Biblion Bible Commentary
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Dismissed From the Battle Line
1 Samuel 29:1-11
1 Now the Philistines gathered together all their armies to Aphek; and the Israelites encamped by the spring which is in Jezreel. · WEB
Philistine suspicion rescues David from the one battlefield he must not be on — and he argues to stay.
"Make the man return... lest in the battle he become an adversary to us. For with what should this fellow reconcile himself to his lord? Should it not be with the heads of these men?" 1 Samuel 29:4.
The Philistine commanders are shrewder than their king, and they are right about the danger even if wrong about David's intentions: a Hebrew war band in the rear of their line, sixteen months into a suspiciously convenient defection, singing distance from the man whose thousands they still remember 1 Samuel 29:5. They insist, and Achish — who trusts David completely and says so twice 1 Samuel 29:3 1 Samuel 29:9 — has to send him home.
"But what have I done? What have you found in your servant... that I may not go and fight against the enemies of my lord the king?" 1 Samuel 29:8.
David protests, and the sentence is deliberately ambiguous — my lord the king could be Achish, could be Saul, and the enemies could be either army's. Whether he was play-acting to hold his cover or had genuinely lost the plot, the text does not say, and the ambiguity may be exactly what he intended at the time. What is clear is the position he had walked into: marching with Philistia against Israel, on the day Israel's king and God's anointed would die.
The corner is absolute. Fight, and he is a traitor whom no tribe would ever crown; refuse, and he loses the men and the town. There is no move available to him.
"Therefore now rise up early in the morning... and as soon as you are up early in the morning and have light, depart" 1 Samuel 29:10.
And God gets him out of it through the suspicion of pagan generals who wanted him gone for their own reasons. It is the same providence as the messenger who pulled Saul off the mountain 1 Samuel 23:27 — a rescue that arrives as somebody else's decision, unrecognized by everyone involved. David is spared the battle of Gilboa, and so the crown, when it comes, comes to a man with no share in Saul's death.
He rides south with his six hundred, complaining, three days from a burned town and a lesson he could not have learned anywhere else.
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