David is the king of the land — a title no Israelite has given him, spoken first by enemies. The praise that made Saul jealous now makes David a prize in Gath, and the man who fled his own king is in danger from the king he fled to. The song will be sung against him once more at Aphek (29:5).
David laid up these words in his heart, and was sore afraid (v. 12). The man who faced Goliath without fear is afraid of Goliath's king — and the narrator does not hide it. Psalm 56's heading sets it when the Philistines took him in Gath, and its answer is the one David found there: what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. Fear and faith in the same man on the same day is not a contradiction in Scripture; it is the ordinary life of the godly.
David's escape from Gath is not a miracle but a performance: he feigned himself mad, scratching at the gate and drooling into his beard — a humiliating sight, and the narrator describes it plainly. Madness was widely feared and avoided in the ancient world, and Achish wants no part of it (vv. 14-15). The LORD's anointed, who carries the sword of Goliath, is thrown out of a Philistine court as a lunatic. The text lets the reader feel how low the man after God's own heart has come.
Two psalm headings are attached to this episode: Psalm 56, when the Philistines took him in Gath, and Psalm 34, when he changed his behaviour before Abimelech; who drove him away. The name Abimelech in that heading, where our chapter has Achish, is usually explained as a dynastic title of Philistine kings (as in Genesis 20 and 26), though that is a traditional solution rather than a certainty. The headings are ancient but are not part of the psalm texts proper; they are presented here as the tradition presents them.
Notice how far a frightened man can fall in a single chapter — a lie to a priest, a Philistine court, spittle on the beard — and that God did not let go of him. If you are at Gath, scrabbling on the gate, Psalm 34 was written on the way out: this poor man cried, and the LORD heard him. Then take Ahimelech's judgment with you: when holy rules meet real hunger, Jesus says the rules were made for the hungry. Be careful, though, with David's lie. It looked harmless and it emptied a town. Tell the truth to those who help you, even when the truth is dangerous; they have a right to know what they are risking. And when your past victories are handed back to you — the sword of Goliath — remember whose they were.
Jesus Himself made the first Christian reading of this chapter: have ye not read what David did, when he was an hungred? (Matthew 12:3). The rejected anointed one, hungry and hunted, fed with the bread of the Presence by a priest who put mercy above rule — the church has seen in it a shadow of the greater David, who declared Himself Lord even of the sabbath and the true bread given to the hungry. The sword taken from the slain enemy and kept behind the ephod recalls, for Christian readers, the weapon of death turned on death at the cross. And the psalms born in Gath — what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee; this poor man cried — became the prayers of the One who in Gethsemane was sore amazed and still said, not what I will.
Nob, a priestly town near Jerusalem (Isaiah 10:32), is where the tabernacle service seems to have continued after Shiloh's fall, with Ahimelech — the son of Ahitub (22:9), and so of Eli's line (14:3) — at its head. He is afraid (v. 1): the king's son-in-law never travels alone. David's answer is a lie. There is no royal business and no waiting servants. The text records it flatly and lets the next chapter show its price: I have occasioned the death of all the persons of thy father's house (22:22).
An honest study will not excuse the lie, and will not pretend the narrator does. David is a hunted man improvising, and he keeps the priest ignorant perhaps thinking to protect him; it does not protect him. Scripture's heroes are shown with their sins, and the man whose psalms call for truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6) is seen here telling a priest a story in God's own house. Grace in the Bible is not for the flawless.