STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 30

1 Sam. 22:6-23

Nov. 12, 2000

Text Comments

The history of David himself and his movements proceeds from 22:5 to 23:1. David goes from “the stronghold” [the Israeli archaeologist Aharoni thinks this is Masada!] to the forest of Hereth and then to Keilah which was being besieged by the Philistines. But, meanwhile, Saul is at work. Vv. 6-23 are, in that sense, an aside, an interruption of the main story, which is about David, but an important aside.

v.6 The sort of movements described in vv. 1-5 could not have been kept entirely secret, certainly not after the 400 men had gathered to David. “Spear in hand” may be an ominous foreshadowing of what is to come. After all, he had already thrown that spear at David and at his own son Jonathan.

v.7 It is entirely in character for Saul to suspect that these Benjamite men will be as motivated by self-interest as he is and that David would treat men as Saul has. David was from Judah so Saul supposed he would naturally favor men from his own tribe. That is what Saul would do. Indeed, the suggestion is that these men had benefited from Saul’s largesse. Why then were they defending David?

v.8 Saul imagines a conspiracy against himself because his officials have not aided him against David by keeping him apprised of the latter’s movements. He conveniently forgets that many of these men had become David’s admirers when he was one of Saul’s commanders, indeed, the one who had had the most success in battle (18:5).

v.9 Three times in the passage Doeg is identified as “the Edomite.” An Edomite, with a longstanding hostility toward Israel, is happy to do what, to their credit, the Israelites would not. Doeg, remember, happened to be at Nob when David arrived there and received help from Ahimelech.

v.10 In the account of David at Nob we were not told that Ahimelech had “inquired of the Lord” on David’s behalf. That shows still more his having been interested in David’s welfare.

v.11 Nob was quite near Gibeah, remember.

v.13 That last idea, that David was lying in wait for Saul, was, of course, not only untrue, but absurd and everyone would have known it.

v.15 Ahimelech is without Saul’s guile and speaks plainly. David had been one of Saul’s officials. Saul had not told Ahimelech otherwise. This hadn’t been the first time he had aided Saul as Saul himself would well know. It had never been a problem before.

v.17 Given Saul’s rage and unstable state of mind it is to their credit that the Israelite men in Saul’s entourage would not lift their hand against the Lord’s priests – no matter that Saul was demanding that they do so.

v.18 The “eighty-five” is significant as indicating that the judgment of the Lord against the house of Eli (2:27-36) is being fulfilled. Eli’s house is all but eliminated by Saul’s savage revenge.

v.19 Remember, Saul carried out this complete destruction imperfectly when he had been commanded to do so against Amalek (15:14-15), but now he does it without reservation against his own innocent people. Israel, at God’s command, had done this to some enemy cities, but here an Israelite king is obliterating an Israelite town with its population. One sidelight is that, by this means, the way is cleared for Jerusalem, later on, to become the religious capital of Israel. [Gordon, 174]

v.20 One man escaped, we don’t know how, and made his way to the only safe-haven he knew, David himself. Abiathar would become chief priest during David’s reign and would serve jointly with Zadok until dismissed by Solomon because of his role in the failed coup of Adonijah to seize the throne after David’s death. So, now David has a prophet, a seer, and a priest, with access to the oracle by which to learn the will of God. David has what has been taken from Saul.

v.22 David, who is only indirectly responsible for the tragedy, takes his responsibility, while Saul who is actually responsible takes none.

We have here an account that shows us in terrible detail what has become of Saul since the Lord left him to himself. He has become a man eaten up by his fear and his hatred, against David, of course, but still more against God. Surely the murder of all of those priests, including many who had nothing to do with any assistance given to David, along with their wives and children, is the overflow of Saul’s rage against God.

And, yet, true to form, all through this episode Saul is consumed by self-pity. No one cares for him, no one is loyal to him. He lashes out in a spirit of offended justice. He has been betrayed, he has been deceived. He is the victim of the plots of others. If isn’t fair or right how others are treating him. Self-pity joined to viciousness and ruthlessness. Saul has become a study in paranoia. He is a figure very much like King Herod at the end of his life, in malice and fury lashing out at the babies in Bethlehem to protect himself from the mere rumor of a pretender.

