1. Adullam. The location is in the hilly terrain at the western edge of the tribal territory of Judah, near the Philistine region.

his brothers . . . all his father’s household. Saul’s rage over the notion that David would have neglected the new moon festivity at the palace to join his brothers in Bethlehem is given an after-the-fact political confirmation here: David’s brothers and clansmen rally round him, forming a kind of family militia. But there is a push as well as a pull in their going out to David in the badlands: if they remained in Bethlehem, they would be subject to retribution by Saul’s soldiery. David’s decision to move his parents across the border to Moab (verse 3) is another reflection of fear of royal vengeance against the family. Jesse, earlier characterized as very aged, would have been too old to join the fighting men.

2. every man in straits . . . in debt . . . embittered. David’s guerilla band has a core drawn from his clan and a rank and file of the dispossessed and malcontent—men with nothing to lose who have been oppressed by the established order. David’s social base as guerilla chieftain is strongly reminiscent of Jephthah’s (Judges 11).

3. Mizpeh of Moab. The word mizpeh (or in some places, mizpah) means “outlook” or “vista,” and so this particular Mizpeh must be identified as the one in Moab, east of the Jordan. If the Book of Ruth provides reliable genealogy, David’s great-grandmother Ruth was a Moabite, and so David here may be calling on a family connection in requesting asylum for his parents.

4. all the time that David was in the stronghold. The identity of the stronghold has puzzled interpreters, especially because David is said to have set up headquarters in a cave. Some have argued that the two terms refer to the same place, but the Hebrew for “stronghold,” metsudah, usually refers to a height. Others read “cave,” meʿarah, for metsudah. That proposal is problematic because Adullam is in the territory of Judah, and in verse 5 David is enjoined to leave the stronghold and head for the territory of Judah. The most reasonable inference is that after the parlay with the king of Moab, David moves his fighting men from Adullam at the western border of the territory of Judah to an unspecified stronghold, probably in the craggy border region between Moab and Israel.

5. Gad the prophet. This figure appears in the story without introduction or explanation. What is important is that we see David with an open line of communication with the divinity, in sharp contrast to Saul.

6. Saul heard that David was discovered. From this point onward, the narrative will switch back and forth deftly between David and Saul. It now turns to an ominous piece of unfinished business—Saul’s response to the priest of Nob who helped David in his flight. The specific reference of Saul’s hearing “that David was discovered” could well be intelligence that places David’s hideout at the stronghold. That would explain why Gad urges David to move on from the stronghold to a forest in Judahite territory.

his spear in his hand. The same spear in hand with which he sought to kill David, and then Jonathan. This small detail thus foreshadows the massacre of an entire town that Saul will order.

7. you Benjaminites. Evidently, the inner circle at the court is enlisted from his own tribe. The tribal affiliation helps explain the sarcasm of his rhetorical questions: could they really expect someone from the tribe of Judah to bestow all these bounties on them?

fields . . . vineyards . . . captains. As Moshe Garsiel has aptly noted, Saul’s paranoid outburst picks up key terms from Samuel’s warning about the “practice of the king” in chapter 8. It is also noteworthy that Saul’s distraught speech takes the form of one lone onrushing sentence (all the way to the end of verse 8). Once again, Saul refers to David contemptuously solely by patronymic, as “the son of Jesse.”

8. none revealed to me. Once again, Saul’s problem, which is also the symptom of his paranoia, is that he feels essential knowledge is denied him.

10. he inquired of the LORD. There was no report in chapter 21 of Ahimelech’s inquiring of the oracle for David, and it seems unlikely that so essential a fact would have been simply elided by the narrator. The first item, then, in Doeg’s denunciation of Ahimelech looks like a fabrication—and one that would especially enrage Saul, who has repeatedly had access to divine knowledge blocked.

12. son of Ahitub. It is a shocking piece of rudeness for Saul to address someone invested with the authority of priesthood merely by patronymic.

14. who of all your servants is like David. Ahimelech may still be laboring under the delusion that the fugitive David was embarked on a special secret mission for Saul. His testimony to David’s loyalty and eminence will of course stoke Saul’s already blazing anger.

15. Did I this day for the first time inquire for him of God? Some interpreters read this as a declarative sentence, but the context compels one to construe it as a question: I never previously consulted the oracle for David, and why on earth would I do it now? (Perhaps he is suggesting that consultation of the oracle is a service to be offered only to the king.) He is silent, however, about providing bread and sword, which in fact he has done.

16. you and all your father’s house. Ahimelech is the great-grandson of Eli. The slaughter of the entire clan of priests here is the grim fulfillment of the curse on the house of Eli first enunciated by the man of God in 2:27–36.

17. for their hand, too, is with David. The Hebrew adverb gam, often a general term of emphasis, surely has the force of “too” here: the paranoid Saul sees conspirators on all sides—his son, his Benjaminite court attendants, and now the priests of Nob.

the king’s servants did not want to reach out. Beyond any moral considerations and any concern for the king’s sanity, it would be a violation of a taboo to murder the priests of the LORD.

to stab. The core meaning of the Hebrew verb pagaʿ is the meeting or intersection of two material bodies or human agencies. It can mean “to encounter,” “to accost,” and, by extension, “to entreat,” but in contexts of violent action, it refers to the “encounter” between forged blade and flesh. The verb “to strike down” (hikah, as in verse 19) indicates the consummated act of killing. In verse 21, the narrator uses harag, the unadorned verb that means “to kill.”

18. You, then. Saul emphatically adds the second-person pronoun ʾatah to the imperative verb: if none of my Israelite subjects will kill the priests, you, then, as an Edomite, may carry out my orders.

who wore the linen ephod. This is a kind of epic epithet for priests.

19. man and woman, infant and suckling. Saul, with the Edomite Doeg as his cat’s-paw, flings himself into an orgy of mass murder, killing not only the adult priests but every living creature in Nob. Now he is carrying out the ban he executed only imperfectly against Amalek (the terms used are virtually identical), but the massacre is directed at his own innocent people. Saul’s madness has become sinister and lethal, like that of Macbeth, who also becomes a murderer of children—the well-meaning farmer’s son who became king has turned into a bloody tyrant.

all by the edge of the sword. “All” catches the force of the Hebrew preposition ʿad (“even” or “as far as”) reiterated before each term in the catalogue of the massacre.

20. And one son of Ahimelech . . . got away. This sole survivor (his name means “my father remains”) will then be able to provide David with priestly services, including access to the oracle.

22. I am the one who caused the loss of all the lives. The Hebrew uses an ellipsis, “caused all the lives,” but the sense is clearly loss of life.