1. the wilderness of Paran. This geographical indication is puzzling because, unless there is some other place called Paran, it would refer to the Sinai desert, where it would make no sense for David to go and where he could scarcely be if he and his men are engaged with Nabal’s shepherds in Judah. The Septuagint reads “wilderness of Maon.”

2. Maon . . . Carmel. Both places are in the tribal territory of Judah, in the vicinity of Hebron, and just a few miles apart.

3. the man’s name was Nabal. On the face of it, this is an improbable name because nabal in Hebrew plainly means “base fellow,” “churl,” or “fool,” as Abigail (verse 25) will point out. It is at least conceivable that the name is not originally Hebrew, and various meanings drawn from other ancient Near Eastern languages have been proposed for it, such as “archer” and “chosen one of the god.”

a good mind and lovely looks. As yet, we do not know why this characterization will be important. Her shrewd intelligence will be vividly demonstrated in her brilliant speech to David, and her physical attractiveness will stir his matrimonial interest in her.

and a Calebite. The Calebites were non-Israelites who in effect joined the tribe of Judah. Several medieval Hebrew commentators detected a double meaning because kalibi could also be construed as “doglike.”

6. Thus may it be this time next year. The compact Hebrew phrase koh leḥay occurs only here, and its meaning has been disputed. This translation adopts an interpretation that goes back to Rashi, which is based on the similarity to a well-known idiom, ka‘et ḥayah. That would make sense in terms of the narrative situation: the prosperous Nabal is obviously “faring well” at the moment, and David’s greeting of peace (to fare well in the Hebrew idiom is to possess shalom) contains a veiled threat—let us hope that you continue to fare well a year from now.

7. we did not humiliate them. This is the same verb used for Jonathan’s sense of his father’s treatment of him (20:34), although here it has the meaning of “molest.”

nothing of theirs was missing. The message is that David’s men did not permit themselves to take any of Nabal’s flock, and perhaps also that as armed men they defended Nabal’s people against marauders (compare verse 16, “They were a wall around us both night and day”). But there is a certain ambiguity as to whether David was providing protection out of sheer goodwill or conducting a protection racket in order to get the necessary provisions for his guerilla band.

8. our lads. The Hebrew says “the lads”—“our” is added for the sake of clarity, to distinguish David’s retainers from Nabal’s.

for we have come on a festive day. The time of sheepshearing was a sort of holiday, with feasting and drinking. Nabal’s own feast back home at Maon (verse 36) may have been encouraged by the festivities in which he joined with his shearers out in the field.

Give, pray, whatever you can to your servants. The request for a payoff is politely worded, and no quantities are specified.

to your son, to David. This is an expression of deference or humility to the powerful and presumably older Nabal. It also strikes an ironic note of correspondence with the language of David’s encounter with Saul at the cave near Ein-Gedi in the previous episode. There, David addressed Saul as “my father,” and the king, in an access of feeling, called David “my son.”

10. Who is David and who is the son of Jesse? This sarcastic question, in verse-like parallelism, picks up another ironic correspondence with Saul, who after the vanquishing of Goliath asked whose son this was. In Nabal’s case, of course, the question expresses the contempt of a rich landowner for David and his ragtag band of dispossessed men and malcontents (“men who come from I know not where”).

many are the slaves breaking away from their masters. On the surface, these words reflect the disdain of a propertied man (who would also be a slaveholder) for all landless rebels who threaten the established social hierarchy. But there is also a barbed hint that David himself is a slave or subject (the same word in Hebrew) who has rebelled against his master, Saul.

11. shall I take my bread and my water. The Septuagint has “wine” instead of “water.” In any case, Nabal’s harsh and contemptuous response to David’s men vividly illustrates that he is a “hard” man, and a churlish one. His outrage over the notion of parting with any of his possessions is nicely indicated, as Shimon Bar-Efrat has noted, by the fact that there are eight grammatical expressions of the first-person singular in this one sentence.

12. Every man, gird his sword. The angry David wastes no words: he merely gives the urgent command to take up weapons and move out for the kill.

15. And the men have been very good to us. In keeping with the general practice of biblical dialogue, the servant recycles the language of David’s message to Nabal—“we were not humiliated and we missed nothing the whole time”—but amplifies it by adding this clause as well as the image in the next verse, “They were a wall around us both night and day.” He thus makes emphatically clear that David’s men really provided protection faithfully, whether in the simple sense or in the racketeering sense.

