Adullam, an old Canaanite royal city of the Judaean lowland (Joshua 12:15), gives its name to the cave where David's exile becomes a movement. His brothers who once sneered at him (17:28) come down, with all his father's house; and then come the broken — in distress... in debt... discontented (the last word means bitter of soul). This is not an army of the ambitious but a refuge for people the kingdom had failed. He became a captain over them — the title the LORD had given him through Samuel (13:14), now exercised over four hundred unwanted men.

These four hundred will grow to six hundred (23:13) and become the core of the mighty men whose deeds fill 2 Samuel 23 — the chapter that also remembers the cave of Adullam and the water from Bethlehem's well (2 Samuel 23:13-17). God built David's kingdom from debtors and the embittered. The church has never been able to read this verse without thinking of its own membership, and of the One who said come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.

An outlaw cannot keep aged parents in a cave, and Saul's reach makes Bethlehem unsafe for them. David goes to Moab — an enemy of Israel for most of its history, but the land of his great-grandmother Ruth (Ruth 4:17-22), which may explain the welcome, though the text does not say so. Mizpeh of Moab is otherwise unknown. Honouring father and mother is the fifth commandment, and David keeps it under pressure that would excuse most men.

Till I know what God will do for me — one of the quiet confessions of the book. David does not say till I take the kingdom or till Saul dies, but waits on what God will do. Verse 5 shows how he learned it: the prophet Gad, who will be David's seer to the end of his life (2 Samuel 24:11), tells him to leave the stronghold and go into Judah — toward the danger, among his own tribe. David obeys at once. The anointed is still a man under orders.

Gad appears without introduction. He will be with David for some forty years and more, naming his sin after the census (2 Samuel 24:11-14) and helping to order the temple music (2 Chronicles 29:25), and he is credited with writing part of David's history (1 Chronicles 29:29). Here he is simply the prophet who brings a word: leave the hold — the stronghold, perhaps in Moab, perhaps Adullam itself; readers differ — and go home to Judah. The forest of Hareth is unlocated.

The instruction is risky. Moab was safe; Judah is Saul's kingdom. But a king of Israel cannot be made in a foreign refuge, and God moves David into the land he will rule and among the people who will crown him first (2 Samuel 2:4). Samuel is far away at Ramah; from here on, David's guidance comes through Gad, through the ephod (23:9), and through his own inquiries of the LORD. The exile is being trained to ask.

Saul sits under a tree in Gibeah, spear in hand (v. 6) — the KJV's in Ramah renders a Hebrew word that may simply mean on the height; many take it so. His speech to the Benjamites is a study in a tyrant's mind: tribal bribery (will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards?), suspicion of all (all of you have conspired), and self-pity (none of you is sorry for me). The man who was told the king will take your fields (8:14) now offers fields as the price of loyalty.

My son hath made a league with the son of Jesse — he knows about the covenant, and he reads it as a plot to lie in wait for him. Nothing in the text suggests David was lying in wait; the king's fear has invented an ambush. Note too that in his speeches Saul prefers the son of Jesse to David's name (vv. 7, 8, 13; Doeg echoes it in v. 9), naming him only once (v. 17). A man who will not name his enemy has stopped seeing him as a person, and the massacre that follows comes from that.

Ahimelech's defence is brave and true. He helped David because David was the king's most faithful servant, his son-in-law, a man honourable in thine house — and nothing he had heard at Nob suggested otherwise, because David had told him nothing (21:2). Verse 15, Did I then begin to enquire of God for him?, is read two ways: as a denial that he enquired at all, or as this was not the first time — it was his regular duty for the king's officers. Doeg had reported an enquiry (v. 10); chapter 21 records none, so the reader cannot be sure.

What is sure is the priest's innocence, which he states plainly: thy servant knew nothing of all this, less or more. The high-priestly figure of Eli's line stands before the king and tells the truth, and it costs him and his house their lives (v. 16). The one man in the room who had actually enquired of God is the one condemned for it; the king who could get no answer from God (14:37) kills the man who could.

The order is monstrous and the narrator calls the victims by their title twice in one verse: the priests of the LORD. And the king's own guard refuses. They had rescued Jonathan from Saul's oath (14:45); now they will not raise a hand against men in linen ephods. Scripture honours this silent refusal. There are commands that no office obliges a man to obey, and the footmen of Gibeah knew one when they heard it.

Saul's charge — their hand also is with David — is false on the facts and reveals the logic of his fear: anyone who did not inform on David is David's accomplice. This is the king who spared Agag against God's command (15:9) and now slaughters priests against every command. The man who was too tender for Amalek is merciless to Nob. Disobedience to God does not make a man gentle; it leaves his cruelty to find its own targets.

What Israelites refused, the Edomite did. Eighty-five priests are killed in one day — some ancient copies of the Greek version give a larger number; the KJV follows the Hebrew — and then Nob itself is put to the sword, men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen, and asses, and sheep (v. 19). The language is the language of the ban that Saul would not carry out against Amalek (15:3: man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep). He executes on the LORD's priests the sentence he withheld from the LORD's enemies. The reader is meant to feel the full horror.

Many readers connect this with the word spoken against Eli's house (2:31-33; 3:12-14), and 1 Kings 2:27 does tie Abiathar's later removal to that prophecy. But the text here says nothing to lessen Saul's guilt or Doeg's. God's purposes may run through an atrocity without making it less an atrocity; the men of Nob are the LORD's priests (v. 21), innocent of what they died for, and Psalm 52 — headed by Doeg's report — goes on to see the boaster rooted out and the righteous also shall see (52:5-6). The Bible holds the sovereignty of God and the guilt of the murderer together without blinking.

David does not say Saul did this or Doeg did this, though both are true. He says I have occasioned it — he saw Doeg at Nob, knew what the man was, and went on with his story anyway. The confession is remarkable in a leader: the anointed king takes on himself the weight of a massacre he did not order and could not have prevented once his lie was told. Psalm 52's heading places that psalm in this moment; its opening scorn for the man whose tongue deviseth mischiefs reads, after this verse, as a man who also knows what his own tongue has cost.

Verse 23 is the answer: Abide thou with me, fear not... with me thou shalt be in safeguard. Abiathar, sole survivor of Eli's house, brings the ephod to David (23:6), and for the rest of David's reign the LORD is enquired of through him. Nob's priesthood does not die; it goes into the wilderness with the true king. He that seeketh my life seeketh thy life — the hunted anointed and the hunted priest will share one fate, and one future.