Keilah - 1st Samuel 22:1-8

Surely by now the news that Saul had executed almost all the priests and destroyed the city of Nob had spread to the surrounding towns. This was probably the first time that the ordinary citizenry knew there was a rift between Saul and David, and now the consequences of even interacting with David was knowns to the people. That was probably terrifying to the people, because death could come to anyone for just being near David, but also the nonsensical nature of it. The people probably heard that Ahimelech did not conspire with David against Saul but Saul had him and his family executed anyway. So not only did David’s presence mean death, there was no way out of it regardless of what you did, which was a big part of the problem. This knowledge that David brings Saul’s wrath to entire cities plays into what happens next.

Another concept that is introduced to this chapter by the last chapter was that Ahimelech’s son, the only remaining priest of that line that escaped and joined David’s camp, had brought with him an Ephod, and with that the Urim and Thummim. What we as LDS church members know the Urim and Thummim as and what they were in ancient Israel was probably two different things. That the Urim and Thummim is now in David’s camp isn’t expressly stated in the chapter, but it’s assumed because it was part of the ephod and TB says that this is the method used by David and this priest to determine God’s will for them. It’s an interesting concept though because this binary, yes/no question and answer format using this Urim and Thummim is very different than what happens with receiving God’s word in the Book of Mormon and even in modern day revelation. I don’t have a Urim and Thummim in which I communicate with God and as far as I know that’s not how the prophets today do it either, and I don’t think that’s how it was in Book of Mormon times either.

The process as TB describes it is that there are two stones, a black stone and a white stone, one Urim and one Thummim, and they are in the pockets of the ephod, and so when these ancient prophets needed answers from God, they would ask God the question and then draw a stone out of the pocket and depending on which stone was drawn out, the answer was either yes or no. So all the questions had to be yes or no questions and we see later that that’s exactly what David did. It’s just interesting to me that this is how God would communicate with ancient priests but not this method at other times. In fact, TB is the only person I’ve ever heard describe it that way, not that I would have heard it before, but it’s just interesting to think about why God would do it this way for them and why more involved ways for other people.

It begs the question, was this a legitimate way for these priests to communicate with God? Because really, I could make two stones answer my questions, and there’s a 50/50 shot that they’d be accurate. It does seem that these answers are correct in the times that are recorded, but are there times that the answers weren’t correct but those times weren’t recorded? I think that if I were using this method to receive God’s will for me, I would be just as skeptical after the answer as I was beforehand because what if this isn’t real and I’m just taking chances on a 50/50 outcome? But apparently these priests were confident enough to go to war when it said to go to war and to stay home when it said to stay home, and according to these records the answers were accurate.

Anyway, David is hanging out in these caves with his men and someone comes to tell him that the Philistines are attacking the city of Keilah “and they rob the threshingfloors.” This is a time during the harvest when the wheat has been gathered and is now they are separating the usable wheat from the rest of the stalk. TB says that the Philistines weren’t a conquering people but they were a “stealing resources from the neighbors and selling it as our own” people. They didn’t want to necessarily take all of Israel’s land, but they did want to take their food and resources. It’s also interesting that when the city if being attacked, the people come to tell David about it and not Saul, or maybe they did go tell Saul but David was also told. TB also said that the invading horde probably consisted of a small contingent of professional soldiers and a bunch of cattle ranchers who would confiscate the grain under the intimidation of the soldiers and then allow their cattle to graze on the harvested fields for the leftovers.

After hearing the report of Keilah being attacked, David asks God if he should take his men and go defend it, and God answers that yes he should go fight the Philistines “and save Keilah.” David’s men aren’t so convinced and they don’t want to go. This makes sense, David has fought many battles before and been delivered by the hand of God many times already, he has a history and a testimony of God’s deliverance, but the men that gathered with him now isn’t his regular army, these aren’t soldiers, these are men who fled oppression from Saul and that’s it. They don’t see any benefit to going to fight against the Philistines in behalf of a city they aren’t connected to, and there are only a few hundred of them at most, and surely the Philistines outnumbered them significantly. So David goes and asks God a second time and the answer is again, “I will deliver the Philistines into thine hand.” Again, I don’t know how this comprehensive of an answer could have been given based on just drawing a stone out of a pocket. One thought that I had about that concept is that the Complete Jewish Bible that TB reads out of translated that verse to say something like “and David asked God if they would win the battle if they fought the Philistines, and God answered yes.” That’s a little bit different than the “I will deliver them into your hands” translation in the KJV. It’s possible that the Complete Jewish Bible assumes that they were using the Urim and Thummim to ask God these questions, so therefore the questions had to be only answered in yes/no so they translated these verses using the yes/no format because nothing else could have been possible using these stones for the answers. Interesting.

The men finally agree to go fight the Philistines, presumably with this second confirmed victory from God and surely with some motivational speeches by David. They go fight the Philistines and they win, surely by the hand of God, as promised. In fact, it wasn’t just that the Philistines were driven out of the land, they “smote them with a great slaughter.” Just kind of as a side note, verse 6 says that Ahimelech’s son Abiathar the priest brought the ephod with him when he escaped to David’s camp. This might be the implication that the Urim and Thummim were there with David and the presumption is that that’s what they used to discuss battle plans with God.

David and his men save Keliah from the Philistines and they save their harvest so they should have food to eat and not starve, and you’d think that they would be welcomed as heroes, but that would be wrong. Keilah was apparently a wall city and when Saul heard that David had delivered Keilah from the Philistines, he wasn’t grateful that his people were saved, he wasn’t relieved that a food crisis had been averted, he didn’t thank God for his deliverance of his people and a miraculous victory. He heard that Davis saved Keilah and genuinely thought “God hath delivered him into mine hand; for he is shut in, by entering into a town that hath gates and bars.” This is another example of someone looking at the miracles of God and thinking how they can destroy it, like the audacity, how does someone think that God can be destroyed by humans especially after working impossible miracles. It’s like the men who wanted to kill Lazarus because he was raised from the dead, like how could anyone look at that miracle and think “yup I’m going to kill it,” like the spirit of Satan has to be in their heart so deeply entrenched that even logic and reason go out the door. This makes me nervous that one day my heart could become that hardened, that I could become that delusional. I’ve seen it happen to many “good” people, and it’s something in the back of my mind, always, that it could just as easily become me at some point. Like how do you even guard against that? Probably doing the basic stuff and trying to stay on the right path, keeping your covenants, etc. I guess I know how to not become that, but it’s easy to imagine that happening and falling away because I’ve seen it happen so many times to people much better than me.

Saul’s audacity to think that God just delivered David a military victory, just to then be given to Saul to kill, led him to start heading out to the city of Keilah to trap David and his men. Because Keilah was a walled city, Saul planned to just show up and probably either demand that David be brought out by the people, or he would just lay siege to the city and wait until either David surrendered or until he starved to death. Just as a reminder that this is Saul’s own city that he’s king over that he’s planning on doing these things to, his own people that he’s planning to destroy just to kill David because he’s jealous and threatened by him. Anything in our hearts that is not God is a corrosive agent and we see it again and again and in this instance, in Saul.