17. And now, mark and see what you must do. Unlike the “lads” who address Saul, this one offers no specific advice to Abigail, for she is more than clever enough to figure out what steps she must immediately take.

20. And so she was riding on the donkey coming down under the cover of the mountain and, look, David and his men were coming. The two parties moving toward each other introduce a moment of suspense, for David, after all, as the next verse (with a pluperfect verb) makes utterly clear, is armed and angry. The “look” (hineh) is used in characteristic fashion to indicate Abigail’s visual perspective: he at first doesn’t see her because she is coming down the sheltered slope of the mountain, but she sees him and his men with their swords girded ready for battle.

22. a single pisser against the wall. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is properly followed in the King James Version, as it is in this translation. The phrase, of course, is a rough and vivid epithet for “male,” and one that occurs only in curses. Its edge of vulgarity seems perfectly right for David’s anger.

23–24. flung herself on her face . . . bowed to the ground . . . flung herself at his feet. In a world where an angry king could massacre every man, woman, and child in Nob, Abigail has no way of knowing whether David will have an impulse to kill her on the spot. (She has not heard the words that limit the threat of slaughter to the males.) Thus, her first move in this highly dangerous situation, before she speaks a word, is to demonstrate her absolute submission to David through these extravagant gestures of obeisance.

24. Mine. The shrewdness of her extraordinary speech begins with the very first syllable she utters. She immediately takes all the blame on herself, though in the next breath she will be sure to transfer it heartily to her contemptible husband. At the same time, she exploits a momentary pun, for the word bi (“mine,” “in me”) in other contexts can mean “I beseech you,” so she initiates her address to David with what sounds like a term of imploring.

25. this scoundrel of a man . . . his name means Base . . . And as for me. It is hard to think of another instance in literature in which a wife so quickly and so devastatingly interposes distance between herself and her husband. She rapidly denounces her spouse and then counterposes herself (“And as for me,” waʾani) as a person who had no part in the rude rejection of David’s emissaries. Abigail of course wants to save her own neck, but she clearly has been chafing over her marriage with a boorish, unpleasant, and probably older man, and she sees an opportunity here.

26. Who kept you from coming into bloodguilt. Abigail is no doubt speaking in general, but the reader can scarcely forget the immediately preceding episode, in which David refused to harm Saul when he had him in his power.

27. this blessing that your servant has brought. The obvious sense of “blessing” (berakhah) in context is “gift,” but the primary meaning of the word is worth preserving for two reasons. First, it is clearly intended to answer to David’s reiterated use of “blessed” in his response to Abigail. Then, as Moshe Garsiel has aptly observed, it is a key term in a network of allusions to the moment in Genesis 33 when Jacob is reunited with his brother Esau: Esau, too, approaches dauntingly with four hundred armed men; Jacob, like Abigail, prostrates himself before the figure he fears; and he, too, has brought with him generous tribute to be offered in conciliation, which he refers to not as a “gift” (minhaḥ) but as a “blessing.” And in Genesis 33, that term plays back against the fraught meanings of “blessing” in the larger Jacob–Esau narrative.

28. Forgive, pray, the crime of your servant. “Servant” is in the feminine, but the conventional “handmaiden” sounds too fussy. By way of deference, Abigail once again speaks as though the fault were hers, though she has made it quite clear that her husband alone is the guilty one.

a stalwart house. A stalwart, or enduring, house is precisely what was promised the priestly line that was to replace the house of Eli (2:35).

no evil will be found in you all your days. Abigail exploits the temporal ambiguity of the Hebrew imperfective verb to make a statement that is both descriptive of the way David has conducted himself and predictive of the way he will, or should, conduct himself.

