40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 22:1-19 (Episode 248)

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

David flees and finds refuge in a cave. Four hundred desperate men join up with him. And Saul visits the priest who helped David and the whole town suffers the wrath of the mad king. Chad and Daniel discuss these things in this episode. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Conferences 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. and while you're over there check out the events page you can find out about all the events that we're having in 2021 uh which chad when this releases it'll be 2021 yeah i'm ready you're ready you know i've heard chad that everything's going to magically change uh the calendar flips and the dumpster fire that is uh 2020 just magically goes away oh man there's nothing

like the turning of the clock hands to solve all our problems yeah i mean i mean in fact uh there's it's actually impossible for 2021 to be worse than 20 it's not possible let's just call it a jubilee year yes all debts for all debts forgiven all jobs restored all health back yeah i feel like there's gonna be a bunch of people that wake up on january 1st uh they wake up and they say You mean this coronavirus is still a thing? What? I thought 2021 was the vaccine. I thought that that was it.

Yeah. Oh, would that it were so. Yeah, it would be nice. But don't worry, guys, because there's one thing that 2021 does have, and that's a regional event in April in Bentonville, Arkansas, that you can come to. So that's something different. So we'd love to have you come hang out with us in April, April 16th and 17th.

Chad will be there, I'll be there, a whole bunch of other people will be there. It's going to be a great two-day event. We'd love to see you. And then, of course, the national event in October. You go to the events page, you can get all the information about that stuff. All right, man, we are in 1 Samuel 22. Yeah, we're going to start out here with a description of David's next place of refuge and the kind of interesting group of people that hang out around him. And last time we we wrapped up with the humorous story of David pretending to be a madman and by means of that escaping from the king of one of the Philistine cities.

So he gets he gets away from there and he's got to go someplace because he has he can't certainly cannot return to his hometown, cannot return to to Saul. So where is he going to go? Well, it says that verse 1 of 1 Samuel 22 says that David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam. And when his brothers and all his father's household heard of it, they went down there to him. So this cave is going to come up a couple more times. In fact, in 1 Chronicles, it's referred to simply as the rock. so I'm assuming this geographical feature just kind of became known as David's place the rock the cave of Adullam David's hideout probably known by several different names caves are mentioned

all over all over the old testament I remember when I was when I was writing Unveiling Mercy and I talked about I can't remember the text where the word cave came up that I cited on that particular day but i remember just doing a word search and i was astonished by how many references there are to caves in the old testament just like one after the other and they're used for all sorts of things um the first occurrence is if i remember correctly back in genesis are caves as a burial place right yeah that's where patriarchs matriarchs were were buried which you know you'll buy yourself a cave right yeah yeah get yourself get yourself a cave make it into a burial plot for you and and your and your family keep everybody together and then uh caves came up of course in books like

first samuel as a hideout more or less yeah which makes makes pretty good sense it's a natural stronghold uh you're i mean if you if you only got one way in and one way out there are weaknesses to that because you can get trapped in there like setting a fire right in the front of it and uh Yeah, yeah, not good. And then also interestingly, in Jeremiah, which is quoted by Jesus, when Jeremiah refers to how the religious authorities of his day had turned the temple into a den of robbers, the Hebrew word there is actually cave.

So it kind of makes sense. If you watched old Westerns like I used to growing up, a lot of times the uh you know the bad guys will hang out in a cave so turns it into a den of robbers and of course that's what jesus quotes on the day that he overturns the tables of the money changers and uh purges purges the temple anyway caves are interesting man i used to do uh quite a bit of caving or spelunking as it's called oh you did i did i didn't know that about you i did used to do a lot of that uh so the ozarks have a lot of they have a lot of caves and uh so uh yeah i used to do that a lot i've spent uh 20 hours inside of a massive cave system

one time with uh two other guys 20 hours slept in there like it was uh i was thinking we didn't even get to the end of it i mean it was just this massive cave system we were in that which is a little bit creepy when you're in a cave when you're in a cave that long and you're like there is only one way out of here but yeah so how do you how do you how do you find your way back out once you've gone in there quite a while. You can throw markers at turns. You know, it's spray paint or something in there, but you can throw like a glow marker

and that kind of stuff so you know. Well, what's interesting is if you go into these, especially big caves, if you go into big caves, you will find, if it's not a cave that a lot of people have been in, you find all kinds of weird stuff in there. It's very obvious that like a long time ago, people were in that cave and they left stuff in there.

