Thoughts on 1 Samuel 25

Today’s reading: 1 Samuel 25; 1 Corinthians 13

I don’t have too much to say about 1 Samuel 25 other than something I have never really thought about before that I feel like makes this all make a little more sense to me.

I’ve always been a little bothered by how thuggish David comes across in this chapter. Obviously someone can be thuggish, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of who David is and how he operates. I have wondered before if this was David starting to act more like a regional warlord than like the king Yahweh was calling him to be, and the humble rebuke from Abigail was God’s way of drawing his attention to it before he had gone too far down that road, but while maybe there is some of that in there, I don’t think that’s what’s really going on.

The reason this has felt thuggish is that clearly David had no pre-determined agreement with Nabal. He sends his men to Nabal to say, “By the way, we’ve been protecting your shepherds, so you should give us some food today.” There is no messenger sent ahead of time to arrange things, and to make sure Nabal would have enough prepared, they just show up expecting him to hook them up last minute. It seems completely reasonable to me that Nabal would say no. If someone showed up to my house saying, “Hey, the whole time your kids have been in school I haven’t harmed them at all, and in fact, I’ve been make sure they stay safe, so I’m here for you to pay me for my services,” I wouldn’t pay him, I would call the cops and file a restraining order! Obviously protecting grown men and their herds is different from “protecting” little kids, but it’s still the expectation of payment for unsolicited protection that gets me.

But the thing I realized today is that David was a shepherd. He would have known what was customary, and I’m guessing there’s a decent chance his family has paid people for protection in the wilderness in the past as well. The fact that David seems to think this is a perfectly reasonable request is evidence of that, but so too is the response of Nabal’s shepherds and Abigail. The fact that the shepherds recognize Nabal’s rejection as a problem and go to Abigail about it makes it likely that this isn’t the first time they are encountering this kind of protection, and they know what is customary. And finally the fact that Abigail also sees the issue and gathers the proper “payment” herself, and then apologizes to David for Nabal’s failure to do what is right furthers evidences that this is customary.

All that to say, I’m wondering if the reason this strikes me as thuggish on David’s part is more cultural/contextual than anything else. I have never been a shepherd, let alone a shepherd in ancient Israel, so I really have no context for what was or wasn’t customary at that time. So while maybe there is a bit of David starting to go the wrong way and God turning him back in here, given the way everybody other than Nabal seems to be on the same page with this expectation, I’m guessing this is much more customary, and therefore reasonable, than I have previously considered.