1 Samuel 23:1 Commentary and Bible Study

Here is a strange and an interesting situation. Keilah is under attack. The harvest fruit is being stolen by the Philistines. They will starve and no doubt the Philistines will turn on the city and kill the people. This is the kind of thing that they did. The question that comes to our minds when we read these verses is, why hadn't Saul come to their aid? He was the king. It is his role to defend these cities, and he is not doing it. He is not defending Israel; that is why the Philistines are getting bolder and bolder. He is too busy chasing after David, deploying his forces here and there in the wilderness to track him down and destroy him. The people of Keilah are starving, because their crops have been destroyed, and they have been smitten by the Philistines, and now they are going to be struck even further, and Saul does absolutely nothing about it. So they tell David. He hasn't got the army; he has only got four hundred fighting men, and he is on the run from Saul. Nevertheless they turn to him. It is an insight: the country, generally speaking, is becoming aware that David has been anointed. David is the one on whom God has laid his hand. David will be their deliverer, and they are already going to him, even before he is in office, before he is ready to deal with it. He has slipped; he has fallen; but now he has been restored, and he and Israel are about to be given a token now of what will be in the future: that David will be the defender and their champion. So David enquires of the Lord, and the Lord says, go. What you have here is a token of David's calling. David felt for Keilah. He was moved deeply by their condition. But he didn't take the law into his own hands; he ‘enquired of the Lord.’ Now a wonderful thing had happened, and you don't read about it until verse 6. ‘It came to pass, when Abiathar, the son of Ahimelech fled to David to Keilah, that he came down with an ephod in his hand.’ The ephod and the Urim and the Thummim, through which the priests communicated with God in those days to seek guidance: it had come to David. Abiathar had helped himself and he had taken it from the tabernacle of the Lord at Nob, and brought it to David, and that was God's will. David is the one who is going to seek guidance, and therefore David will have it. Saul does not seek guidance, so he won't have it. There is David on the run in the cave of Adullam and then moving on to Keilah, and he, the fugitive, has the most important thing in the land: the means of seeking the guidance of the Lord. That's the Lord's encouragement to him.