I tell you, you cannot think of Saul here in 1 Sam. 22 without thinking of the self-pitying and vicious despots who made life so terrible for so many millions of people in the 20th century: Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. They all felt that they were surrounded by conspirators. They all felt themselves ill-used. They were all masters of self-pity. And they were all extraordinarily vicious in putting down anything they remotely saw as posing danger to themselves and were happy to strike terror into potential enemies by the ferocity of the reprisals they took against those they imagined their enemies. Reading vv. 1-8, I couldn’t help but think of Hitler in the bunker and the end of the Second World War. Like Saul, Hitler had around him also to the very end people who would take seriously his paranoid rantings.

 “’Everyone has deceived me! No one has told me the truth! The Armed Forces have lied to me!’ [He was virtually quoting Saul!] One man who was there said that he went on and on like this. Then his face went bluish purple. I thought he was going to have a stroke at any minute.”

“Poor, poor, Adolf,” Eva Braun said near the end. “Deserted by everyone, betrayed by all. Better that ten thousand others die than that he be lost to Germany."” [W.L. Shirer, Rise and Fall, 1114, 1122]

And, like Saul, Hitler surrounded himself with men who would do his dirty work for him. Hitler, in those last days, was sending out orders for the executions of those he believed had betrayed him. And, amazingly, even as the world was collapsing around them, they would do his cruel bidding. Those who know the personal history of Stalin or Mao know that it was the same. They were dangerous men to be around because of their suspicions. They were absolutely brutal in taking steps to eliminate enemies and took no thought of women and children or hosts of innocent bystanders. Think of the purges that Stalin conducted on several occasions.

Against verse 9 you should put in your margin a reference to Psalm 52 which is David’s inspired song about Doeg and what he did at Nob. The psalm begins with a description of the kind of man Doeg was.

“…you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God…”

“…you love evil rather than good…”

“…you love every harmful word…”

Then David goes on to describe the brevity of Doeg’s success, how soon God’s judgment will befall him.

“Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin: He will snatch you up and tear you from your tent.”

“The righteous will see and fear; they will laugh at him, saying, ‘Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold…and grew strong by destroying others.’ ”

And, then, David finishes the short psalm by renewing his own trust and confidence in the Lord. But, there is no doubt about the evil that was done here, the utterly inexcusable evil. Saul has become a man overcome by pure evil and the Bible pronounces its verdict on him and on the man who did the killing for him. Israel had wanted a king like the other nations. God warned them through Samuel in chapter 8, what that would mean. And now Israel had a king like the other nations, and was suffering the consequences.

But, though Israel suffered, God’s will and purpose did not. And the narrator finishes the chapter by reminding his readers of that fact. Saul is not only paranoid, but he is now impotent. He kills the priests of Nob and succeeds only in carrying out God’s judgement against the house of Eli. And the one man who escapes, goes to David and provides him with a priest of the Lord, and, as we will read in 23:6, when Abiathar came to David, he brought with him the ephod. This ephod – usually simply a part of the priest’s dress – had something to do with oracles and revelations from God (it is mentioned as a separate thing, not a piece of clothing worn in 21:9) as seems clear from Doeg’s reference in 22:10 to Ahimilech having inquired of the Lord on David’s behalf. So, with Abiathar, David has still greater access to God and to communications from God. He now has both a prophet and a priest. Saul set out to punish those who had helped his rival and ends up having rendered David a great assistance. No doubt we are to appreciate this irony. Here is Fokkelman, the great scholar of the narrative technique employed in Samuel.

“Saul himself is a prime cause of David having obtained the ephod, through his having been so stupid as to wish to exterminate the family of priests from Nob. The irony here is that Saul has condemned the priest Ahimelech for using the oracle on behalf of David, and as an important consequence of that judgment, must accept the development that the oracular device, which probably was not even consulted [that is by Ahimelech; Fokkelman takes Doeg to have lied about that], has now finished up permanently in David’s hands.” [Cited in Waltke, Syllabus, 34]

So we are here given to see Saul’s moral disintegration, his psychological unraveling, the evil that he is bringing upon his own people, and, at the same time, the complete futility of his efforts to overturn the will and purpose of God.