there was a there was a cave i was in where we found like a massive stockpile of arrowheads in this cave um so which made you think like okay like osage indians or whatever are holed up in this thing making arrowheads arrowheads yeah preparing either for uh for a hunt or for or for a battle yeah so we're not that far removed i guess is what i'm saying from from caves serving that that same kind of purpose yeah yeah i i suppose the most famous caves in uh in israel would be the the ones where the dead sea scrolls were found of course you know and and you know those caves had of course always been there no one had just taken the time at least in a long time to explore them and then lo and behold they find these these jars that have some

of the scrolls inside them so caves were used obviously as kind of a storage place or at least to hide materials and to hide men to bury bodies uh just kind of a a natural natural place for things like that to to happen you know if you know some like nasty weather's rolling in i mean a cave's a good place to be before yet i mean if you didn't have houses or cars or anything like that is a cave is better than a teepee in a you know in a you know in tornado season yeah this is true this is true so david made a good choice he uh he went to this this cave this one's a cave of adulim uh which is located on the uh kind of the western side of the territory of judah and he's not there alone uh at this point as far as we know he has been alone remember he showed up to

get some bread from the priest and a weapon. He's got Goliath's sword. Then he goes down to the city of Gath, the Philistine city of Gath, and presumably he's alone there. And now when he gets to the cave, it says his brothers and all his father's household heard about it. And so they went down there to him. Now, I think the last time we heard about his brothers was when he showed up for the battle with Goliath and things did not go so smoothly with his brothers back then, especially his oldest brother who basically told him you know what are you doing here you should be with the sheep and they exchanged some some some brotherly words there before the battle with goliath but now of course things have changed and chances are uh that his brothers in his father

father's household of course have kept up with what's been happening to david so as family tends to do, they gathered around him to no doubt join forces with him and to be a means of protection and companionship to him there. But we find out in verse 2 that it's not just his family that's gathering around him. There's a very interesting group of people who are attracted to David. It says everyone who was in distress, everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was literally bitter of soul or discontented all these people gathered to him and he became captain over them and it says there were about 400 men with him this is this is a a pretty uh quick accumulation of guys to be with you i mean i mean it's one thing if you're on the run and uh you know four

or five guys are like we're with you man you can be kind of nimble and stuff you got 400 guys all of a sudden all of a sudden you have like a little army uh here you got like a little a little squad that you gotta start thinking about food and all i mean feeding five guys is different than feeding 400 guys right all of a sudden you're like well okay we gotta we actually have logistical problems to solve now yeah i mean you get five or six guys together they can devour a whole refrigerator's worth of food in a weekend pretty quickly. You can imagine trying to take care of all these soldiers. Yeah, they've got to have some organization pretty quickly with this number. If memory serves me right, the last time we heard about 400 men was way back in Genesis

when Esau had 400 men with him. When Jacob returned from his exile, Esau comes out to meet him and he's got 400 men with him, which of course was very impressive and indicative of Esau's power and authority and influence back then and so this is more or less saying about david hey he's he's attracting people i mean we can talk about the kind of people he's attracting but nonetheless people are coming to him so he's got a pretty sizable force here that he's going to be able to use as we'll see in the uh the stories that come after this a sizable force to use in in attacking and raiding and doing whatever it takes to kind of work his way back into the realm of the of the throne and we do know that david is not just a good warrior himself but from all accounts he

