Two Hundred Loaves

One of Nabal’s young men came to Abigail with the news. David had sent messengers from the wilderness to greet their master, and Nabal had scolded them. The servant brought the matter to Nabal’s wife, naming both the greeting that had arrived and the answer that had gone back.

Then he told her what David’s men had been to the shepherds. “Yet these men were very good to us. When we were in the field, we were not harassed, and nothing of ours went missing the whole time we lived among them.” The protection David had mentioned was something this servant could confirm.

He described it more closely. “They were a wall around us, both day and night, the whole time we were herding our sheep near them.” Nabal’s animals had been safe among these men, and so had the people tending them. The servant’s report left no doubt about the help his master had dismissed.

Now the report became a warning. “Now consider carefully what you must do, because disaster looms over our master and all his household. For he is such a scoundrel that nobody can speak to him!” He placed the danger before Abigail because speaking to Nabal offered no way through it.

Abigail hurried. She took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, and five butchered sheep. She added five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs, gathering the provisions in the quantities the account carefully preserves.

These were things that could be carried and given to hungry men. Bread, meat, grain, and fruit answered the request Nabal had refused, and Abigail did not leave the answer as an intention. She loaded the food and wine on donkeys and sent her young men ahead of her.

“Go ahead of me. I will be right behind you.” Those were her instructions to them. She told her husband nothing; the provisions went out, the servants went ahead, and she followed without a conversation with Nabal being recorded between the warning and her departure.

While Abigail was bringing food, David was speaking about the protection he had given. He counted it wasted: everything belonging to Nabal had been kept safe, nothing had gone missing, and his care had been answered with evil. The same facts the servant had brought to Abigail were feeding David’s anger.

David had gone further than an angry complaint. He had sworn that he would not let one of Nabal’s men survive until morning. His words set a limit on the time remaining and extended the consequence of Nabal’s answer to men throughout the household, whether they had spoken the insult or not.

Abigail came riding her donkey into a mountain ravine. There she saw David and his men coming down toward her, and she met them. The account does not say that she had heard his oath; it places that oath beside her arrival, so that the reader knows what is approaching with him.

The servants had gone ahead with the gift, as she had ordered. Now Abigail herself had reached the armed men, with Nabal behind her and David before her. The food was on its way to the men who had been refused it, but David’s promise of bloodshed had not yet been withdrawn.