Pursuit - 1st Samuel 30

It turns out to be quite fortunate that Achish sends David and his men home from the war because when they get back to Ziklagt hey find their city burned and all their women and children gone. Turns out while they were gone, the Amalekites had raided their city, taken what they wanted, burned the rest and took the women and children with them. Kind of a full circle moment for David because this is exactly what he’d been doing to them with the main difference being that David killed all their women and children, and the Amalekites didn’t kill any of David’s people. TB asked the question is this was because the Amalekites were just kinder, more gentle people. The answer was that no, they weren’t, but David had wreaked such havoc on their cities and killed so many of their people, that the Amalekites needed new people to repopulate with.

I also wonder what the Amalekites long term strategy was here. Surely they attacked Ziglak now because they had been watching for them to go off to war and knew that their population was vulnerable, as well as the other Israelite and Philistine towns that they raided, that might have been a pretty profitable strategy for them. But then on the other hand, if this was something that they did regularly, raid towns when the men went off to war, then the warring parties would have left a contingent of men behind to protect their cities and it seems like they didn’t do this, so it might have been a new strategy for them. Maybe the Amalekites were hoping to raid the town and make it back to their own strongholds before the warring parties returned and it was a sound strategy because the only reason David made it back as soon as he had was because he was sent home before the war even started. So not a bad strategy overall. TB did mention that these are the same Amalekites that God commanded both Joshua and Saul to destroy, and that if they had done that when commanded, there wouldn’t have been these types of problems from them.

Finding his city burned and the women and children missing, David, of course, is upset and I wonder if he recognized the irony, but his people are even more upset. Between joining the fight on behalf of the Philistines to kill their fellow Israelites and then the loss of their women and children, a divide started among the people and they started talking about stoning David to death. But it says that “David encouraged himself in the Lord his God.” The word “encouraged” is cross-referenced with Psalms 56:304 which says, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.”

It wasn’t David’s time, and maybe he knew that, maybe he knew that if he did die it was because it was God’s will, but it seems like he accepted that only God could arrange his death, and whatever happened was what God wanted. Surely using his diplomacy, he convinced the people not to kill him, and instead of just storming off to seek vengeance, he asked Abithar the priest, Ahimelech’s son, to bring the ephod, which contained the Urim and Thummin. It doesn’t say explicitly that they used the Urim and Thummim to talk to God, but TB and the IM both agree that it’s implied with the request for the ephod. David asks if he should pursue the troop and if so would he overtake them.

I think it’s interesting that there’s two parts to that question and it’s something that I’ve noticed when people when using the Urim and Thummim, they usually ask the questions in two parts: 1. Should I do this thing 2. Will I have success if I do? In my mind, when I ask “should I do this thing” if the answer is yes, the it either means that I will have success or that I will have failure, which failure is part of God’s plan for me. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, maybe something is lost in translation, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it’s what if the answer was “yes you should do the thing” but then the second answer was “no you won’t have success?” Would that change the decision people would make do the thing anyway? Another thought that I had today while thinking about the Urim and Thummim is with the Liahona, it seems like God gives instruments to people from time to time to better communicate with Him, and I wonder what all goes into that decision process on what to give and who to give it to. I wonder if there is anything like that today, and if so what, and if not why? And if not, then how is the communication supposed to come and why is it in a different way than with other peoples? Is the way that I communicate with God sufficient? Am I making it all up in my head? Interesting things to consider.

The answer that God gave was that David should pursue the Amalekites and that he would recover everything that was taken. It’s important to remember that David and his men had left the battlefield and walked back to their city. I don’t know where this information came from but TB says that it was a 3 day journey from the city to the battlefield and that David’s army made it in one. Either way, they were tired and hungry and when they got to their city expecting to eat, all their food was destroyed, so when it came time to pursue a fleeing force, only 400 of David’s men were healthy enough to go and 200 were “so faint that they could not go over the brook Besore.” This dynamic of only 2/3s of the men going to fight will be important later.

While pursuing the Amalekites, David’s army comes across an Egyptian boy in a field who, I assume was too malnourished to continue on the journey, because we find out later that he hadn’t had food or water in 3 days, so he was let behind to die in the desert. David’s men feed him and he was able to answer some questions, he was an Egyptian slave who had been forced to participate in the raid against David’s city as well as some other ones in the south of Judah and Caleb, but was left in the desert 3 days ago because he got sick. David asks if he can take them to where the Amalekites are with all their people, and the boy says that he can if David promises not to punish him. David agrees and the kid takes David to the Amalekites’ camp where they are just having a party, “eating and drinking, and dancing, because of all the great spoil that they had taken out of the land of the Philistines, and out of the land of Judah.” So this party had been all over the place raiding and they were clearly in no hurry to get back, taking their sweet time, which makes sense because they assumed that David was still out warring with Israel.

It doesn’t take any convincing for David and his men to rain down terror and death on these Amalekites and they spend the entire day killing them and every one of them is killed except for 400 of the young boys who were taking care of the camels and was able to escape on them. TB notes that with 400 young boys taking care of the camels, it just demonstrates how huge this raiding party was. David and all the men got their wives and children back, and they also got their possessions back, but in addition, they got all the spoils that the Amalekites had taken from the other cities that they raided. TB notes that because God told David to pursue the Amalekites that this would have probably been considered holy war and therefore all the spoils should have belonged to God, and that David was wrong to take anything that wasn’t his own property that had been stolen initially. But take all the spoil he did and he took it for himself which included a lot of animals and surely gold, jewelry, clothes, etc. and they all went back to their burned out city of Ziglak with all their people and all the extra stuff.

When David and 400 of his men show up, the 200 men who stayed behind come out to greet them, and a group among the 400 men, who verse 22 call “wicked men and men of Belial” meaning wicked and worthless men, say that they 200 who stayed behind should not get any of the spoils because they didn’t participate in the fighting. They said they should only get their wives and children back and not even any of their own stuff that was stolen. So these men weren’t content with sharing the extra spoils that they didn’t even have in the first place, but now they want to keep the property that belonged to their own comrades. David is very diplomatic and reminds them that anything they have came from God and they were delivered by the hand of God, and that they had victory because of God, so everyone will share in the spoils equally, and so that became the policy from that point forward, that everyone got a share regardless of how involved they were.

Within the last few days, David had been rejected by the Philistines, started feeling rifts in his own army, and had his whole city destroyed, it’s been a big week and David probably sees that his chickens have come home to roost and his current strategy is not sustainable. They already have all the loot from the Amalekites and killed a lot of their men. David needed a new strategy, so he took some of the spoils that he got from the Amalekites and sent it to a number of the “elders of Judah, even to his friends, saying, Behold a present for you of the spoil of the enemies of the Lord.” These are men he needed as allies if he decides to go back to Israel someday, so he’s laying the inroads to strengthen those relationships now.