Samuel's death is given one verse, and it is enough: all the Israelites were gathered together, and lamented him. The last judge, the prophet who anointed both kings, is buried in his house at Ramah — in his own grounds, as the phrase is usually taken. He had come no more to see Saul (15:35) and had taken David in at Naioth (19:18); now neither king has him. The narrator will repeat the notice in 28:3, just before Saul tries to reach him beyond the grave.

David arose, and went down to the wilderness of Paran. The great southern desert is a long way from Ramah; some ancient Greek copies read Maon here, which fits the next verse, and readers differ. Either way David moves south with his company, further from Saul and nearer the sheep-country of Carmel in Judah (not the northern mountain). The chapter that follows is the only one in these years in which Saul hardly appears — and in it David nearly becomes him.

Two names and two characters, set against each other in one verse. Abigail is of good understanding, and of a beautiful countenance; Nabal is churlish and evil in his doings — hard and mean — and of the house of Caleb, a proud lineage of Judah (Joshua 14:13-14) that the text may mention on purpose: great ancestry, small man. Verse 2 has already counted his wealth, three thousand sheep and a thousand goats, before it gives his name. That is the order of his own values.

The narrator does not explain the name Nabal here; Abigail will (v. 25): as his name is, so is he... folly is with him. The study takes the meaning as the text gives it and no further. Sheep-shearing was a festival time (2 Samuel 13:23-24), a season of open hands, which is why David's request (v. 8, we come in a good day) was not impudent in that world. Nabal's refusal breaks the custom of a feast day as much as a debt of gratitude.

Who is David? and who is the son of Jesse? Nabal knows exactly who David is — his next words show it: one of the many servants... that break away every man from his master. It is Saul's view of David, spoken by a rich man with a full table. The question is the chapter's hinge: Abigail will answer it (v. 28, my lord fighteth the battles of the LORD), and Nabal's own end will answer it. The reader has known the answer since chapter 16.

Verse 11 adds the possessive refrain — my bread, and my water, and my flesh — and the insult men, whom I know not whence they be. David's messengers had stated the plain fact (v. 7) that his men guarded the shepherds; Nabal's own servant confirms it (vv. 15-16, they were a wall unto us). The man is not ignorant; he is ungrateful, and the rich fool of Luke 12:17-20, with his my fruits... my barns... my soul, has often been read beside him.

Abigail's speech (vv. 24-31) is one of the finest pieces of pleading in the Old Testament. She begins by taking the blame — upon me let this iniquity be — and then separates her husband from herself without excusing him: as his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. This is the text's own gloss on the name, and the study rests on it alone. Man of Belial repeats the servant's verdict (v. 17); the household knows what it lives with.

Note what she does not do: she does not pretend Nabal was right, does not pretend David was unprovoked, and does not plead for Nabal's life as such — she pleads for David's innocence. I thine handmaid saw not the young men explains, truthfully, why the gift was not sent. Wisdom in Scripture is often this practical: a woman of good understanding (v. 3) sees in an hour what four hundred armed men did not see on the road.

Bound in the bundle of life with the LORD thy God — the image is of valuables tied up and kept safe in a bundle, and Abigail applies it to David's soul, his life, held in God's own keeping. Jewish tradition later took the phrase up for the hope of life beyond death, and Christian readers have heard in it something near your life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3); in its setting it is first a promise of safe-keeping from Saul, the man... risen to pursue thee.

The second image is a soldier's: the enemies' souls God will sling out, as out of the middle of a sling. She is speaking to the man who felled Goliath with a sling (17:49), and the compliment is also a theology — the sling is in God's hand now. Verse 28 has said why: David fighteth the battles of the LORD, and the LORD will certainly make my lord a sure house — language that 2 Samuel 7:16 will confirm from God's own mouth. Abigail speaks it before the prophet does.

Her last argument is the one that lands. When the LORD has made David ruler over Israel (v. 30), let there be no grief... nor offence of heart in the memory that he once shed blood causeless or avenged himself. She asks him to look at the slaughter of Nabal's household from the throne — and to see that a king who climbed over a private vendetta would carry it with him. Offence of heart is a stumbling of conscience; she knows he has one (24:5).

Then remember thine handmaid — a modest close that the chapter will fulfil beyond her meaning (v. 39). The whole plea assumes what Saul confessed in the cave (24:20): that David will be king. In chapter 24 David restrained himself; here he had not, and is restrained by a woman's wisdom. The two chapters stand side by side so the reader can see that the man of 24:6 is not yet safe from himself, and that God's keeping of him sometimes wears an ordinary face.

David's reply is three blessings: Blessed be the LORD... which sent thee (v. 32), blessed be thy advice, blessed be thou. He reads Abigail as God's messenger, not merely a clever woman, and names what she has done in her own words — kept me this day from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with mine own hand (v. 33, echoing her v. 26). A man who can be stopped on the road, and thank the one who stopped him, has the kind of heart God chose in chapter 16; the oath of verse 22 had shown the other kind.

Verse 34 is honest about how close it was: except thou hadst hasted... surely there had not been left unto Nabal by the morning light a single male. The KJV's blunt phrase in verses 22 and 34 is the Hebrew's own idiom for every male of a household. David had sworn to kill them all for one man's insult — the very blood causeless of verse 31. He does not keep the oath, and Scripture does not fault him for breaking it; a rash vow is better repented than performed (Leviticus 5:4-6).

Nabal feasts like the feast of a king while his wife is on the road buying his life, and is very drunken; Abigail wisely waits for the morning. Then she tells him — what exactly, the text does not say — and his heart died within him, and he became as a stone (v. 37). Many read this as a stroke or seizure; the narrator records only the effect. Ten days later the LORD smote Nabal, that he died. What David would not do with his hand, the LORD did without one — the first of the three ways David will name at Hachilah (26:10).

The reader should be careful here. The text does not say every churl will be struck down, nor that sudden death is always judgment; Scripture elsewhere warns against reading providences that way (Luke 13:1-5; John 9:3). What it says is that in this case the LORD returned the wickedness of Nabal upon his own head (v. 39), and that David, who had been kept from avenging himself, saw it as the LORD pleading his cause. The chapter is about whose hand does the judging, not about how to read every funeral.

Verse 43 adds Ahinoam of Jezreel — a town in the Judaean hills (Joshua 15:56), not the northern valley — and then the narrator closes a wound opened in 19:17: Saul had given Michal... David's wife, to Phalti. The king has dissolved his son-in-law's marriage as if David were dead or outlawed, and married his daughter to a man of Gallim. Scripture reports it without comment, but the sentence sits at the end of a chapter about a wife who kept faith, and the contrast is not accidental.

David's marriages here are the beginning of a pattern the Law warned against in a king — neither shall he multiply wives (Deuteronomy 17:17) — and that 2 Samuel will show bearing bitter fruit. The study does not pretend otherwise. Michal will be demanded back (2 Samuel 3:13-16), with Phalti following her weeping; Abigail will bear Chileab (2 Samuel 3:3). The man kept from blood-guilt in this chapter is not kept from every fault, and the narrator lets us see both on the same page.