1. on the third day. If, as seems plausible, David and his men were sent away from the Philistine ranks just before the engagement with the Israelites, the battle, ending in the catastrophic defeat of Saul’s forces, took place while David was traveling southward. The writer, it seems, wants to get David as far away as he can from the battlefield in the Valley of Jezreel, perhaps to remove him from any possible implication in Saul’s death. But an indirect question lurks in the margin of the narrative, for we are left to wonder what would have been the outcome of the battle had David turned against his Philistine allies, as their field commanders feared he would.

the Amalekites had raided the Negeb, and Ziklag. David must initially confront a military disaster on his own home front that mirrors the disaster which, unknown to him, has unfolded in the north. His habitual enemies, the Amalekites, have of course exploited the absence of the fighting men at Ziklag.

burned it in fire. It is possible, although not entirely certain, that the idiomatic force of this seemingly redundant idiom, which occurs frequently, is “utterly consumed,” “burned to the ground.”

2. they put no one to death. At first blush this notice casts a favorable light on the Amalekites in comparison to David, whose practice as a raider has been general massacre of the conquered population. What becomes clear, however, is that the Amalekites (who do not have David’s motive of secrecy) consider the women and children to be part of the booty and have carried them off in order to exploit them as slaves. The appearance of the Egyptian man (verse 11) serves as a reminder of the Amalekites’ role as slaveholders, and of how inhumanely they treat their slaves.

they drove them off. This rather brutal verb is typically used for driving animals as in verse 20, and so highlights the rapaciousness of the Amalekites.

6. And David was in dire straits, for the troops thought to stone him. The initial phrase might momentarily be construed as referring to David’s feelings (“and he felt very distressed”), but it is immediately made clear that the reference is to the practical predicament in which he suddenly finds himself in relation to his men. As before, David’s real emotions remain opaque—we know only of his participation in the public orgy of weeping. This moment is also a vivid reminder, as are others in the Saul–David story, of how precarious political power is: David, the charismatic and brilliant commander who has led his men through a host of dangers, suddenly discovers that these hard-bitten warriors are ready to kill him because of the disastrous turn of events. It was he, after all, who drew them to the north with the Philistine army, leaving Ziklag exposed.

David took strength in the Lord his God. He finds encouragement in the face of mortal despair—specifically, as the next verse explains, by calling for the oracle. In this fashion, he staves off the assault his men are contemplating by dramatically showing that they still have means of redress against the Amalekites, and that he has a special channel of communication with God.

7. Bring forth, pray, the ephod. As several interpreters have observed, there is an antithetical contrast here between David, who has priest and ephod to convey to him God’s oracular counsel, and Saul, who, frustrated in all his attempts to discover God’s intentions, resorts to forbidden necromancy.

8. you will surely rescue. The ephod, as we have noted before, can yield only a binary yes-or-no answer, so the gist of the oracle is that David should pursue the raiding party. But rescuing the captives, which is surely paramount in the minds of the embittered guerilla fighters, was not an explicit part of David’s inquiry of the oracle—perhaps because he was afraid to presume so much. The “yes” from the oracle is now taken to imply that David and his men will both overtake the raiders and rescue their dear ones.

9. those to be left stayed behind. The first phrase (literally, “the ones being left”) has bothered some commentators, but it is in keeping with occasional biblical usage to introduce this sort of proleptic reference, creating what from a modern point of view is a redundancy between the first and second phrases.

10. were . . . exhausted. The verb piger may be related to the noun peger, “corpse,” and so would have the sense of “dead tired.” It should be kept in mind that David and his men had been traveling three days from the Philistine camp, and now they have had to continue on into the desert at top speed in order to overtake the raiding party.

11. they found an Egyptian man in the field. This is the first of three memorable instances in the David story in which a foreigner brings intelligence of a dire event, although in this case the subject of the intelligence is not the event itself but the whereabouts of the perpetrators.

