Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 21-24.

I am not sure why this never occurred to me before, but it struck me that David, whose great grandmother was a Moabite, took his parents to the king of Moab to keep them safe while he was on the run from King Saul.  This made me wonder if Ruth had been related to the royal family of Moab?  I think that is probably not a conclusion we are intended to reach, not even that Ruth’s descendants kept some kind of connection with her homeland.  As I have thought about it more, it seems like David went to Moab as the logical conclusion.   First, he had gone to Gath, in Philistia, and before he could ask for the king of Gath to shelter his parents he realized that he was seen as an enemy there.  If we then look at Ancient Israel we see that Philistia was on one side of Judah and Moab on the other.  Basically, after Philistia, Moab was the next place where David could take his parents.  Further, his other options would have required travelling through territory controlled by Saul, where David had no allies (at least not at this point in his life).

The other thing I want to look at is the men who followed David.  In 1 Samuel 14:52 it says that “whenever Saul saw a mighty or brave man, he took him into his service.”  In today’s passage it says that when David was at the cave of Adullam “All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around him, and he became their commander.”   Yet out of those discontented, distressed, or debtors came David’s mighty men.  Saul took the mighty and brave to build his army.  David took the outcasts.   David took the distressed, the discontented, the debtors, the outcasts and forged a force of mighty warriors.  Just as Jesus forges His Church out of the outcasts of our society.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.