actually is a good military leader yeah yeah he certainly knows what he's doing he's not he's not a novice in other words i mean he's been going out and leading the armies of israel for quite a while now so his experience he knows what he's doing and i and i suppose the reason one of the reasons he attracts the people that he does people in distress we're not told what kind of distress but some kind of distress and uh people who were in debt and everyone who was discontented or bitter of soul presumably these are people who are basically kind of they have they have nothing else to lose. We might say, you know, they're, or they're being, um, oppressed by the system that Saul himself has set up, uh, whatever it might be. They're the kind of people who don't

have a whole lot to lose if they have anything to lose at all. And so, you know, those people are dangerous. Those people will do just about anything that, uh, is necessary. So I'm sure that David has his hands full. Not only does he have kind of this logistical challenge of taking care of 400 men but these aren't like 400 400 guys who are probably the most scrupulous of characters i'm guessing that these are people who are going to need a pretty strong commander to keep them to keep them in check doesn't this kind of sound like the sort of people that that jesus would gather and attract himself right that's exactly what i was thinking when i was uh reading this that uh hmm sounds a whole lot like the the group of people who were attracted to the to the son of

david as well a bunch of debtors and bitter of soul and got nothing else to live for yeah sounds like a bunch of people who's like well this is our last hope like if i don't get a regime change it's all over for me so yeah yeah so david and the son of david are are alike and the the kind of people that that are attracted attracted to them you know it's kind of a when i read the commentaries on this they were described as sort of this you know kind of guerrilla warfare group or the malcontents or various other designations for people who are kind of like that. These aren't your typical citizens, in other words. So anyway, there's a bunch of them.

I'm guessing that some of these guys brought their families with them or their wives with them at least. So when it says 400 men, there's a chance it's a whole lot more than just 400 people, just 400 men, probably including at least a few women and children. So after that, it says that David had to take care of his family. So he goes to Moab, to Mizpah, someplace in Moab. And he addresses the king of Moab, and he says, Please let my father and my mother come and stay with you until I know what God will do with me.

By the way, I love that last phrase. uh let my parents stay here because i don't have any idea what god is going to do with me so i was reading it this morning and it just struck me as it's just kind of a as a great phrase like you know i know god is going to do something i just don't know what yeah so i want to make sure that my family's taken care of so let them stay here until god makes it clear what he has in store what he has in store for me and this and this i think this is fairly obvious that the reason David is doing this is because he assumes that as he's on the run doing the things that he's going to be doing, that his family is not safe from Saul. That Saul is going to make

his way down to Bethlehem and do who knows what to interrogate his family, so he's just trying to get ahead of that and get them somewhere else in hiding. Yeah, and we learned in chapter 20 that the made-up story that Jonathan told his dad was that David had gone down to be with his family in Bethlehem for their monthly feast. Now, I don't know that Saul actually believed David was in Bethlehem, but it was a reminder to Saul that David had family down there. And so, yeah, to make sure they're safe, David does the wise thing here. Now, the reason he goes to Moab, We're not told this, but I'm assuming the reason that he goes to the king of Moab is because David's great grandmother, Ruth, was from Moab. So probably because of these family connections, David decides that he is going to go outside the borders of Israel.

He's not going to try and hide them in some Israelite city because, well, you just never know which Israelite city is going to be safe, which Israelites are going to be allied to him or to King Saul. so he decides safest bet is to take them back where his family on his mother's on his great grandmother's side came from to the king of moab so he leaves him there and they stayed with him all the time that david was in the stronghold whatever wherever that was we're actually never told precisely where this stronghold's at but i guess what happened was they they left the cave for a while they moved into this other kind of fortress the stronghold then we're introduced to a new character that we'll hear more about as we go along he's the prophet gad no introduction he just kind of shows up and it says the prophet gad said that david do not stay in the stronghold

depart and go into the land of judah so david departed and went into the forest of hereth this is uh this is intriguing uh because this is the first of actually many instances that we're going to see in the next couple chapters where david has access to the will of god what god wants him to do but in contrast saul does not it seems to be an ongoing theme in these next couple chapters yeah it's also interesting that david has access to the will of god but via means uh like god doesn't do a lot of like speaking to david directly and this is something that's interesting is like as we've been going through the old testament you know sometimes jacob will you know he'll hear from god or joseph will hear from god or there's dreams or visions

