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The Story of Abigail
At the time of David's sojourn in this district, Nabal held his annual sheep-shearing. This was equivalent to the harvest of the flock-masters, and was commonly finished with a joyous feast which corresponded to the harvest-home. Generally, therefore, it was a season of liberality and goodwill. It was the yearly stocktaking time, and if things had turned out well, if the flocks had increased in number, and the fleeces were up to the average standard of weight and value, the heart of their owner was opened, and he was commonly disposed to show more than usual kindness to all who were in need. In the present instance, David knew that Nabal had peculiar reasons for being satisfied with the returns from his shepherds, for during the sojourn of his troop in the locality, he had constituted himself the guardian of Nabal's property, and, on the testimony of the shepherds, had not only not injured them himself, but had been a wall around them by night and day, so that neither were they injured by any one, nor had they missed anything all the time that David and his men had been beside them.
Where such services were accepted and counted upon, it was obviously fair, and indeed according to the custom of the time, that some recompense in kind should be made. It was a tacit understanding, an unwritten law; and David was perfectly justified in sending ten young men to greet the opulent sheep-master, Nabal, in the day of prosperity, to which the exertions of himself and his men had so largely contributed, to remind him of his obligations, and to ask whatsoever might come readily to his hand to give. The messengers departed without delay, and at length reached Carmel, and addressed to Nabal the words that had been given to them. But they were bitterly disappointed in their expectations. Nabal, a man “churlish and evil in his doings,” as the narrative describes him, did not comply even so much as to return thanks for the friendly salutation which had been brought to him, but angrily, and with a stern countenance, said to the messengers, “Who is David? and who is the son of Jesse? There be many servants nowadays that break away every man from his master. Shall I then take my bread, and my water, and my flesh that I have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men, whom I know not whence they be?”
Stung to the quick by these aggravating words, the young men went to David, and told him how they had been repulsed. Very likely their story lost nothing in the telling. Most probably, indeed, they would infuse something of their own wounded pride into their account; but in any case, when David heard what they said, he became fiercely indignant, and, ordering four hundred of his men to arm themselves and follow him, he went forth, vowing the deepest vengeance, and determined not to leave a single survivor of all those who belonged to Nabal.
Thus he stands before us, about to break the peace of the land, to seize on the possessions of strangers, and to stain himself with the blood of peaceful citizens. If he had carried out what his anger suggested to him-and it was not his fault if the intention was never executed-he would have given the death-blow to his own honour and to his cause. Then he would have appeared before God and all the world as an outlaw, a man not only over whom his enemies would have triumphed, but who must also be given up by his friends as unworthy of the crown of Israel, and to whom nothing else would have remained but to beg for protection within the limits of some heathen land.
When Mary Stuart in 1567 rode away a captive from Carbery Hill, she seized the hand of Lord Lindsay, her foe, and holding it aloft in her grasp, she swore by it, “I will have your head for this, so assure you.”1 [Note: Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 93.]
2. By the prompt and prudent management of Abigail, Nabal's wife, David was saved from carrying out his rash intention. It came about in this fashion: One of the shepherds, who knew how much they had all been indebted to David and his men, and who feared the consequences of Nabal's rudeness, went at once to Abigail, and stated the case to her. He did not take it upon him to expostulate with his master, for he knew that he was “such a son of Belial that a man cannot speak to him.” But he had confidence in the sagacity of his mistress, and he besought her to take measures immediately to ward off the evil which would be sure to come upon them all. His appeal was not made in vain, for she made haste, and laded asses with ample stores of provisions; and, sending these on before, she determined to go herself and make a full explanation and apology to David. As she was descending into a covert of the hill on the one side, David and his men were coming down on the other, “nursing their wrath” the while. As soon as she saw them she alighted from her ass, and, falling at David's feet, in Oriental fashion, she made suit to him in such a manner as to show a rare amount of womanly tact and intellectual ability. Taking all the blame upon herself, she referred to her husband with that union of playfulness and seriousness which, above all things, turns away wrath. “As his name is, so is he; Nabal (fool) is his name, and folly is with him.” Then she proceeded, on the supposition that her request had been already granted, to congratulate David that the Lord had withholden him from shedding blood, and she begged his acceptance for his young men of the supplies which she had brought. Thereafter, rising from present circumstances, she went on to refer to the future in such a way as to show that she had implicit faith in the prophecies that had gone before concerning David; and in a manner the most delicately adroit she concluded by saying that, when God had given him the kingdom, it should be no grief to him that he had shed blood causelessly, or that he had avenged himself. All this was pertinently put; and when she spoke of God's making David “a sure house,” of his soul as “bound in the bundle of life with the Lord his God,” and of his enemies as destined to be slung out, “as out of the middle of a sling,” we do not wonder that she gained her object. By the skilful allusion which she made to his revengeful purpose, she deeply touched the conscience of David, and turned his gratitude to her into thanksgiving to God.
