1 Samuel25chapter 25

1 Samuel 25:14-17

he railed on them: An unnamed servant goes around Nabal to warn Abigail, because evil is determined against the whole household and Nabal is such a son of Belial that a man cannot speak to him. Belial, worthless one, is the word the narrator used for the sons of Eli at 2:12, and Scripture uses it again for Sheba's rebellion at 2 Sam 20:1 and in David's own last words for the thorns burned rather than handled at 2 Sam 23:6. The servant's account, a wall unto us both by night and day, repeats what David's own men had already claimed, confirming to Abigail that the danger to her house is real and that David's men have kept faith with it.

Matthew Henry reads the servant's words as testimony for David's honor from inside Nabal's own household. The praise answers David's complaint at verse 21. He calls his care of Nabal's flocks wasted, and the herdsmen who received it think otherwise.

Albert Barnes explains the wall as protection from desert raiders, the herdsmen as safe among David's men as inside a walled town. Day and night means a watch kept around the clock. Raiders of that kind appear in the book at 30:1, when Amalekites strike the Negev and burn Ziklag.

The servant brings the decision to Abigail and leaves it with her, a measure of the trust the household placed in her judgment. Matthew Henry reads the next verse as her answer. It was no time to linger when the whole house stood in danger.

1 Samuel 25:18-19

took two hundred loaves: Abigail moves at once, loading donkeys with two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, dressed sheep, parched corn, raisins and fig cakes, a store large enough to answer four hundred hungry men without asking Nabal's leave. She sends the gift ahead and tells her husband nothing, acting on her own judgment in a household where the master cannot be reasoned with. Matthew Henry reads the size of the gift as wisdom answering folly, for a gift pacifies anger, and Abigail loses nothing of her house by giving generously what Nabal had refused meanly.

Sending the gift ahead of herself follows the order Jacob used with Esau at Genesis 32. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown call this common practice. Abigail followed her young men on a donkey to see how David and his men took the gift.

1 Samuel 25:20-22

came down by the covert of the hill: Abigail comes down one path as David comes down another, and the two meet by what providence alone timed. David's own words in verse 21 show the size of what he intends, an oath sworn in the coarse idiom of the day, cursing himself if he leaves alive by morning any male of Nabal's household, a formula used elsewhere in Samuel when a man binds himself to an act. The chapter records David's grievance honestly, that he had kept Nabal's flocks safe for nothing and been repaid evil for good, but the oath itself goes further than the grievance justifies.

Albert Barnes explains in vain as care given in the wilderness in the false hope of a return. Augustine of Hippo grants that Nabal paid David back evil for good, and still faults the anger that led David to swear to kill every male. Saul had confessed the same wrong toward David at 24:17.

In the Hebrew text David calls down punishment on David's enemies, and Matthew Henry reads this as David turning the curse away from himself. The Berean text follows the Greek, which names David. Adam Clarke allows no defense of a vow to leave no man of Nabal's household alive by morning.

1 Samuel 25:23-25

lighted off the ass: Abigail dismounts and falls on her face before David, then at his feet, taking the blame for Nabal's insult onto herself before she has said a word in her husband's defense, Upon me, my lord, upon me let this iniquity be. Her plea plays on her husband's own name, Nabal is his name, and folly is with him, since the Hebrew word nabal means fool or base one, so the request is not to excuse Nabal but to ask David not to measure his own worth by a fool's provocation. Matthew Henry reads her taking the blame as the wisdom of yielding, which pacifies great offenses, and notes she was not ashamed to take the posture of a penitent for the good of her house in front of both households' men.

Abigail asks for a hearing before she makes any case, and calls herself David's servant in the same breath. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that dismounting before a superior was the highest mark of respect. David grants the hearing in full at verse 35.

Abigail calls her husband by the same word his servant used at verse 17, the Hebrew term for a worthless man. Matthew Henry hears a wife who knows the rudeness is old. She had never seen David's messengers.

as the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth: Abigail's oath answers David's oath, and her theology is exact, it is the Lord who has withheld him from coming to bloodshed and from avenging himself with his own hand, not her gift that stopped him, though her gift is the means. The verse sits at the center of the chapter's argument, for the same restraint from personal vengeance that marks David toward Saul in the cave chapters on either side of this one marks him here toward Nabal, though this time a woman rather than his own conscience supplies it. Albert Barnes reads the Hebrew as crediting the Lord directly with the restraint, Abigail speaking as one who already sees David's cause as the Lord's own.

this blessing which thine handmaid hath brought: Abigail calls her gift a blessing rather than a debt paid or a bribe, and asks that it go to the young men who follow David rather than to David alone, honoring the four hundred who were prepared to act on his oath. What David's grievance called a debt owed and Nabal's refusal called nothing at all, Abigail reframes as a gift freely given, which is the only kind of peace offering that can turn back an oath already sworn.

the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house: Abigail speaks the covenant's own vocabulary a decade before David hears it from Nathan, for the exact phrase a sure house occurs in Scripture only here, at 1 Sam 2:35 of the priest who will replace Eli, and at 1 Kings 11:38, offered to Jeroboam and there forfeited. She grounds the promise on two things she says are already true of David, that he fights the Lord's battles and that evil has not been found in him, and asks forgiveness for a trespass that is her husband's rather than her own. Albert Barnes compares her confidence to Rahab's conviction that the Lord had given Canaan to Israel, both women testifying to a word from God they had not personally received but plainly believed.

bound in the bundle of life: Abigail's image comes from an ordinary practice, precious or important things tied into a bag for safekeeping, and she asks that David's soul be kept that way with the Lord his God while his enemies are slung out as from the middle of a sling. The figure is aimed precisely at the man she is speaking to, the shepherd whose feat with a sling against Goliath was already the most famous thing about him. The phrase later became a fixture of Jewish memorial prayer, but here it is Abigail's own words, spoken over a king not yet crowned.