and this kind of stuff since samuel we're starting to uh see that god is sort of speaking just through people. He's maybe coming to certain people, but he's not just coming to whoever he wants to talk to anymore. And I think that you start to see that transition happen, where the prophets play a more major role as sort of the mouthpiece of God in the rest of the Old Testament. Yeah, absolutely. You see that especially with the rise of the monarchy. You know, once we have a king, most of the time, the people who speak for God, people to whom God speaks, and then the people who speak for god are the prophets yep so i mean there is there's certainly a uh not a coincidental connection between the rise of the monarchy and the rise of the uh of the number of

prophets those two go those two go hand in glove and you're right i mean if you if you read the early chapters of genesis not even the early chapters almost all the way through it it is it's striking how different it is how god speaks to people right i mean he shows up at abraham's tent yeah or as a meal with them you know show up to you know samson's parents you know or whatever and and tell them give them a message uh it seems that those those things are waning yeah yeah they're waning and the the the prophets are waxing they're becoming more and more the chosen means that that the god will use and we have evidence later in david's reign that uh you know sometimes David will, like when he wants to build the temple, he'll come up with this idea, hey,

I'm living in a house, God's living in a tent, I think that I should build God a house. And at first the prophet's like, sure, do whatever's in your heart, that sounds good. And then God will come to the prophet and say, no, no, no, no, that's not what's going to happen. Go back to David and tell him, this is my plan. So sometimes the prophets are there, more or less affirming the king but then sometimes god has to correct the prophet or speak to the prophet with a correcting word saying no this is my plan prophet is a rough vocation because someone might ask you something and you might think you know the answer right and you just say it and then god comes back to you what are you doing that's not you didn't ask me about what i want that's not right you're

like oh i just assumed you didn't care about this one my bad yeah and you also have at the same time this rise of prophecy you have the rise of false prophecy right oh yeah because you've got you know how many kings have these false prophets gathered around them either false prophets who claim to speak for yahweh or false prophets who are prophets of false gods like the prophets of either way the kings seem to surround surround themselves with kind of yes sir men those who are more or less just going to tell them what they want what they want to hear and so the true prophets they get a they get a bad name because they're called the the troublers of israel because they don't tell the king what he wants to hear.

Well, this prophet Gad tells David that God wants him to move on, so he does. Now, we switch from a narrative about David to a narrative about Saul. This is going to take up most of the rest of the chapter. I mean, the Old Testament has lots of low points, lots of real dark stories, But this ranks, in my opinion, this ranks as one of the top five, top, at least top 10 of these dark stories in the Old Testament, just because of the sheer heartlessness of it, the brutality of it, and the fact that this comes from the Lord's anointed. So what we're going to encounter here with the first six and following is the massacre of a whole town full of priests. so saul verse 6 saul hears that david and his men and who were with him had been discovered and saul was sitting in givia his hometown under the tamarisk tree on the height and he's got a

spear in his hand and all his servants were standing around him i know i pointed this out a couple times already but always notice that when saul is there it's like he has a spear in his hand david never has a spear in his hand but goliath had a spear in his hand so this is and a hint a wink that saul is more or less becoming like a foreign king he's becoming like a foreign power you think of goliath and his spear now you have saul and his spear and of course it's with his spear that he's tried to kill not only david multiple times but even his son jonathan as well I think it tells you that Saul is paranoid, too. Yeah.

Saul feels like he must be armed at all times. Yeah. Yeah. Just imagine a guy who's walking around town, he's always got a pistol in his hand. Yeah. He is always thinking that any second could be the second that someone tries to take me out.

