Three days' march from Aphek brings David home to smoke. Ziklag has been burned with fire and emptied — the Amalekites, whom David had been raiding (27:8), have raided back while the garrison was away. The narrator notes what they did not do: they slew not any, either great or small (v. 2); the women and children were carried off, most likely for sale. The men who had been spared a battle against Israel now have no battle to fight and nothing left; they weep until they had no more power to weep.

The study should let the grief stand before the recovery. These are hard men, six hundred of the kingdom's cast-offs (22:2), and they weep in the ashes. David is among them — his two wives were taken (v. 5), Abigail of the bundle of life among them. There is no sign yet that anything will be recovered; verse 4 is simply loss. Scripture does not hurry its people through sorrow, and this is one of the places where readers in their own ashes have found it honest.

David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him. The men who followed him into a Philistine town now blame him for its burning, and they are not wholly wrong: his plan (27:1) put their families in Ziklag and his raids provoked the raid. Leaders who have led badly are seldom forgiven by those who followed, and the stones are near. Then the hinge of the chapter: but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God. No psalm is quoted, no ephod yet consulted; something inward, between the man and his God, before he asks anything of either.

The phrase has been treasured for good reason. It is the first time since David crossed into Philistia (27:1) that the narrator shows him turning to the LORD, and it comes at the bottom. The LORD his God — the possessive is the point: not the God of Israel in general, but his, the One who had kept him in the cave and the camp. Jonathan once strengthened his hand in God (23:16); Jonathan is on Gilboa now, and David must do for himself what his friend did for him. He does, and everything in the chapter follows from it.

From encouragement to enquiry: bring me hither the ephod (v. 7). The oracle silent since Keilah (23:9-12) is consulted again, and the LORD answers at once and fully — Pursue... thou shalt surely overtake... without fail recover all. In these same days, across the land, Saul is enquiring and getting no answer (28:6). The book sets the two enquiries side by side on purpose: both kings in extremity, both asking; one answered, the other sent to Endor. The difference is not technique but the long histories behind them.

Abiathar, Ahimelech's son (v. 7), is named with his father's name as if to remind us how the ephod came to be here (22:20). The massacre at Nob has become David's means of hearing from God in the worst hour of his life. The study does not say God willed the massacre for this; it says that He turned it. Without fail recover all is a large promise to make to a man standing in a burned town, and verse 19 will count its fulfilment item by item.

The brook Besor — a wadi of the western Negev — stops two hundred of the six hundred: so faint that they could not go over. They have marched three days from Aphek, found their homes burned, wept themselves empty, and then been ordered south at once. The narrator gives their exhaustion without blame. David leaves them by the stuff (v. 24) and goes on with four hundred — the number he began with at Adullam (22:2) — against a force whose camel-riders alone will number four hundred (v. 17).

The division will matter at the end of the chapter (vv. 21-25), and the narrator plants it carefully here so that the reader will know the two hundred did not shirk: they could not. Scripture distinguishes the faint from the unwilling, and so will David. Those who have ever been left at the brook, unable to go on while others fought, may find in this verse that they were seen, and that a statute was made for them.

In the field they find a dying man, an Egyptian (v. 11), and before they ask him anything they feed him — bread, water, figs, raisins — until his spirit came again to him. He is a slave, abandoned by his Amalekite master because three days agone I fell sick (v. 13): property thrown away when it broke. The contrast with David's own treatment of the faint (v. 24) is the chapter's moral spine. One army leaves its sick to die; the other feeds the enemy's sick and gives the faint a share.

The Egyptian becomes the guide. He asks only two things (v. 15) — not to be killed and not to be returned to his master — and David swears. A kindness done to a dying stranger is the way God answers the ephod's thou shalt surely overtake them; providence here wears the face of a man in a field. Readers have noted that the master who left him lost everything, and the captain who fed him recovered everything. The text does not moralise; it arranges.

The Amalekites are spread abroad... eating and drinking, and dancing (v. 16) over spoil from Philistia and Judah alike — careless, as raiders are after a success. David strikes from the twilight even unto the evening of the next day; the phrase is read either as one long day or as beginning at dawn, and the KJV's twilight leaves it open. Four hundred young men on camels escape; the rest do not. This is the Amalekite war Saul was told to finish (15:3) and did not, carried on by the man who replaced him, in the very days of Saul's death.

The study does not dress this as the holy war of chapter 15 — no command to destroy is recorded here, only to pursue and recover. It is a rescue. The narrator's interest is not in the killing but in verse 18: David recovered all... David rescued his two wives. The men who had wept until they could not weep get their families back. God's without fail has held.

The verse is an inventory, meant to be read slowly against the promise: nothing lacking... neither small nor great, neither sons nor daughters, neither spoil, nor any thing... David recovered all. The LORD had said without fail recover all (v. 8); the narrator counts it in. Scripture seldom lets a promise go unverified; here the audit is itemised. Readers who have been told that God restores the years the locust ate (Joel 2:25) have found this chapter among the plainest pictures of it.

Verse 20 adds This is David's spoil — the flocks and herds beyond what Ziklag lost, the Amalekites' own and what they took from the Philistines, driven before the recovered cattle. The men's cry gives David the credit, which he will refuse in verse 23 (that which the LORD hath given us). The spoil funds the gifts of verses 26-31, which build the loyalty that will crown him at Hebron (2 Samuel 2:4). God restored the loss and then added the means of the kingdom.

As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff: they shall part alike. The wicked men and men of Belial (v. 22) — the narrator's term, not softened — want to keep the spoil for the four hundred and send the two hundred off with their families only. David refuses on three grounds: the men are my brethren; the spoil is that which the LORD hath given us (v. 23); and the fighting and the keeping are one service. The principle runs back to Numbers 31:27 and Joshua 22:8, and forward to verse 25's statute and ordinance for Israel.

The church has read this verse as a parable of grace and of the body: the reward is not proportioned to the visible fight, and those who kept the baggage are not second class (Matthew 20:12-15; 1 Corinthians 12:22-24). The study frames that as a reading, not as the verse's first meaning, which is a military ruling. But even as a ruling it reveals the man God chose: a captain who, on the evening of his greatest victory, sides with the exhausted against the strong.

Back at Ziklag, David sends spoil to the elders of Judah, even to his friends — a present, the KJV says, from the spoil of the enemies of the LORD. The list that follows (vv. 27-31) names Bethel (most likely a southern town, not the famous one), Jattir, Aroer, Eshtemoa, Hormah, Hebron, and others, with the Jerahmeelites and Kenites whom David had told Achish he was raiding (27:10). These are the towns that sheltered him — where David himself and his men were wont to haunt — and he pays his debts.

It is also, plainly, politics: the elders who receive Amalekite spoil from Ziklag will shortly anoint David king at Hebron (2 Samuel 2:1-4), and the narrator does not pretend otherwise. Scripture is unembarrassed that a king must win his people. What it notes is the name on the gift — the enemies of the LORD — and the timing. While David distributes spoil to Judah, Saul lies dead on Gilboa (31:6). The old king's last day and the new king's first gifts fall close together, and the next chapter will say so.