I will conclude this evening simply by reminding us that the situation depicted in the narrative we read tonight – in varying degrees, of course – is the perpetual situation of the human race. The further it is removed from God the more vicious it becomes and the more self-pitying and self-protecting. The greater the evil that is done, at the same time, the more heart-felt the protestations of innocence and injury. But the promise of God is that it will not succeed in its rebellion and try as it might to destroy the truth and the kingdom of God, they will both triumph in the end. As David, in Psalm 52, reminds us regarding this incident, the wicked will not escape the judgment of the Lord.

I was thinking about this in regard to an article I read the other day concerning the Supreme Court’s decision in Sternberg v. Carhart, the decision which protected partial-birth abortion from the efforts of state lawmakers to ban the practice. The author was making the point that in prohibiting the State of Nebraska from outlawing the procedure the five justices who voted with the majority could hardly avoid the obligation to explain what it was that they were allowing. Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote for the majority, used the very technical medical jargon, perhaps in hopes of obscuring the horror of the procedure. But one of the dissenters, Justice Anthony Kennedy, put it all in plain English.

“…the fetus’ arms and legs are delivered outside the uterus while the fetus is alive; witnesses to the procedure report seeing the body of the fetus moving outside the woman’s body…. At this point, the abortion procedure has the appearance of a live birth. As stated by one group of physicians ‘as the physician manually performs breech extraction of the body of alive fetus, excepting the head, she continues in the apparent role of an obstetrician delivering a child.’ … With only the head of the fetus remaining in utero, the abortionist tears open the skull.”

“…brain death does not occur until after the skull invasion and…the heart of the fetus may continue to beat for minutes after the contents of the skull are vacuumed out…” And so on in still more gruesome detail. [J.E. Dunsford, “Like a Startle…Like a Finch,” Touchstone (Nov. 2000) 11]

Justice Scalia wrote that this method of killing the fetus “is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion.”

However, the most remarkable feature of the majority opinion, in the judgment of the author of the article (a law professor at St. Louis University) is that Justice Breyer defends the practice by pointing out that it is, really, no more gruesome than the most commonly employed method for second trimester abortions, the D & E (Dilation and Extraction). According to Justice Breyer, “the notion that either of these two equally gruesome procedures performed at this later stage of gestation is more akin to infanticide than the other…is simply irrational.” Which is to say that they both amount to the killing of a live baby. That is, it may be barbaric to kill a live baby that is in the process of being born, but it is no more barbaric, really, than to kill the baby the way abortionists kill them in the second trimester. This Justice Breyer used as an argument for partial birth abortion. It is a practice no more barbaric really than other practices we allow.

It is remarkable how clarifying the abortion issue has been. We American Christians struggled years ago to separate our confidence in God from our confidence in our nation, our political institutions, our democratic way of life. But no more. The further the society has moved away from God the more vicious and hard-hearted it has become, while all the while wallowing in self-pity. What is a woman, what is a man, what is a nation to do that suffers as we suffer, but kill the boys and girls of Nob who, in one way or another, we see as standing in the way of our own well-being. Our case may seem more polite, but it is moral and spiritual paranoia just as really as was Saul’s.

Samuel warned us not to count on our government for very much. He warned us that we would get much evil along with some good. And he was as right about American government in the early 21st century as he was about Israelite government in the 11th century B.C.

And what is to be our response to that truth? Well, we will, as David did at the end of Psalm 52, renew our confidence in God: in his judgment of the wicked and in his promised and so certain vindication of his people, his kingdom, his holiness, in due time.

“But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God; I trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever. I will praise you forever for what you have done; in your name I will hope, for your name is good. I will praise you in the presence of your saints.” [Ps. 52:8-9]