The House at Carmel

Samuel died, and Israel gathered to mourn him. The account says that “all Israel gathered to mourn for him”; they buried him at his home in Ramah. Before the story comes to Abigail, it pauses at a grave, with a whole people gathered around the loss of one man.

Then David set out and went down to the Wilderness of Paran. His departure follows the burial without a recorded word from him. Israel had gathered, Samuel had been buried, and now David was moving again, away into the wilderness while the account turned toward another place and another household.

There was a man in Maon whose business was in Carmel. His name was Nabal, and he was very wealthy. The size of his possessions was given plainly: “a thousand goats and three thousand sheep”, a flock large enough that the telling counted its thousands before it described the man who owned it.

He was shearing his sheep in Carmel. The wealth was not merely a number attached to his name; there were animals to tend and a season’s work to do. Here the story settled, among the sheep and the business of their owner, while David remained out in the wilderness.

Nabal had a wife named Abigail. She entered the account beside her husband, within the same sentence that gave his name. But the description did not leave them together for long: she was intelligent and beautiful, and he was a Calebite, harsh and evil in his dealings.

The difference was there before either of them spoke. Nothing had yet been asked of Nabal, and Abigail had not yet been called upon to answer for anything. Still, the two descriptions stood side by side, giving the reader something the count of sheep and goats could not give.

Nabal possessed a great deal, but the account did not mistake his possessions for his character. It called him “harsh and evil in his dealings.” The words belonged to the way he treated others, to what happened when another person had business with this wealthy man of Maon.

Abigail belonged to that household too. His wealth and his harshness were not descriptions of some distant man she might choose to avoid; they described her husband. The account gave no history of their marriage, no conversation between them, no explanation of how these two people had come to share a home.

It gave her intelligence its place nonetheless. Before there was any occasion to see what she would do, that much was established about her. She was not introduced only as the wife of a wealthy man, or only as a beautiful woman: her understanding was part of the first thing told.

For now, neither husband nor wife had spoken. Nabal was at Carmel for the shearing, with his thousands of animals and the work that had brought him there. Abigail’s name had been set beside his, and the difference between them had been made plain without a quarrel being shown.

David was in the wilderness; Nabal was shearing sheep at Carmel. The two circumstances stood close together on the page, though no messenger had yet passed between them. In the wealthy household, Abigail had been introduced with the very quality her husband’s dealings would soon require.