we have come on a
feast-day. Give also whatever you have at hand to your servants and to
your son David.'"

When David's young men came, they spoke to Nabal for David as they were
told, and then waited. But Nabal answered David's servants, "Who is
David? And who is the son of Jesse? Many are the slaves these days who
break away from their masters! Should I then take my bread and my water
and my meat that I have prepared for my shearers and give it to men of
whom I know nothing?" So when David's young men returned and told him,
he said to them, "Let every man put on his sword." So they all put on
their swords. David also put on his sword; and about four hundred men
followed David, and two hundred stayed with the baggage.

But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, "David has just
sent messengers from the wilderness to greet our master, but he insulted
them. The men have been very good to us and we have not been harmed nor
have we missed anything, as long as we were with them in the open
country. They were as a wall about us both night and day all the time we
were near them guarding the sheep. Now therefore decide what you will
do, for evil is planned against our master and against all his
household, for he is such an ill-tempered man that no one can say a word
to him."

Then Abigail quickly took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of
wine, five roasted sheep, five baskets of parched grain, a hundred
bunches of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs, and loaded them on
asses. She said to her young men, "Go on ahead of me; see, I am coming
after you." But she said nothing about it to her husband Nabal. As she
was riding on the ass and coming down under cover of a hill, David and
his men were coming down toward her, so that she met them. David had
just said, "It was in vain that I guarded all that belongs to this
fellow in the wilderness, so that nothing of his was missing, for he has
returned me evil for good. May God bring a similar judgment upon David
and more too, if by daybreak I leave a single man of all those who
belong to him."

When Abigail saw David, she dismounted quickly from her ass and bowed
down before him with her face to the ground. As she fell at his feet she
said, "Upon me, my lord, upon me be the blame. Only let your servant
speak to you, and listen to her words. Let not my lord pay any attention
to that mean man Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. 'Fool' is his name
and folly rules h