The trespass of thine handmaid. — Abigail again takes upon herself the wrong; the gracious act of forgiveness, of which she feels assured beforehand, she reminds David, will be shown to her. Thus all the chivalry of David’s character — if we may use a term which belongs to another age — was brought out by this wise and beautiful woman.
For the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house. — Unconsciously, perhaps, without any very definite conception of their far reaching and magnificent meaning, the Israelitish lady repeats the words which she had heard perhaps in Samuel’s “Naioth” by Ramah — possibly from some trained or inspired disciple of the prophet’s school. She was thinking, perhaps, of the young captain then standing before her in all the pride of his early reputation, as the future hero-king of Israel, sitting on the throne of the insane and gloomy man — her evil husband’s friend — King Saul, and it may be of his son reigning after him; but the unconscious prophetess, we may be sure, never dreamed of that glorious and holy One in whose person, far down the stream of ages, the Eternal would make good her words, and indeed found for that outlawed chieftain, before whom she was then kneeling, a sure house.
The battles of the Lord. — Abigail, in common with the pious Israelites of her time, looked on the wars waged by the armies of Israel against the idolatrous tribes and nations around them as the wars of Jehovah. We frequently in these early records meet with the expressions, “fighting the battle of the Lord,” “the ranks of the living God,” “the battle is the Lord’s.” We hear, too, of an ancient collection of songs — ballads, perhaps, would be a more accurate designation — now lost, entitled “The Book of the Wars of the Lord” (Numbers 21:14). For several years now since his famous combat with the great champion of idolatry, Goliath, David had been the popular hero and the favourite subject of those folk-songs which ever loved to sing of these “Wars of Jehovah.”
Evil hath not been found in thee. — Rauh, “evil,” here signifies not “wickedness,” but “misfortune.” The wife of Nabal means to say that all through that stormy, restless life of David’s, the Lord had ever held him up. It had given him victory and crowned his efforts with splendid success; and in the later days of bitter persecution, the same invisible One had shielded him, and had turned what seemed to be the certain ruin of his prospects into a still more certain career of usefulness and popularity.