Prayer Challenges
Current Challenge from Doug Knox.
April
Man Builders, Part 40
1 Samuel 30:1-15
David—Forged Masterpiece, Part 22
CONFLICTING REALITIES
Lingering Issues Over 1 Samuel 27 and 29
1 Samuel 27 and 29, the chapters that record David’s deepening emotional ties with King Achish, leave a laundry list of questions. How could David and his men have become so attached to the Philistine King that they expected to accompany him into battle against King Saul? Why, in turn, would Achish think that the other Philistine kings would permit such a thing? Did David think he would wrest Israel from King Saul through this development? Questions of a more philosophical nature follow. Why did God choose to remain passive when the relationship between David and Achish deepened into mutual loyalty? How do formerly cautious enemies become loyal friends? This last question is not an idle one. Achish himself told David, “As the LORD [Israel’s God!] lives, you have been honest…. For I have found nothing wrong in you from the day of your coming to me to this day” (1 Samuel 29:6). Of course, this is an ironic misconception, given David’s bait-and-switch tactics discussed in 1 Samuel 27:8-12. The entanglement deepens from a convenient arrangement to a potentially explosive situation when these two men who worship different gods become loyal to each other. Part of the situation is natural. God has created men to be passionate, to care deeply. And passionate men respect this quality in others. This fact helps explain why David’s relationship with Achish is so compelling on a human level. Both are fighters. They share their deepest drives. The result can be only mutual loyalty. Meanwhile, we as readers watch in perplexity as the situation grows more complicated. We wonder, “What are they doing?”Unfortunately, that question never occurs to the characters themselves. No one from the narrative stops to ask, “What are we doing?”
Redirection Over Resolution
This is what makes the drama in 1 Samuel 27 and 29 so charged. By the time we reach its close, we stare down a wormhole that threatens to swallow redemptive history. Everything else that has come before—Samuel’s calling as a prophet during the close of the Judges, the people’s demand for a king at the end of Samuel’s life, Saul’s failed tenure, and the preparation that God has invested in David—threaten to collapse because two men who should have remained enemies now stand as friends. It is more than Israel’s future as a kingdom that hangs in the balance. Our New Testament gospel, inextricably linked to the Old Testament, is equally exposed by the threat, Paul preaches “the gospel of God...concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh [meaning genealogically]” (Romans 1:3). But just before the avalanche breaks free, the narrative takes us in an unexpected direction. David and his men return to Ziklag to discover a new crisis:
Now when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid against the Negeb and against Ziklag. They had overcome Ziklag and burned it with fire and taken captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great. They killed no one, but carried them off and went their way.
And when David and his men came to the city, they found it burned with fire, and their wives and sons and daughters taken captive. Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep.
David's two wives also had been taken captive, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail the widow of Nabal of Carmel. And David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in soul, each for his sons and daughters. But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God.
--1 Samuel 30:1-6
For fighting men to have to leave a battle must be a difficult thing. Nonetheless, David and his troops do so. Upon their return, however, they discover that the Amalikites, one of the groups that David has been raiding, has attacked the Negeb and Ziklag, and has captured their families. Tthe tragedy strikes them all equally. Everyone’s families are missing, including David’s two wives. For a moment, everyone grieves together. Inevitably, though, the people shift the blame to David. After all, he led them away from their families in the first place. The “solution” in their minds is to rage against David and stone him. David, however, strengthens himself in the LORD his God.
What David’s Strengthening Looks Like
Contemporary Bibles make a paragraph break between verses 6 and 7, so that the clause, “David strengthened himself in the LORD his God,” closes without immediate context. This leads to speculation about David’s interior thoughts. Such an assumption is not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, David corralled his thinking around what he knew to be true about his relationship with his God. The context, however, takes us in a more concrete direction. The text continues,
And David said to Abiathar the priest, the son of Ahimelech, “Bring me the ephod.”
So Abiathar brought the ephod to David. And David inquired of the LORD, “Shall I pursue after this band? Shall I overtake them?”
He answered him, “Pursue, for you shall surely overtake and shall surely rescue.”
--1 Samuel 30:7-8
The writer makes a double connection to a similar event here. First, David seeks “Abiathar the priest, the son of Ahimelech.” Ahimelech first appeared in 1 Samuel 21-22, when he harbored David and his men during their flight from Saul. Saul, in his rage, had all the residents at Nob slaughtered (1 Samuel 22:19). Only Ahimelech’s son Abiathar survived, and David guaranteed him sanctuary (1 Samuel 22:23). The writer’s mention of father and son in chapter 30 reminds us that both David and Abiathar have suffered deeply at Saul’s hands, and David has given the surviving son a place of honor. The second connection also draws on an incident that followed immediately after David and his men learned about Saul’s slaughter of the residents at Nob. Before they had time to complete their grieving, ord arrived that the Philistines attacked the threshing floors at Keilah (1 Samuel 23:1-14). Against his men’s “safe” advice, David consults the LORD through the ephod whether he should muster them to rescue the residents at Keilah. The LORD told him to go, and the rescue was successful. The rescue released them from thinking of themselves as victims and made them think like strategists again. The parallels between Keilah and Ziklag are clear. These two elements—Abiathar’s active role as priest and, the two inquiries over the ephod—all reappear in 1 Samuel 23:10-12, our present situation. I believe that these elements describe David’s “strengthening” in 1 Samuel 30:6. As as a military commander, he must make defensible decisions in the moment. Even following setback, he braces himself for risky but potentially valuable tactical decisions that lie ahead. Through this crisis, God moves the humanly impossible dilemma over conflicting loyalties aside as he redirects David’s men back to a new mission.
Moving Ahead
David musters his entire six hundred men to engage in an all-or-nothing retaliation raid. His powers of persuasion are commendable. Events bode well for them.
So David set out, and the six hundred men who were with him, and they came to the brook Besor, where those who were left behind stayed. But David pursued, he and four hundred men. Two hundred stayed behind, who were too exhausted to cross the brook Besor.
They found an Egyptian in the open country and brought him to David. And they gave him bread and he ate. They gave him water to drink, and they gave him a piece of a cake of figs and two clusters of raisins. And when he had eaten, his spirit revived, for he had not eaten bread or drunk water for three days and three nights.
And David said to him, “To whom do you belong? And where are you from?”
He said, “I am a young man of Egypt, servant to an Amalekite, and my master left me behind because I fell sick three days ago. We had made a raid against the Negeb of the Cherethites and against that which belongs to Judah and against the Negeb of Caleb, and we burned Ziklag with fire.”
And David said to him, “Will you take me down to this band?”
And he said, “Swear to me by God that you will not kill me or deliver me into the hands of my master, and I will take you down to this band.”
--1 Samuel 30:9-15
The events described here are straightforward. As God promised, the men make unhindered progress toward their goal.
The Egyptian Man’s Strategic Value
The men’s encounter with the young Egyptian raises an interesting character contrast in the background. When the men give him food and water to reviv him, he tells them about his abandonment at his master’s hand. When David asks that he escort his troops to the Amalekite band is a call for the man to switch loyalties, he makes a logical request. “Swear to me by God that you will not kill me or deliver me into the hands of my master, and I will take you down to this band.” If we consider the interchange from the Egyptian man’s standpoint, his only leverage is the value of the information that he provides. He has traded certain death for a hopeful reprieve. But he speaks to an honorable man. David, who welcomed Ahimelech’s son Abiathar, will do the same for this man who provides key information for the mission. The next segment will look at Saul and Jonathan’s final battle and bring the book of 1 Samuel to a close. David’s transition from guerrilla general to king of Israel will show a man of depth walking in maturity.
Doug Knox