So far in our series exploring David’s relationships we have been focussing on his relationships with men – friends and enemies. For the next three services we are looking at his relationships with three different women, beginning tonight with Abigail.
We did jump into the middle of this story, and so we are going to begin by going back to the end of chapter 24. This will help to locate us in the overarching story of David, and to understand exactly what has been going on in the lead up to our our passage this evening.
At end of chapter 24 we read about one of the reconciliations between David and Saul, brought about by David sparing Saul’s life when he had an opportunity to kill him. It feels like an uneasy truce, not really a true peace – if it were that then David would have returned with Saul, and taken up his place in the army, but he doesn’t, he continues to live out in the wilderness with his men. Saul has returned home to continue his rule for now and David and his warband are based in a stronghold in the Desert of En Gedi.
At the beginning of chapter 25 we read that Samuel has died and David has shifted his base of operations, this time to the desert of Paran.
Then we are introduced to Nabal. He’s a wealthy man, with huge flocks – around 4,000 sheep and goats. But he’s not just materially wealthy, he also has a wife. The descriptions of the two of them are telling. She is intelligent and beautiful. He is surly and mean. Even if we hadn’t read the end of the story, we’d already have a pretty good idea where this is going, it’s all set up in those four words. Intelligent/beautiful v surly/mean.
So let’s have a look at the detail of how it works out.
It’s shearing time for all those sheep and goats and David sends ten of his men to Nabal, saying that he and his men have treated the shepherds well, haven’t stolen any of the flocks, and have generally been good neighbours, and asking if Nabal would acknowledge this by being generous to David and his men.
At first sight it might look like a bit of a protection racket shake down. You might have seen the kind of thing on films or TV shows, a couple of young thugs go into a store and extort money from the shop owner claiming to have “protected” the store, when the only threat to the store is actually their gang if they don’t get paid.
This reading of the situation might be why Nabal reacts the way that he does, which is to send David’s messengers away with a flea in their ear, insulting David and refusing to give them anything.
David’s reaction, from our perspective, seems quite extreme. He straps on his sword, gathers his warband together and heads out to teach Nabal a lesson.
Meanwhile one of Nabal’s servants has a word with his wife, Abigail, and explains the situation to her. He makes it clear that David and his men really had looked out for them. It wasn’t just that they hadn’t abused them, they had actively protected them and the flocks. He says, “They were a wall around us the whole time we were herding our sheep near them.”
It seems likely that given this testimony this servant would have known David reasonably well, and would have known that he was not going to take Nabal’s insult well. He knew that Nabal wouldn’t listen to reason, so he asks Abigail to step in.
She doesn’t hesitate. She gathers together a caravan of supplies – bread, meat, wine, fruit. She has them loaded onto donkeys and sends them in David’s direction, following on behind. She finds David just in time. He is livid that he’s spent all this time and energy looking after Nabal’s flocks with no reward and has said that he intends to kill Nabal and all his men. Again – quite an extreme reaction.
Abigail arrives and bows down before David. She encourages David to overlook Nabal’s behaviour. She doesn’t excuse it or mitigate it – she acknowledges that he has been foolish – but she presents as something that it is beneath David to get wound up about.
Her denunciation of Nabal is only a couple of lines long. Her gentle and subtle challenge to David’s over-reaction takes several verses. Let’s look at it carefully:
In verse 26 she gives credit to God for keeping David from bloodshed and from seeking vengeance.
In verse 28 she reminds David that his dynasty is to be founded on fighting the Lord’s battles and not in wrongdoing.
In verse 29 she reminds David that his life is protected by God, he doesn’t need to take things into his own hands.
In verses 30 and 31 she looks ahead to when God fulfils God’s promises and David is crowned King, a time at which David will be glad not “have on his conscience the staggering burden of needless bloodshed or of having avenged himself.”
With grace and insight Abigail absolutely skewers David in his angry and vengeful reaction, calls him out on it, and reminds him of who he is and his call to be a different kind of man, a different kind of leader, a different kind of King.
We heard how effective this gentle but clear challenge to David was at the beginning of our reading this evening, which was David’s response. He praises God for sending Abigail to head him off, to stop him doing the evil that he was planning, not just by bringing the gifts, but by showing him why he was wrong to seek vengeance in bloodshed. A little later on he acknowledges that what he was planning to do would have been wrong.
Having headed off the disaster threatening her family, Abigail heads home, where she finds Nabal, drunk and partying, entirely oblivious to his narrow escape. In another example of her good sense Abigail waits until the next morning to tell Nabal what had happened. In contrast to David, who responded with praise to God for Abigail’s intervention, Nabal is silent, his heart fails, and within a fortnight he is dead.
“The Lord struck Nabal and he died.”
A few weeks ago we looked at David and Saul and we read that God sent an evil spirit to torment Saul. At the time I said I didn’t really know what that meant, apart from the fact that it is clear that the writers of the Old Testament had a high view of the sovereignty of God. In their world view nothing happens without God’s permission, or even action. Everything that happens is under God’s rule, including evil spirits and death. So, in a similar way they were entirely comfortable saying that God struck Nabal and he died.
One way of thinking about this that I’ve found helpful is based on Isaiah 28:21 which talks about the strange and alien work of God. Based on this verse, Martin Luther contrasted the proper work of God – the loving, merciful, kind acts of God that are easy to see are in line with God’s nature, with God’s strange works – the ones that we find it difficult to understand.
That, however, is a bit of a digression. The point in this narrative is the contrast between David’s reaction to God’s correction, which led to life and Nabal’s reaction which led to death.
David has no problem seeing God at work in Nabal’s death, he doesn’t see it as strange at all, he sees it as God’s justice being enacted on David’s behalf. This sentiment is echoed in many of the Psalms, in which God is often asked to bring judgement down on the heads of the enemies of the writer.