Yeah. And his paranoia is evident in his speech as well. Verse 7 and 8, even though in our English translations, seven and eight are usually broken up into two or three sentences in hebrew it's like one long running sentence it's as if saul just can't stop talking just goes on and on and on in this this long speech so so listen to it and uh just kind of get into the head of saul when when he speaks to his fellow uh tribesmen he says here now oh benjaminites will the son of jesse also give to all of you fields and vineyards? Will he make you all commanders of thousands and commanders of

hundreds? For all of you have conspired against me so that there is no one who discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse. And there's none of you who is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me to lie in ambush as it is this day. Saul is, well, first of all, intentional or not, Saul has just expressed that he has fulfilled all of the predictions that Samuel gave about what the king would do when the king came along. When the people asked for a king, Samuel's like, if you want a king, let me tell you what the king is going to do he's going to take your vineyards he's going to take your fields he's going to take your young men he's going to take your young women he's going to tax you he's going

to do all he's going to take take take and saul begins his speech by saying hey i took fields and vineyards and gave them to you i made you commanders of thousands out of hundreds so saul is more or less living up to the threat that samuel had voiced back in chapter eight about what a king what a king would do yeah it does seem to i mean this paranoia is like yeah i run in deep because okay it's true enough that somehow david has accumulated to himself 400 guys which is not nothing so maybe this is partially what he's talking about like hey there seems to be some guys missing uh you know like so what's that about but so while that might be true saul does seem to assume that there's like this massive coup and everybody's in on it

yes right everybody's conspiring against him which of course is not true yeah which is not true yeah i mean first of all these are his fellow tribesmen these aren't like people from the tribe of you know asher or the tribe of judah these are his his family more or less his extended family and he thinks that all of them know everything and they're withholding all this from him and they're conspiring together against him and he's calling them this would make more sense if he went down to bethlehem and said all right bethlehem i know that this dude like came down here where's his family seems there's about 400 guys missing like why are you know like this town really shrunk rapidly uh this that would make a little more sense but he's he's not that's not what he's doing

at all no no and and and he's accusing them of things which are patently not true right i mean yeah the son of jesse did make a covenant with jonathan but the covenant was not that he was going to you know lie and ambush and kill saul just the opposite so yeah that he's paranoid he's uh he either believes falsely or he's been given false information we're not you know not exactly sure notice too that he still can't bring himself to call david david he still just refers to him as a son of Jesse. He won't even use his name anymore. And after he gives his rant, none of his tribesmen speaks up, which I find interesting. Of course, this is speculation, but my speculation is that they all realize that Saul has lost it. You know, they've seen how he's

been behaving of course they know all of his all of his uh stories that we've been covering so they're probably all thinking to themselves something's got to change well because all this gets crazier and crazier all the time here's your practical advice uh the application of this text is that if a madman is ranting with a spear in his hand you know you don't want to be the first one to say i don't know if all that's true like that's i don't think anyone wants to be that guy no yeah so you either have to affirm everything this guy is saying or you got to keep your mouth shut yeah silence is wisdom in this regard so uh we're now in verse nine we are introduced reintroduced to a guy that we encountered in the last uh the last chapter you may remember if you

if you listen to the last episode that just seeming out of nowhere when we were having this back and forth between David and the priest at the city of Nob, that verse 7 of chapter 21 threw in this guy. It says there was one of the servants of Saul there that day, and his name was Doeg the Edomite, the chief of Saul's shepherds. And then that's it. It's kind of thrown in there, and then the narrative moves on from there. Well, now we are told why there was that foreshadowing or that introduction of this character back in the previous chapter. because verse 9 of chapter 22 says, after Saul delivered his rant, that Doeg, this guy, the Edomite, so this is a foreigner who is employed by Saul as the chief of his shepherds, that Doeg

was standing by the servants of Saul, and he spoke up. He says, I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech, the son of Ahitub. And, he adds, and he inquired of the Lord for him, gave him provisions, and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine. Now, first of all, yes, the second and third part of that is true, that he did give him provisions, and he did give him the sword of Goliath the Philistine. But there's no reference whatsoever in chapter 21 that the priest inquired of the Lord for him.

