1. And David said in his heart. This is the first actual interior monologue given for David. The decision to “cross over” (verse 2) to the enemy is a momentous one, and the writer wants to make it perfectly clear that David had definitively realized Saul was bound to kill him sooner or later (“I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul”) unless he moved to the safety of enemy territory.

2. he crossed over . . . to Achish . . . king of Gath. For those scholars who have argued that David is no more a historical figure than King Arthur, this whole episode constitutes a problem: why would a much later, legendary, and supposedly glorifying tradition attribute this act of national treachery to David? (It would be rather like the invention of a story that Winston Churchill spent 1914–1918 in Berlin, currying the favor of the kaiser.) The compelling inference is that the writer had authentic knowledge of a period when David collaborated with the Philistines; he was unwilling to omit this uncomfortable information, though he did try to mitigate it.

3. David stayed with Achish in Gath . . . each man with his household. The circumstances have changed drastically since David arrived in Gath alone and was obliged to play the madman. Now he comes with six hundred men under his command, a fighting unit that could be of great use to Achish, and essentially offers to become Achish’s vassal. The notice about the households sets the stage for the Amalekite raid on Ziklag in chapter 29, for we now become aware that David’s guerilla band carries in its train a sizable group of wives and children.

5. For why should your servant dwell in the royal town with you? On his part, David would like to establish his own headquarters and enjoy much greater freedom of movement. But given that his six hundred men with multiple wives and children could easily have made up a group of two or three thousand people, they would have in fact been a rather burdensome presence in a modest-sized Philistine city.

6. Ziklag. The best archaeological guess is that this is a site a few miles to the northwest of Beersheba, in an area under Philistine jurisdiction but facing the border with Israel.

Therefore has Ziklag belonged to the kings of Judah. This seemingly technical geopolitical notice serves a function of historical foreshadowing, as Fokkelman observes: David, the Philistine vassal and fugitive from Saul, is destined to found a lasting dynasty, “the kings of Judah.”

8. for they were the inhabitants of the land of old, till you come to Shur. There might be a textual distortion here: several versions of the Septuagint read “the inhabited land from Telem to Shur.” But the Masoretic version has a certain logic: what David sets out to do is to attack the age-old inhabitants of the land, who are Israel’s staunch enemies, throughout this southern region. In doing this, he is also serving Achish’s purposes, for these peoples are equally hostile to the Philistines (like the Israelites, latecomer interlopers in Canaan).

9. he left not a man or woman alive. The narrator offers no indication of whether he thinks these massacres are morally objectionable or merely what Israel’s traditional enemies deserve. A pragmatic reason for the butchery will be given in verse 11. It should be noted that David is not carrying out a total “ban” (ḥerem) against these groups because he keeps all the livestock as booty, thus palpably building up a base of wealth for himself and his followers.

10. Where were you raiding now? Achish of course wants to know about the military activities of his vassal. David answers with a flat lie, claiming he has been conducting raids against his own tribe, Judah, and against two ethnic groups more or less attached to Judah. In fact, he has been attacking only non-Israelite groups.

The Negeb. The term Negeb means “dry land” and refers to the desert stretching across southern Israel from near the Dead Sea to near the coastal plain. Its subregions are then identified by the tribe or ethnic group that inhabits each.

11. Lest they tell about us, saying, “Thus did David do.” David wipes out all these populations because he wants no one surviving to bring word back to Gath that he has restricted his attacks entirely to Canaanite and related peoples, and also that he has been enriching himself with more booty than he has been sharing with Achish his overlord by way of tribute. David is clearly a man who will do anything to survive. His words here will come back in a surprising new context in his elegy for Saul and Jonathan, when he says, “Tell it not in Gath.”

12. Achish trusted David. He believes the lie, or so it seems.

my perpetual vassal. The Hebrew ‘eved has the general meaning of “slave” or “servant,” but the present episode makes the sense of “vassal” compelling.

28:1. You surely know that with me you must sally forth. Despite the just reported “trust” in David, Achish appears to harbor a lingering doubt (hence the coercive edge of “you surely know”) as to whether David will actually fight against his fellow Israelites, something that, to Achish’s knowledge, David has only claimed to do (27:10).

2. you yourself know what your servant will do. This is an artful dodge: it could be construed, as David means it to be construed, as “yes, of course, I’ll do it,” but the language evasively does not repeat Achish’s words about sallying forth (against Israel).

I shall make you my bodyguard for life. As befits a ruler addressing a former enemy with whom he is in uneasy alliance, Achish’s gesture is a studied ambiguity—either he is rewarding David for his loyalty by making him a permanent bodyguard, or he is seeking to maintain surveillance over David by an appointment that would keep him close to the court.