Nabal, however, was not so well pleased with the result. When Abigail went home, she found him so intoxicated that she said nothing on the subject to him until the morning; but then, when he heard her report, he was so enraged at the loss of his property, or at the thought that his wife had done what he had himself refused to do, that he went into a fit of apoplexy-a disease to which his dissipated habits and the debauch of the previous night had predisposed him, and after lingering for ten days he died.
George Eliot's strongest conviction, the keystone of her philosophy, was the idea that all our actions breed their due reward in this world, and that life is no reign of reason if we put off the compensation to another world. That is a moral far more easily worked in cases of outward, transitive sin than in those which disturb only the direct relations of man with God. These indeed are cases which may partly depend on our belief in God, not only in humanity and human character. Deny God, and whole branches of deeper morality lose their sanction. Her genius would no doubt reveal to her consequences which others cannot imagine. But still the inclination of a godless philosophy will be towards palpable effects and those about which there is no mistake. Especially in a doctrine with so little room for grace and forgiveness, where no God ever speaks except by the voice of other men. Defined and brought to book, that is a detestable system. But it is not on the surface-and many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen. Still there is a piece of truth in this paganism. Looking at history, not at biography, taking societies, and not individuals, we cannot deal with things seen by God alone; things take other proportions; the scale of vice and virtue is not that of private life; we judge of it by its outward action, and hesitate to penetrate the secrets of conscience. The law of visible retribution is false even there. But it is true that the test and measure of good and evil is not that of the spiritual biographer.1 [Note: Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, 96.]
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.2 [Note: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.]
3. When David heard of the fate of Nabal, he was anew impelled to express his gratitude to God for having withheld him from the murder which it had been in his heart to commit. He sent messengers to Abigail, who were to speak to her, saying, “David sent us unto thee, to take thee to him to wife.” Abigail, recognizing in this new incident of her life the guidance of a higher Hand, arose from her seat and bowed herself on her face to the earth before the messengers, as the representatives of David, and said, “Behold, let thine handmaid be a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord”-an expression of deep humility, arising from a true feeling of her unworthiness to be chosen as the spouse of him who would one day, as there was now no longer any room to doubt, be ruler over Israel. She ordered her mule to be saddled, and by no means concealing from herself the fact that she would encounter many hardships and trials she “went with five damsels of hers,” along with the messengers of David, to the wilderness of Paran, and “she became David's wife.”
As the true gentleman never fails to make the best of his companions and of his surroundings, and when temptation, danger, or disappointment comes to himself or to his friends, keeps the child's heart in the brave man's breast; so the true gentlewoman, in all the alternations of life-elated by success or depressed by failure-will not be dazzled by the sunshine or dismayed by the storm. Who has not seen (as I in my long life have seen so often), to honour and to admire, the modest, grateful joy with which she has succeeded to honour and abundance, for which she never hoped. When weaker heads grow giddy, and when weaker hearts grow proud, she keeps the even tenor of her way, is not puffed up, does not behave herself unseemly. So with an equal grace and composure, whether by constraint or free will, she can take a lower place. There are women working in the slums of London, and in all the courts and alleys of our cities and towns, who were born and lived to womanhood in spacious homes, in the pure air of the country, with gardens, carriages, and servants, and all the comforts which money can buy-now wives of clergymen, deaconesses, sisters of mercy, district visitors. There is the tender, delicate woman, the emigrant's wife, doing the hardest and coarsest household work; and everywhere, here in England and six thousand miles away in South Africa, in homes, in hospitals, in tents, and on the battlefield, she is tending the wounded and the sick.1 [Note: Deau Hole, Then and Now, 86.]