David at Adullam; Saul massacres the priests of Nob

The cave at Adullam is in the foothills between the hill country and the Philistine plain, and what gathers there is not an army. All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around David, and he became their commander. About four hundred men.

That is a description of the underclass of a kingdom. People who cannot pay what they owe, people with grievances, people with nothing left, attaching themselves to a fugitive because he is the only alternative on offer. The number grows to six hundred, and this group becomes the core of the men who will run the country twenty years later.

His first move is to get his parents out. He takes them to the king of Moab and asks him to let them stay until he knows what God will do for him, which is a reasonable place to ask given that his great-grandmother Ruth was a Moabite.

Then comes the worst thing Saul ever does. He is sitting under a tamarisk tree at Gibeah with his spear in his hand, complaining to his officials that nobody tells him anything and that they have all conspired against him. Doeg the Edomite, who was at Nob, speaks up and reports what he saw: Ahimelek enquired of the LORD for David, gave him provisions and gave him the sword of Goliath.

Ahimelek is summoned along with his whole family. His defence is that he had enquired of God for David many times before and that David was the king's son-in-law, captain of his bodyguard and highly respected in the household, so there was nothing unusual in the request. Let not the king accuse your servant or any of his father's family, for your servant knows nothing at all about this whole affair.

Saul orders his guards to kill the priests and they refuse to raise a hand against priests of the LORD. Doeg does it. Eighty-five men wearing the linen ephod are killed, and then the town of Nob itself is put to the sword, men and women, children and infants, cattle, donkeys and sheep.

The instruction Saul would not carry out against the Amalekites, he carries out in full against a town of his own priests.

One son of Ahimelek escapes, Abiathar, and runs to David, who says something that carries the weight of the whole episode: I am responsible for the death of your whole family. Stay with me; do not be afraid. The man who wants to kill you wants to kill me too.

The massacre at Nob also finishes something older. Ahimelek was a great-grandson of Eli, the priest at Shiloh whose two sons died on the same day the ark was captured, and the sentence pronounced on that household then was that it would be cut off. Abiathar survives as the last of the line, serves David for forty years, backs the wrong son in the succession, and is dismissed from the priesthood by Solomon, which is where the story of Eli's family finally ends.

Abiathar brings the ephod with him, which means the fugitive now has a priest and a means of enquiring of God, and the king has neither.