We're told there was a conversation. At first, the priest was a little bit nervous because David just shows up out of nowhere and he's needing provisions. He's needing a sword. We talked about all that. But David didn't say to the priest, hey, I need you to bring out the Urim and Thummim

and inquire of God for me and find out what his will is for my future actions. There's no reference whatsoever made to that. but Doeg brings that up, and I think the reason he brings it up is he's wanting, this is his way of kind of, you know, flattering, not flattering the king, but trying to get on the king's good side. He's like, oh yeah, yeah, not only did he give him bread and the sword, but he actually inquired of God for him. With kind of implicit in that, you know, you don't have any access to God right now, but the priest more or less committed this crime against you by inquiring of God for

your enemy. Well, verse 11 says the king wanted to deal with the situation, so he sent someone to summon him like the priest, the son of Ahithoph. Not just him, but all his father's household. The priests were at Nob, and all of them came to the king. You can just imagine what was going through their minds when a runner shows up and says, hey, the king wants to see you. That's never, never good. Verse 12, Saul says, listen now, son of Ahitub. You notice this is another insult. He doesn't address him by his first name. He refers to him the same way he refers to David. He calls David the son of Jesse. He calls the priest, not by his first name, Ahimelech, but he calls him son of a high tooth now the priest doesn't presumably does not know what's

going on he's like here i am my lord then saul says to him why have you and the son of jesse conspired against me this is more of his uh you know thinking everybody's against him why have you and the son of jesse conspired against me and that you have now notice it notice the change of order here in these three things. So Doeg said he inquired of God, gave him provisions and the sword. When Saul reports this to the priest, he says, why have you given him bread and a sword and have inquired of God for him? So he reverses the order. If it's ABC when Doeg speaks, then it's BCA when Saul repeats this. And I think the reason he's done this is because he's more or less save the most treasonous act for the third in that list. So for Saul, the worst was not that

the priest gave him bread or a sword, but they inquired of God for him. Because Saul, as we've pointed out, has no access to God at this point. God is not answering him. And then he finishes up by saying that he should rise up against me by lying in ambush as it is this day. another thing to which there is no evidence of. Right. Yeah. It's all just made up whether Saul actually believes this. He's exaggerating. I don't know, but I think he actually has convinced himself that this is true. He thinks that David, and in fact, his son, and now the priest, that everybody's against him. The whole world's against poor King Saul. Well, Ahimelech, he has no idea all this is going on. So he says, who among all your servants, like no worse thing he could have

said. He's like, who among all your servants is as faithful as David, even the king's son-in-law who is captain over your guard and is honored in your house. So I'm thinking poor Ahimelech has no clue. I mean, he's just, he's probably trying to figure this out even as he's speaking. So he does the worst possible thing at least in his situation he praises david that is now the uh the chief enemy of of saul and here we see that the first instance of someone getting triggered yeah this is definitely a triggering moment for for saul oh yeah it's uh uh and then he goes on And he says, now, verse 15 is a little bit tricky to translate, because, well, let me read the New American Standard. It said, did I just begin to inquire of God for him today?

Far be it from me. Now, that could be taken a couple different ways, and you can translate the Hebrew a couple different ways. It can mean either that the priest is saying, listen, I've been inquiring of God on David's behalf for a long time. So today wasn't the first day, or it could be translated so as to mean, did I begin to inquire for David of God today? No, I've never inquired of God for David. So it can be taken a couple different ways. My opinion is it probably means that Ahimelech is saying, listen, I don't really know what you're talking about. i didn't inquire for him the other day and i never inquired of god for him before so i don't really

know what your accusation is based on and then he finishes out saying don't let the king impute anything to his servant or to any of the household of my father because i really don't know anything about what's going on literally i don't know anything about this matter small or great In other words, all of this is news to me. Hey, all I know is David showed up. He said he was from you. I gave him bread. I gave him a sword. You know, he's your son-in-law. He's the commander of your armies. So why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I do that? So poor Ahimelech is just caught not knowing what in the world is going on, not understanding the basis of the accusations and acting on the assumption that David is someone to be honored and someone to be provided for if he's in need. Verse 16 is where things go downhill very rapidly. It says that the king said, you shall surely die, Ahimelech. you not just you but you and all your father's household the king then turned to the guards