29. when a person rises to pursue you. The generality of “a person” (ʾadam) picks up David’s use of the same word in the preceding episode when he addresses Saul (“Why should you listen to people’s words” [divrey ʾadam]), and, even more pointedly, recalls his very first speech to Saul in 17:32, “Let no man’s heart [levʾ adam] fail him,” where the term seems to refer to Saul himself, who may be the hidden referent here.

bound in the bundle of the living. Although Kyle McCarter Jr., following Tur-Sinai, has claimed that “bundle” (tsror) actually means document or book, a more plausible identification is the pouch in which little stones keeping a tally of live sheep were placed. Thus both this positive image and the negative one of the slingshot would be associated with sheepherding. And as Shimon Bar-Efrat had nicely observed, tsror in biblical Hebrew also means “stone,” the object that would normally be placed in the hollow of the sling; so there is a punning cross-link between the two images.

will sling from the hollow of the sling. Instead of being bound up and safely kept, their lives will be flung out into the void of extinction. (The literal sense of the preposition attached to “hollow” in the Hebrew is “in.”) Abigail has chosen her metaphor shrewdly because it would be general knowledge that David used his sling to destroy a formidable enemy.

30–31. when the LORD . . . appoints you prince over Israel, this will not be a stumbling and a trepidation of the heart to my lord. Abigail deftly pitches her argument to David’s political self-interest. Once he makes the move from guerilla chieftain to monarch, he will not want his record stained by blood he has spilled. It is therefore more prudent to let God take care of his enemies—“the LORD” in biblical parlance being the piously proper way to talk about the course of events, but its pragmatic equivalent being “other people” or “circumstances.”

31. and you will remember your servant. These final words of Abigail’s lengthy and carefully calculated speech are strategically chosen, and discreet. What, in fact, does she have in mind? The Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, in a perceptive and lively essay on this story, makes a bold and, to my mind, persuasive proposal. Abigail has matrimony in view, once her cantankerous old husband is out of the way, but why does she think she will deserve so signal an honor, or reward, from David? Shalev argues that when Abigail dissuades David from killing Nabal, repeatedly assuring him that the LORD will pay off David’s scores against him, she is really suggesting herself as the agency for “the LORD.” She is, in other words, proposing to David that she carry out a kind of contract killing of her husband, with the payoff that she will become the wife of the handsome young warrior and future king.

32–34. David, though persuaded by Abigail’s prudent advice, cannot resist one last reminder that he was indeed about to cut down every pisser against the wall in the house of Nabal.

36. And she told him nothing. Abigail again makes a careful calculation: she does not want to convey the scary news to him while he is enveloped in an alcoholic haze.

37. in the morning when the wine was gone out of Nabal. She catches him cold sober, and perhaps even with a painful hangover.

his heart died within him and he became like a stone. The terrifying information that David had been on his way—or did she say, was still on his way?—with four hundred armed men intent on mayhem triggers a paralyzing heart attack or, perhaps, a stroke (the biblical understanding of physiology not being ours). Abigail gives the distinct appearance of counting on her husband’s cowardice and on a bad heart she might have been aware of from previous manifestations of ill health. If this assumption is correct, she would be using her knowledge of his physical frailty to carry out the tacit contract on his life—bloodlessly, with God Himself left to do the deed (compare the end of verse 38). Robert Polzin perceptively notes that the figurative use of the stone for paralysis cinches a circle of images: the enemies flung from the hollow of the sling and the smooth stone with which David killed Goliath.

39. David . . . spoke out for Abigail. In biblical idiom, the verb “to speak” followed by the preposition b^e instead of the usual ʾel (“to”) means to enter into discussion about a betrothal. David, losing no time, has certainly grasped the veiled implication of Abigail’s last words to him.

41. your servant is but a slavegirl to wash the feet of my lord’s servants. In one last flourish of the etiquette of humility, she professes herself unworthy of so great an honor as to become David’s wife. But perhaps this is just what she has been aiming to become, and so, once again “hurrying,” she sets off to join her new husband. She then vanishes from the subsequent narrative.

44. And Saul had given Michal his daughter, David’s wife, to Palti. The legality of this act is questionable. David’s having taken two wives—of Ahinoam all we know is her place of origin—while hiding out from Saul is no justification because, given the practice of polygamy, he could have done that even if he were living under the same roof with Michal. Saul’s motive is political, to deprive David of one claim to the throne by removing the connection through marriage with the royal family. But that connection has already been established, as the narrator’s identification of Michal as “David’s wife” is meant to remind us. We can only guess what Michal, who we know loved David, feels about being passed around in this fashion, or what she feels about the man her father has imposed on her. Later, we will be accorded a brief but unforgettable glimpse into Palti’s feelings for Michal.