12. for he had eaten no bread and drunk no water. The act of abandoning a sick slave in the desert to perish of thirst and hunger dispels any illusions we may have harbored about the humanity of the Amalekites. Fokkelman has proposed a correspondence (in his calculation, also a synchronicity) between the starving Egyptian and the fasting Saul at Ein-Dor.

13. I am an Egyptian lad. The term “lad” (naʿar) does not necessarily indicate chronological age here but rather subservient status, a decorous synonym for “slave,” which the Egyptian proceeds to use.

16. and, look, they were sprawled out. The presentative “look” (hineh) as an indicator of transition from the narrator’s overview to the character’s point of view has particular tactical importance here. The Amalekites, as we can infer from the fact that four hundred escape the general slaughter, must number well over a thousand. David arrives with only four hundred men. But he finds the raiders entirely vulnerable to a surprise attack—drunk, sated, and sleeping (rather like the Hessian mercenaries whom Washington caught unawares by the Delaware after their Christmas feast). The term rendered as “sprawled out” (netushim) derives from a verbal root that means to abandon or cast away, and so in this context suggests some kind of dissipation. The people who left the Egyptian to starve to death in the desert are now exposed to destruction through their unrestrained indulgence in food and drink.

17. four hundred lads. Again, the versatile naʿar is not an indication of chronological age but is used in its military sense, which appears to be something like “elite troops,” or perhaps simply “fighting men.”

20. They drove before them that livestock. The Masoretic Text has the syntactically problematic “before that livestock” (lifney hamiqneh hahuʾ). This translation is based on a small emendation, lifneyhem (“before them”), assuming a haplography—an inadvertent scribal deletion of repeated letters, since the last two letters of lifneyhem (heh and mem) are also the first two letters of hamiqneh.

This is David’s booty. Since the Amalekites had been raiding throughout the Negeb, both in Judahite and Philistine territory, they would have assembled a very large collection of plundered flocks. Thus David has abundant livestock to distribute as “gifts”—the word also means “blessing” or “greeting”—to the sundry elders of Judah.

21. he had them stay. The Masoretic Text has “they had them stay” (a difference of one vowel). The Septuagint has the singular subject.

22. that they may drive them off. The coarseness of the ill-spirited men is reflected in the verb they use for taking away the wives and children, nahag, which, as we have noted, usually means to drive cattle. (Compare the irate Laban’s use of the same verb in reference to Jacob’s treatment of Rachel and Leah, Genesis 31:26.)

23. with what the LORD has given us. The syntactical link of this clause with what precedes is not entirely clear. Given the ideology of victory that David assumes—all triumph and all spoils of war come from God—it is best to construe the particle ʾet that introduces the clause not as a sign of the accusative but as “with.”

24. who stays with the gear. There is an implicit rationale for giving an equal share to those who remain behind—beyond the consideration of exhaustion, they have played a role in guarding the gear, thus enabling the other fighting men to proceed to battle with a lightened load. It is for this reason that David “had them stay” (or “posted them”) at the ford of the wadi. In all respects, this episode is meant to demonstrate David’s attributes as leader: he finds strength in the face of disaster, consults God’s oracle, intrepidly leads his troops in a counterattack, and now makes the most equitable arrangement for the division of spoils.

26. he sent from the booty to the elders of Judah, to his friends. This act shows David the consummate political man, shoring up support among the sundry leaders of his home tribe of Judah (hence the catalogue of place-names), and preparing for himself a base in Hebron (at the end of the catalogue), the principal town of Judah, where he will soon be proclaimed king. Some scholars have been troubled by “to his friends” (lereiʿeihu, which would normally mean “to his friend”) and have sought to emend it. David Kimchi, however, persuasively argues that the ostensibly singular noun can be legitimately read as a plural on the basis of other biblical precedents, and that the reference to “friends” makes good political sense: these are the same elders of Judah who provided cover for David during the period when he was hiding out from Saul in his own tribal territory. The verb “move about” (hithalekh) in the wrap-up verse of this section is an allusion to precisely this period, for it recalls David’s flight with his men from Saul at Keilah in 23:13—“and [they] moved about wherever they could.”