Saul Closed the Ring Around David and Heaven Sent a Runner

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The Cave at Adullam

David got out of Saul's presence fast and went down into the cave at Adullam, and in the dark there he did the arithmetic on his own life.

He had been a shepherd. A prophet had come to his father's house, singled him out in front of his brothers, and poured oil over his head, and the words that went with the oil were that the Lord was making him king. Since then he had been chased through open country by a king who threw spears at him, and he was living in a hole in a hillside eating whatever his men could carry in.

He said it out loud. Did Samuel anoint me for nothing? Where is that promise?

Then he said the thing he would spend the rest of his life being embarrassed about. I said in my haste, all men are liars.

The Prophet Had Been Fooled Once Already

David had reason to wonder about the oil, because the day it was poured had not gone the way a prophet's day is supposed to go.

Samuel had been sent to Jesse's house to anoint one of the sons and had not been told which. He walked in, looked at Eliab, the tall one, the eldest, and decided on the spot. He was wrong, and he was allowed to be wrong. Samuel had been calling himself the seer, and God let him stand there in a room full of Jesse's boys and pick the wrong one, so that a man who used that word about himself would find out in public that he could not see everything.

The mistake was closer to right than it looked. Eliab had in fact been the first choice. What lost him the crown was his temper, the speed with which he turned on his youngest brother, and the appointment slid down the line of sons until it reached a boy nobody had bothered to call in from the flock. Eliab was not left with nothing. His daughter married Rehoboam in the end, so his blood runs in the kings of Judah too, and the old prophet's eye had not been altogether blind.

God Testifies for Samuel

The answer came back into the cave immediately.

Samuel is not a liar. I testify that he is faithful.

That was all. No army, no sign in the sky, no lifting of the pursuit. A hunted man had accused a dead prophet of cheating him, and heaven filed a defense on the prophet's behalf and left the man exactly where he was, in a cave, with Saul coming.

Hurry, Go Up Quickly

Saul came. He brought his men around the hill in the wilderness and closed the ring, and David and his men were on the far face of a rock with nowhere left to go.

Then a man reached Saul at a run with a message. The Philistines had raided the land. Hurry, he said. Go up quickly.

Nobody agreed afterward about who that runner was. Some said a messenger. Some said an angel out of heaven, sent from on high, and their argument was about the words themselves: no counselor talks to a king that way. Hurry. Go up quickly. Court men do not give a king orders in two clipped commands. Whoever he was, Saul turned his army around and took it off the mountain, and the ring opened, and David walked out of it alive.

The Rock of Divisions

They named the place afterward for what had split there.

The rock itself had cracked from one side and from the other, and Saul and his mighty men stood on one face of it while David and his mighty men stood on the other, close enough to hear each other breathe, with a seam of stone between them that neither could cross in time.

Something else divided on that rock. Saul's own warriors, the men who had marched out to bring David in, came apart over him. We will never turn him over to you, some of them said. Others said the war with Israel came first, but David was with them always, and there was no hurry.

So the king went down the mountain with an army that had just refused him, and the man in the cave who had said all men are liars kept the crown he had stopped believing in.