1 Samuel30chapter 30

1 Samuel 30:1-2

Ziklag burns while David and his six hundred are three days' march away, still shut out of the Philistine muster he had marched to join. The raiders take every woman and child alive and kill no one, which is calculation rather than mercy, since captives carry a price that corpses do not. Amalek strikes here as the war Saul left unfinished at chapter fifteen, when he spared the king and the best of the flocks that the ban had named for destruction.

1 Samuel 30:3-4

David's men come home to ash and an empty town, and the narrator gives their grief its own sentence: they wept until they had no more power to weep. Every wife, son and daughter in the company is gone in one stroke, David's own house among them, so the chapter's worst verse belongs to every man equally before it belongs to their captain.

1 Samuel 30:5-6

Ahinoam and Abigail are named among the captives, and the men who owe David their lives now speak of stoning him, the same word Israel used against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. Verse six turns the chapter and, on the older writers' reading, turns David's exile: with every human prop gone, he encouraged himself in the LORD his God, a phrase that occurs nowhere else in Scripture in exactly this form. Henry reads the timing as no accident, coming just before David's rise to the throne begins.

1 Samuel 30:7-8

David calls for the ephod and enquires at the LORD before he moves, the pattern that runs through both books at 23:2, 23:4, 23:9 and on into the next reign. Two chapters back Saul went to Endor because the LORD answered him not when he enquired; here Abiathar brings the ephod and the answer comes at once, pursue and thou shalt surely overtake them. Wesley reads the swiftness of the answer as God meeting a need that could not wait, against the slower word Saul once had at Keilah's gates.

1 Samuel 30:9-10

Two hundred of the six hundred are too spent to cross the brook and stay with the baggage, a detail the narrator keeps for its own sake, since the men left behind will matter again at verse twenty-one. David presses on with four hundred, the same number who first gathered to him in the cave of Adullam, an army built from the discontented now doing the discontented's work.

1 Samuel 30:11-13

an Egyptian in the field: An Amalekite master leaves a sick servant to die in the open, three days without bread or water, and David's men feed him before they question him. The contrast is plain without being stated: Amalek abandons what it no longer needs, and David's camp gives bread first and asks its questions after. The Egyptian's own account at verse fourteen supplies the geography no other verse gives for this raid.

1 Samuel 30:14-16

The servant names the whole sweep of the raid, the Cherethite south, Judah's own coast, and Caleb's territory, before he leads David down to a camp spread abroad on all the earth, eating and drinking and dancing over spoil taken from two nations. An oath sworn to a foreign slave to save his own guide's plan, a picture the commentators read as ordinary shrewdness rather than any special virtue, though it serves David well.

1 Samuel 30:17-20

The fight runs a full day and night, and four hundred young men escape only because they were mounted on camels. Saul's charge at chapter fifteen had named camel among the beasts to be destroyed with Amalek entire; the animals that carried Saul's spared enemy away here carry this generation's raiders to safety, a continuity the older writers note without pressing it further. David recovers every wife, son and daughter named lost at verse three, and the flocks and herds taken from the Amalekites become, in his own words, David's spoil before any division is settled.

1 Samuel 30:21-22

the two hundred men: David comes back to the two hundred left at Besor and salutes them first, before any word of dividing the spoil is spoken. It is the men who fought, not their captain, who call the exhausted two hundred wicked and men of Belial and propose to send them home with wives and children only, no share of what was recovered. The same word, sons of Belial, closes David's last words at 2 Sam 23:6, thorns fit only for burning, and here it is spoken by men who have just been rescued from becoming captives themselves.

1 Samuel 30:23-25

David answers by naming the victory the LORD's rather than the four hundred's own, the same instinct that will govern his mighty men's roll call in the last chapters of the second book. His ruling, that the part of the man who tarries by the stuff equals the part of the man who goes down to the battle, echoes the division Moses set over the Midianite spoil in Numbers thirty-one and the arrangement Joshua's altar-builders claimed at Joshua twenty-two. It stands afterward as statute and ordinance for Israel, one of the few laws in Scripture credited to David by name rather than to Moses.

1 Samuel 30:26-31

David sends the spoil of the enemies of the LORD to town after town across Judah's south, a list of names running from Bethel to Hebron that reads like a map of every place that sheltered him through the outlaw years. Clarke calls the gesture plain gratitude to the men who gave him shelter and protection when he had none; Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the same gifts as the seed of the following that would soon bring the men of Judah to anoint him. Two chapters later that anointing happens at Hebron, one of the very towns named on this list.