1 Samuel 25:30-31

appointed thee ruler over Israel: Abigail speaks of David's kingdom as already settled fact, when the Lord shall have appointed thee ruler over Israel, though he was anointed at 16:13 and enthroned nowhere yet. John Gill reads her confidence as common knowledge in Israel by this point, Samuel's anointing and the Lord's favor toward David already the talk of the people even while Saul still holds the throne. Her closing plea looks past the crisis of the day to the memory a king will carry, no needless bloodshed to grieve over, and a request simply to be remembered once the Lord has dealt well with her lord.

Matthew Henry draws the lesson that a temptation should be weighed by how it will look afterward. The pleasure of revenge soon turns bitter. Her request to be remembered once David reigns is answered long before, at verse 39, when he sends for her as his wife.

1 Samuel 25:32-34

which sent thee this day to meet me: David answers with a threefold blessing, on the Lord who sent Abigail, on her advice, and on Abigail herself, naming plainly what he had been about to do, coming to shed blood and to avenge himself with his own hand. He credits her intervention as the Lord's own providence rather than mere good fortune, seeing in a stranger's counsel what he could not see in his own anger. Verse 34 makes the oath's scale explicit one more time, that but for her haste not a male of Nabal's household would have survived the morning, so the chapter does not let the reader forget how close the outcome came.

Matthew Henry reads avenging himself as taking a seat that belongs to God, who claims vengeance as His own at Deuteronomy 32:35. Henry sets beside it David's own later prayer. At Psalm 51:14 he asks for deliverance from bloodguilt, the same sin he was kept from on this day.

John Cassian cites David's oath against Nabal as proof that a vow sworn in anger should be set aside. Matthew Henry measures the mercy by how near David came to shedding blood. Only Abigail's quick coming kept every male of Nabal's house alive.

Go up in peace to thine house: David receives what Abigail brought and sends her home in peace, the same word of peace his own men had carried to Nabal at the start of the chapter, now returned in fact rather than merely spoken. Matthew Henry reads David's readiness to be persuaded by a woman's reasoning, though his oath and his anger were already up, as itself the mark of a wise and good man, since oaths cannot bind anyone to a sin.

1 Samuel 25:36-38

like the feast of a king: Abigail returns to find Nabal holding a feast fit for a king, merry and very drunk, and she tells him nothing of what she had done until morning, waiting until he is capable of hearing it. When the wine is gone out of him and she tells him, his heart died within him, and he became as a stone, and Albert Barnes reads the description as a stroke brought on by the shock, from which he lay senseless ten days before the Lord struck him and he died. John Wesley notes that an oath sworn to commit sin is annulled by not performing it rather than kept by performing it, so it is Abigail's gift that answers David's oath, not the Lord's later stroke on Nabal, which comes after the danger has already passed.

The heart that was in high spirits at night becomes like a stone by morning, and Matthew Henry sets the two verses side by side. John Wesley reads it as horror at a danger past. He compares a rider who learns at dawn that he crossed a broken bridge in the dark.

The chapter that opens with all Israel mourning Samuel records no mourning for Nabal. Matthew Henry marks the silence. The narrator names the Lord as the one who struck, so the death David had sworn to cause comes without his hand.

Blessed be the Lord, that hath pleaded the cause of my reproach: David's second blessing of the chapter answers his first, crediting the Lord rather than his own restraint with settling the matter, the Lord hath returned the wickedness of Nabal upon his own head. The same principle will govern how David later reads Saul's death and Abner's, that vengeance belongs to the Lord and a king's hands must stay clean of it even when the provocation is real. The verse closes with David sending to take Abigail to wife, a request the text records without comment on the haste, though Adam Clarke notes David likely already knew Saul had given Michal to another man by this point.

1 Samuel 25:40-42

to take thee to him to wife: Abigail's answer to David's proposal is the same posture she took before him in the field, bowing to the earth and calling herself a servant fit only to wash the feet of David's men. She rises at once, rides to him with five of her own maidens, and becomes his wife, a wealthy widow's whole household folded overnight into an outlaw's camp in the wilderness. Albert Barnes notes the text gives no interval for mourning beyond what custom required, so nothing in the narrative suggests unbecoming haste on either side.

Ambrose of Milan, in a letter, sets David's two wives side by side, Ahinoam the sterner and Abigail the one full of mercy. Her answer to David's servants fits his reading. Both wives go with David into Gath at 27:3 and are taken captive at Ziklag at 30:5.

Matthew Henry reads the marriage as an act of faith. David had no house of his own to bring her to, and Abigail joined him on the strength of the promise she had spoken at verse 28. The same word for hurry marks her at verse 18.

1 Samuel 25:43-44

David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel: David takes a second wife, Ahinoam of Jezreel, alongside Abigail, and the text sets his growing household beside Saul's own move against him, for Michal, David's actual wife, has been given by her father to Phalti the son of Laish. Two claims on David's marriage now stand unresolved in the narrative at once, and Scripture keeps both on record until David demands Michal back by name at 2 Sam 3:14, treating Saul's gift of her to Phalti as no divorce at all. John Gill notes that plural marriage, though never commanded and against the law's own pattern, was a custom good men of that age gave into without Scripture commending it.

Albert Barnes reads the gift of Michal to another man as Saul's formal break with David, cutting the marriage tie that made David the king's son-in-law. Adam Clarke places Gallim in Benjamin and thinks Saul chose a man of his own tribe. Isaiah 10:30 names it beside Laishah and Anathoth.