2. Nob. This is the very beginning of David’s flight after the exchange with Jonathan in the field, and Nob is less than three miles south of Gibeah, his approximate point of departure.

Why are you alone and no one is with you? The doubling of the question (in a pattern that is reminiscent of the parallelism of verse) reflects Ahimelech’s astonishment: a prominent commander in Saul’s army would not ordinarily go about without his retinue. From his first sight of David, Ahimelech suspects that he may be a fugitive, which is why he “trembles” to meet him—fear of the powerful king’s retribution stalks the land.

4. five loaves of bread. The number five is sometimes used idiomatically in biblical Hebrew to mean “a few.”

5. if only the lads have kept themselves from women. Ordinarily, consecrated bread would be eaten only by the priests. Ahimelech is willing to stretch the point if David’s “lads”—his fighting men—are not in a state of ritual impurity through sexual intercourse.

6. women were taboo to us. This is the second reference in this narrative to a general practice of refraining from sexual activity during periods of combat.

the lads’ gear was consecrated. The term for “gear,” the all-purpose kelim, could equally refer to weapons, clothing, and vessels for containing food. There are no grounds for restricting the meaning here to the last of these three items, as some interpreters have done.

7. the Bread of the Presence. This would be twelve loaves laid out in display on a table in the sanctuary. When they were replaced with fresh loaves, the old loaves could be eaten by the priests. Robert Polzin proposes a link between the eating of forbidden food here and in the story of Jonathan and the honey. Death will ensue, although not for the eater.

8. And there a man of Saul’s servants. This seemingly intrusive notation is a piece of ominous foreshadowing. For the moment, all we can pick up is a certain dissonance in the presence of a foreigner in the sanctuary and the nearness of a high official of Saul’s to the fugitive David. The ghastly consequences of David’s visit to Nob (chapter 22) will pivot on Doeg’s fatal presence. His identity as Edomite reflects the enlistment of foreign mercenaries in the new royal bureaucracy. It also marks him as a man who will have no inhibitions in what he does to Israelites, even Israelite priests.

detained before the LORD. The verb is derived from the same root (ʿ-ts-r) as the one used for “taboo” in verse 6, but it is unclear whether the reference is to being detained at the sanctuary for some unspecified reason or being detained from participation in the cult.

9. For neither my sword nor my gear have I taken. David, of course, has fled weaponless from his encounter with Jonathan in the field. Now he uses the supposed urgency of his royal mission to explain his lack of arms and to ask for a weapon.

10. If this you would take for yourself, take it, for there is none other but it hereabouts. The last exchange between Ahimelech and David is a vivid instance of the biblical use of contrastive dialogue. The priest’s language is a wordy hesitation dance of repetitions and synonymous expressions. David responds with the most imperative succinctness (just four words in the Hebrew): “There’s none like it. Give it to me.” The fact that this huge sword might be too big for David is submerged by the symbolic notion that it is the weapon of the Philistine champion he vanquished which he now takes up. In any case, David is no longer a raw shepherd lad but a battle-hardened warrior.

11. he came to Achish king of Gath. David flees to the southwest to the one place where he imagines he will be safe from Saul’s pursuit—enemy territory. Such a crossing over to the enemy is a familiar enough move on the part of political refugees. Gath was the hometown of Goliath, and so one must assume that David planned to enter the city incognito, as an anonymous Hebrew fugitive. He would clearly have had to hide the telltale sword before coming into town.

12. David king of the land. The Philistine courtiers, unfortunately, immediately identify David and can even quote the song sung by the Israelite women after his victories. Their characterization of him as “king of the land” is no doubt a tribute to his preeminence on the battlefield but also is an inadvertent confirmation of his clandestine election, of his displacing Saul. Appropriately, though, as J. P. Fokkelman notes, they use a somewhat vague designation instead of the more official “king of Israel.”

13. he was very afraid of Achish. He has come unarmed and, evidently, alone, and now he realizes he has been recognized.

16. Do I lack madmen that you should bring this one to rave for me? Achish’s words are a mirror of outrage and disgust. As Shimon Bar-Efrat has nicely observed, Achish three times uses the root for raving mad (meshugaʿ), three times the first-person pronoun, and three times the root b-w-’ (“to bring” or “to come”). Thus David has succeeded in making himself so revolting that he arouses in Achish a primitive revulsion from the spectacle of the insane, so that the king simply wants to get David out of sight rather than have him killed. This is an extraordinary moment in the story of the founding king of Israel: David, the glamorous young hero of the preceding episodes, is prepared to do whatever is necessary in order to survive, even if it means making himself appear to be the most repulsive of humankind. It is an even lowlier disguise than Odysseus’s as beggar, and it is also not the last experience of humiliation into which David in adversity will willingly plunge. It is noteworthy that David feigns madness in order to survive and eventually become king, in contrast to Saul, whose genuine madness reflects his loss of control over the kingdom.