literally the runners who were attending him to turn around and put the priest of the lord to death because their hand also is with david and because they knew that he was fleeing and did not reveal it to me now the king says this but it ends up saying that the servants of the king were not willing to put forth their hands to attack the priest of the lord so yeah good for good for the guards they were not going to commit not only murder but sacrilege i mean this is a command that any reasonable person would refuse well i mean it's going yeah it's going to feel very conflicted about i mean that you're that you're saying i dude i don't think that we could do that yeah and so i mean and props to them because you are dealing with

like a madman at this point and so to refuse is is obviously a dangerous thing too uh but uh but obviously even the people close to saul working for saul are like okay man that's like that's too much yeah yeah it's time for at the at this time it's it's time for either passive or active rebellion against the king, one of the two. So they don't do what he says. And, you know, that's good of them for recognizing just the craziness of the command and refusing to do it. However, however, the king turns to Doeg, the Edomite, and says, well, then you turn around and attack the priest. Well, Doeg had no scruples about doing this whatsoever. In fact, he didn't seem to have any scruples whatsoever about doing anything since he turned and he attacked the

priest. He killed that day 85 men who wore the linen ephod. They're described by means of their more or less uniform. It'd be like us if there were 85 priests who were martyred for us to say that 85 men who wore the clerical were were massacred that day so these were 85 priests who were were killed that the whole the whole household of of the of the priest ahimelech and not only that but verse 19 he says that he struck the city of nob nob the city of the priest with the edge of the sword and just didn't kill the men but he killed the men the women the children the infants and even the animals the oxen the donkeys the sheep he struck with the edge of the sword so this is more or less a uh the act of of harem that we've talked about back in joshua where

every living thing is put to death in the city the city of knob this is as i said earlier this is one in my opinion one of the darkest and lowest points in uh in israel's history because you have a king of israel who has lost his mind and commands the murder of innocent people and And when his own guards refused to do it, he enlisted the hands of a foreign servant to engage in this murderous act of sacrilege. So this is, if you go to Psalm 52, this is another one of those events that David memorializes in one of his psalms. And it's very easy to see in Psalm 52 that this is a pretty accurate conjunction of narrative and poetry, because when you read through Psalm 52, you can definitely see that he's talking about Doeg, the Edomite, as well as Saul and how their tongues are like swords and end up devouring people. so we're not gonna be able to finish a chapter that just leaves us with uh with a few verses left but uh it's a you know it's a it's an introduction to what we're going to see as a

long drawn out uh exile of david struggle of david against saul and the the gradual the ongoing demise we might say of saul and the the ongoing upraising of of david but for now he's gonna have to endure several more years of exile before he is brought to brought to the throne yeah and I don't know, you can tell me if you think this is a stretch at all, Chad, but whenever I read this, because of who David is, it seems to me that you sort of have at least a version of, like, first martyrs. You know, in the life of Jesus, you know, a lot of people will call the death of the innocents, you know, when Herod has all the infants killed, they're trying to seek out Jesus, and those are oftentimes referred to as the first martyrs. I think that you

You can go back even further and say when David, of course, you know, Jesus is the son of David. When David was being pursued by the king who was trying to exterminate him, there's martyrs that happened as well. I sort of read these as sort of the first sort of Old Testament martyrs or sort of a foreshadowing of what will become a sort of ordinary thing in martyrdom. Yeah, I fully agree with you. I mean, martyr is someone who's basically giving witness to the faith, giving witness to the true God, and here it certainly applies. And it is, I mean, it's a martyrdom as well as a foreshadowing of those Christian martyrs who will come by great numbers, especially the first couple of centuries of the Church's history. Well, that's not the greatest note to leave the podcast on But hey, as of right now

David, whom Christ will come He is safe and on the run So that's a good thing Because we're going to need the son of David to come along All right, Chad I will see you next week All right, see you here We'll see you next time.