The Stranger and the Fool

My devotional reading the other day led me to the story of David’s encounter with Nabal and Abigail in 1 Samuel 25. The story revolves around a wealthy landowner whose name, literally, means “fool.” (To the modern reader this raises serious questions about Nabal’s parents, but these are irrelevant to the story, so I’ll let them go.) David, on the lam from King Saul, has gathered about himself a band of several hundred bankrupt and marginalized desperados, with whom he travels the countryside in an effort to survive. Without Nabal’s knowledge, they find room in his fields to set up a temporary encampment, repaying the unintentional favor by protecting his property and workers from bandits and other threats. David eventually sends word to Nabal, informing him of their presence and services and asking for enough food to celebrate a feast day together. Nabal, incensed to learn of the company’s presence, denies the request, insults David, and ignores the testimonies of his own servants to the help that David’s men have been to them. David explodes with fury, commands his followers to take up their swords, and sets out on a raid.

Nabal’s wife Abigail emerges as the story’s hero. She learns of David’s plan and rushes out to meet him with a peace offering of food and wine. She acknowledges not only the rightness of David’s complaint against her husband, but also her own complicity in the wrong that David has suffered. Most important, she affirms that God is on David’s side, in spite of his criminal appearance, and urges him not to resort to violence to accomplish what he considers God’s purposes. David receives her blessing and warning, and relents of the vengeance he had intended to bring about. In her role as peacemaker, Abigail both guarantees justice for David and keeps him from perpetuating the injustice that he himself had experienced. (In the epilogue to the story, Nabal suffers a heart attack upon learning what his wife has done, and the widowed Abigail marries David.)

In Karl Barth’s discussion of the Atonement, Nabal stands as the personification of human stupidity before God. The deepest roots of his sin lie not in his rudeness, his wealth, or his mistreatment of David, but in his willful inability to recognize God’s gift when it stands in front of him. God had sent David to bless Nabal, but Nabal could recognize him only as a threat and a nuisance. In Nabal we see that our blindness—our sheer stupidity—before God not only robs us of our exalted status as God’s covenant partners, but causes us in turn to treat one another inhumanely, to become divided against ourselves, and to resent our human limitations. By refusing hospitality to David, Nabal doesn’t simply incur guilt; he turns away the one sent to bring him God’s Shalom.

On the other hand, Abigail here represents the path of wisdom. If I can add to Barth’s description, I might suggest that Abigail’s moral vision can be seen on three levels. Most fundamentally, unlike her husband, she recognizes David for who he is, God’s anointed one, sent to her and her people for their good. Second, she recognizes that, in spite of David’s status as an outlaw and a trespasser, he still has a claim to her hospitality. She remembers the ancient divine command to treat aliens with special honor, since her own ancestors were once aliens in the same land, and since she herself inhabits the land only as God’s guest. Finally, she acknowledges her own complicity in an economic arrangement by which David has been victimized. Although she herself has apparently never wished ill to David or to any other stranger, she has enjoyed the comforts of wealth secured through the mean-spirited policies of her husband. Therefore, she takes the first step toward reconciliation with the trespasser, coming to him in a spirit of humility, sharing with him basic provisions for living in her midst, and urging him to join her in the creation of a more just and peaceable living arrangement.

Here in Southern California, where the presence of millions of undocumented aliens has become such an unavoidable and explosive fact of our social life, this story seems remarkably relevant.