Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Samuel · About this commentary
The Massacre at Nob
1 Samuel 22:1-23
1 David therefore departed from there and escaped to Adullam’s cave. When his brothers and all his father’s house heard it, they went down there to him. · WEB
Four hundred debtors become an army; a paranoid king murders a town of priests; and Eli's last surviving heir runs to David with an ephod.
Everyone who was in distress, everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented gathered themselves to him; and he became captain over them 1 Samuel 22:2.
David's army recruits itself from the wreckage of Saul's kingdom — the broke, the desperate, the embittered — four hundred men nobody else wanted, and the making of them into a disciplined force is the quiet work of the exile years. These are the men who become the mighty ones of the reign 2 Samuel 23:8. God's habit of building with unpromising material is a theme this book has stated from Hannah forward 1 Samuel 2:8.
His first act as their captain is to get his parents out of reach, into Moab 1 Samuel 22:3 — his great-grandmother's country Ruth 4:17 — and his second is to obey a prophet who tells him to leave the safe stronghold for Judah 1 Samuel 22:5.
"Hear now, you Benjamites! Will the son of Jesse give everyone of you fields and vineyards?" 1 Samuel 22:7.
Saul under the tamarisk tree, spear in hand, is a study in the self-pity of power: he appeals to tribal self-interest, accuses the entire court of conspiracy, and lands on the phrase that gives him away — there is none of you who is sorry for me 1 Samuel 22:8. A king who has murdered nothing yet but has already cast himself as the victim is one confession away from atrocity.
Doeg the Edomite turned, and he attacked the priests, and he killed on that day eighty-five people who wore a linen ephod 1 Samuel 22:18.
Ahimelech's defense is transparently true — he had inquired for David many times, as anyone would for the king's own son-in-law 1 Samuel 22:14–15 — and it is not heard, because the verdict preceded the trial. Then the sentence, and the moment that should be famous: the servants of the king wouldn't put out their hand to fall on the priests of Yahweh 1 Samuel 22:17. Ordinary soldiers refuse an unlawful royal order, and the refusal costs them nothing in the text and everything in courage. Only the foreigner obeys, and having killed the priests he takes the sword through Nob — men, women, children, nursing babies, livestock. It is the destruction Saul would not carry out on Amalek 1 Samuel 15:9, executed instead on a town of his own priests. A king who spares under God's command will slaughter under his own.
"I am responsible for the death of all the persons of your father's house" 1 Samuel 22:22.
David's response to Abiathar is the honest sentence Saul never manages about anything. He does not distribute the blame, and he takes in the survivor — who arrives carrying an ephod 1 Samuel 23:6, so that the fugitive can now inquire of God while the king cannot. And with Nob destroyed, the word spoken over Eli's house is finished: no old men, the line begging, all but one cut off 1 Samuel 2:31–33. Saul, hunting his successor, has unknowingly executed a prophecy against the priesthood that crowned him.
settled What this mark means