Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Samuel · About this commentary
Holy Bread and a Feigned Madness
1 Samuel 21:1-15
1 Then David came to Nob to Ahimelech the priest. Ahimelech came to meet David trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no man with you?” · WEB
A hungry fugitive eats the sanctuary bread, takes the giant's sword, and escapes an enemy king by drooling into his beard.
"Now therefore what is under your hand? Please give me five loaves of bread" 1 Samuel 21:3.
David arrives at Nob alone, hungry, and lying. The story about a secret royal errand 1 Samuel 21:2 is invented to protect a frightened priest and himself, and it will get eighty-five priests killed. Scripture reports it without a word of approval, and David's own verdict, when the news reaches him, is unsparing 1 Samuel 22:22.
So the priest gave him holy bread; for there was no bread there but the show bread 1 Samuel 21:6.
The bread of the Presence was for the priests alone Leviticus 24:5–9. Ahimelech's ruling — hungry men before ritual property — is one Jesus later cited as decisive, and cited in defense of hungry disciples accused of Sabbath-breaking: the incident is his proof that God's law was never designed to be kept against people Mark 2:25–27. A regulation about who may eat consecrated bread does not outrank a starving man, and the priest who worked that out under pressure understood the law better than the men who would later quote it at Jesus.
"Behold, the sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the valley of Elah, is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod" 1 Samuel 21:9.
And he leaves with the trophy of the day he needed no sword 1 Samuel 17:50 — an irony the narrator sets down without comment. The man who once refused Saul's armor now takes the giant's blade, because he is running on fear rather than on the confidence he preached in the valley.
Now a certain man of the servants of Saul was there that day... Doeg the Edomite 1 Samuel 21:7.
The fuse, lit in one verse.
He changed his behavior before them and pretended to be insane... and let his spittle fall down on his beard 1 Samuel 21:13.
Then the low point: Israel's anointed king in the enemy capital, recognized instantly as David the king of the land, terrified, saved by an impersonation of madness that persuades Achish to throw him out. Two psalms are headed with this episode and neither mentions the acting; they record instead a man who sought Yahweh, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears Psalms 34:4 Psalms 56:3. The prayers are true and the drooling is true. Fear and faith are not alternatives in the life of a real person, and the book that records David's psalms also records the beard.
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