The story draws to a close with David’s asking Abigail to marry him. It seems that he was impressed by her ability to gracefully call him out, to challenge him to be and do better, by her wit and wisdom, and valued those things in a wife.
There is a brief mention here of Michal, David’s first wife, but I’m not going to pick that up, as we’re looking at Michal in more detail next time.
We do also have a reference to the fact that David was starting to collect wives. Here there are two mentioned. By the time we get to 2 Samuel 3:3, and the list of sons borne to David in Hebron, we find six sons born, all by different wives, one of which was Abigail. And that is the last that we hear of her.
As I was reflecting on Abigail’s story, a few other situations in Scripture where women had deal with obtuse and foolish men came to mind, so I thought that we might spend a bit of time diving into those as well.
The first of these is the account of Tamar, which we find in Genesis 38.
Just to fill in the background. Jacob, the son of Isaac, Grandson of Abraham, has returned to his homeland and been reconciled with his brother Esau. He has twelve sons, and one of them, Joseph, has been sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. As a little interlude in the accounts of Joseph’s adventures, we are told something about the family of one of his brothers, Judah.
Judah had married and had three sons – Er, Onan, and Shelah. As was the way of things, Judah arranged for Er to be married, to a woman called Tamar.
However, Er was a bad’un and, in another example of the attribution of all that happens to the sovereign God, we are told that “Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.”
Now, in that culture, in order to keep the family line going and a man’s name alive, it was the practice that the brother of a man who had died would take his widow as a wife, and any children they had would be counted as children of the dead husband. So, to maintain Er’s family line Judah told his second son, Onan to take Tamar as his wife.
Which he did, but he knew that any children they had wouldn’t be counted as his, so he used the withdrawal method to avoid impregnating Tamar.
In verse 10 we read, “What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so he put him to death also.”
This left Judah with only one son, Shelah, and no heirs. This was a big deal. He was dealing with the grief of losing two sons, and his family line was now completely at risk. Two sons had married Tamar and both had died. What was he going to do with his third and last son, not yet grown to adulthood.
He prevaricated, he sent Tamar away until Shelah was “old enough” to marry Tamar, but did nothing to bring Tamar back at that point. In time Judah’s wife died, and Tamar heard that he was coming to visit the area she was living in. She knew that he had no intention of bringing her home to marry Shelah, so she took things into her own hands.
She took off her widow’s clothes, and went and sat by the road in the equivalent of the local red-light district, wearing a veil. Judah saw her as he passed by, liked what he saw, and asked what a night with her would cost. He offered a young goat, but didn’t have it with him, so she took his seal and staff as a guarantee that the payment would follow. They slept together and she became pregnant.
Judah tried to sent the goat, and redeem his seal and staff, but by then Tamar had disappeared back home so Judah tried to brush it under the carpet and forget about it. Which it seemed he managed to do until he received word that Tamar was pregnant.
In a breath-taking example of hypocrisy, Judah finally orders that she be brought back, not to be married to Shelah as she should have been, but to be burned to death. As she is being brought out she sends the staff and seal to Judah saying, “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,see if you recognise them.”
Judah is brought face to face with his own sin, his betrayal of Tamar, his hypocrisy, and recognising it says, “She is more righteous than I; since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah”
Tamar lived and gave birth to twins, Perez and Zerah – continuing Judah’s family line, all the way to Jesus. And we read in Matthew 1 that Perez was the ancestor of Jesus, and Tamar is the first woman mentioned in that genealogy. A woman who found a way to make a man face his own sin and failings, and by doing so is recognised throughout scripture as a person of integrity and honour.
Another woman that came to mind was Samson’s mother. You might remember her story from when we were exploring the time of the Judges. In Judges 13 we read about the way in which an angel came and told her about the son she was to have, and how they were to bring him up, but her husband asked God to send a messenger to tell them how to bring up the boy. God does send the angel again, who basically says, “I already told your wife, just listen to her.”
But Manoah isn’t very good at listening to his wife. He didn’t realise that it was an angel of the Lord, even though his wife, had told him that the person who came to visit her, “looked like an angel of God.”
When he does realise, Manoah has a melt down – “We’re all doomed.” Whilst his wife is much more level headed, pointing out that it wouldn’t have made much sense for the angel of God to come and tell them all about a son they are going to have just to fry them both to a crisp.
Samson’s mother is clearly the sensible and faithful one in this household, trusted by and spoken to by God in her own right, entrusted with the bearing and raising of the son whose purpose was to be the deliverance of the people of God from the oppression that they were living under.
The final story I would like us to recall this evening is that of Mary Magdalene and the other women who discovered the empty tomb on Easter morning, who received the message from the angels about Jesus having been raised to life. One of them, Mary, was the first to speak with the resurrected Jesus and he told her to go and tell the disciples. And how did the men react?
In Luke 14:11 we read, “But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”
It wasn’t until Jesus appeared to them himself that they began to believe.
Now, I want to be a bit careful here. I don’t want to be heard as saying all men are bad and all women are good. There are plenty of counter examples the other way round in Scripture. What I do feel it’s important to acknowledge is that in the history of the church we have not often made space for the voice of women. Men have not, in general, been willing to hear and accept the challenge of women. It seems to me that things in this area are improving, but I am not really qualified to make a judgement about that.
Whether or not that is the case, it seems to me that we should be watchful of ourselves, and our own hypocrisies, asking ourselves if there is any group or class of people that we find it more difficult to give credence to, to listen to, to hear challenge from. We might also consider how we react to challenge. Are we open to the Holy Spirit speaking through others to call us to account and show us when we have got something wrong. When the Abigails in our life tell us what they see are we like Nabal or like David?