1 Samuel 21

David Runs from Saul

1 ^[a]David went to the town of Nob to see Ahimelech the priest. Ahimelech trembled when he saw him. “Why are you alone?” he asked. “Why is no one with you?”

² “The king has sent me on a private matter,” David said. “He told me not to tell anyone why I am here. I have told my men where to meet me later. ³ Now, what is there to eat? Give me five loaves of bread or anything else you have.”

⁴ “We don’t have any regular bread,” the priest replied. “But there is the holy bread, which you can have if your young men have not slept with any women recently.”

⁵ “Don’t worry,” David replied. “I never allow my men to be with women when we are on a campaign. And since they stay clean even on ordinary trips, how much more on this one!”

⁶ Since there was no other food available, the priest gave him the holy bread—the Bread of the Presence that was placed before the Lord in the Tabernacle. It had just been replaced that day with fresh bread.

⁷ Now Doeg the Edomite, Saul’s chief herdsman, was there that day, having been detained before the Lord.^[b]

⁸ David asked Ahimelech, “Do you have a spear or sword? The king’s business was so urgent that I didn’t even have time to grab a weapon!”

⁹ “I only have the sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the valley of Elah,” the priest replied. “It is wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod. Take that if you want it, for there is nothing else here.”

“There is nothing like it!” David replied. “Give it to me!”

¹⁰ So David escaped from Saul and went to King Achish of Gath. ¹¹ But the officers of Achish were unhappy about his being there. “Isn’t this David, the king of the land?” they asked. “Isn’t he the one the people honor with dances, singing,

¹² David heard these comments and was very afraid of what King Achish of Gath might do to him. ¹³ So he pretended to be insane, scratching on doors and drooling down his beard.

¹⁴ Finally, King Achish said to his men, “Must you bring me a madman? ¹⁵ We already have enough of them around here! Why should I let someone like this be my guest?”

1 Samuel 15

Saul Defeats the Amalekites

1 One day Samuel said to Saul, “It was the Lord who told me to anoint you as king of his people, Israel. Now listen to this message from the Lord! ² This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies has declared: I have decided to settle accounts with the nation of Amalek for opposing Israel when they came from Egypt. ³ Now go and completely destroy^[a] the entire Amalekite nation—men, women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and donkeys.”

⁴ So Saul mobilized his army at Telaim. There were 200,000 soldiers from Israel and 10,000 men from Judah. ⁵ Then Saul and his army went to a town of the Amalekites and lay in wait in the valley. ⁶ Saul sent this warning to the Kenites: “Move away from where the Amalekites live, or you will die with them. For you showed kindness to all the people of Israel when they came up from Egypt.” So the Kenites packed up and left.

⁷ Then Saul slaughtered the Amalekites from Havilah all the way to Shur, east of Egypt. ⁸ He captured Agag, the Amalekite king, but completely destroyed everyone else. ⁹ Saul and his men spared Agag’s life and kept the best of the sheep and goats, the cattle, the fat calves, and the lambs—everything, in fact, that appealed to them. They destroyed only what was worthless or of poor quality.

The Lord Rejects Saul

¹⁰ Then the Lord said to Samuel, ¹¹ “I am sorry that I ever made Saul king, for he has not been loyal to me and has refused to obey my command.” Samuel was so deeply moved when he heard this that he cried out to the Lord all night.

¹² Early the next morning Samuel went to find Saul. Someone told him, “Saul went to the town of Carmel to set up a monument to himself; then he went on to Gilgal.”

¹³ When Samuel finally found him, Saul greeted him cheerfully. “May the Lordbless you,” he said. “I have carried out the Lord’s command!”

¹⁴ “Then what is all the bleating of sheep and goats and the lowing of cattle I hear?” Samuel demanded.

¹⁵ “It’s true that the army spared the best of the sheep, goats, and cattle,” Saul admitted. “But they are going to sacrifice them to the Lord your God. We have destroyed everything else.”

¹⁶ Then Samuel said to Saul, “Stop! Listen to what the Lord told me last night!”

“What did he tell you?” Saul asked.

¹⁷ And Samuel told him, “Although you may think little of yourself, are you not the leader of the tribes of Israel? The Lord has anointed you king of Israel. ¹⁸ And the Lord sent you on a mission and told you, ‘Go and completely destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, until they are all dead.’ ¹⁹ Why haven’t you obeyed the Lord? Why did you rush for the plunder and do what was evil in the Lord’s sight?”

²⁰ “But I did obey the Lord,” Saul insisted. “I carried out the mission he gave me. I brought back King Agag, but I destroyed everyone else. ²¹ Then my troops brought in the best of the sheep, goats, cattle, and plunder to sacrifice to the Lordyour God in Gilgal.”

²² But Samuel replied,

Saul Pleads for Forgiveness

²⁴ Then Saul admitted to Samuel, “Yes, I have sinned. I have disobeyed your instructions and the Lord’s command, for I was afraid of the people and did what they demanded. ²⁵ But now, please forgive my sin and come back with me so that I may worship the Lord.”

²⁶ But Samuel replied, “I will not go back with you! Since you have rejected the Lord’s command, he has rejected you as king of Israel.”

²⁷ As Samuel turned to go, Saul tried to hold him back and tore the hem of his robe. ²⁸ And Samuel said to him, “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to someone else—one who is better than you. ²⁹ And he who is the Glory of Israel will not lie, nor will he change his mind, for he is not human that he should change his mind!”

³⁰ Then Saul pleaded again, “I know I have sinned. But please, at least honor me before the elders of my people and before Israel by coming back with me so that I may worship the Lord your God.” ³¹ So Samuel finally agreed and went back with him, and Saul worshiped the Lord.

Samuel Executes King Agag

³² Then Samuel said, “Bring King Agag to me.” Agag arrived full of hope, for he thought, “Surely the worst is over, and I have been spared!”^[b] 33 But Samuel said, “As your sword has killed the sons of many mothers, now your mother will be childless.” And Samuel cut Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.

³⁴ Then Samuel went home to Ramah, and Saul returned to his house at Gibeah of Saul. ³⁵ Samuel never went to meet with Saul again, but he mourned constantly for him. And the Lord was sorry he had ever made Saul king of Israel.

1 Samuel 8

Israel Requests a King

1 As Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons to be judges over Israel. ² Joel and Abijah, his oldest sons, held court in Beersheba. ³ But they were not like their father, for they were greedy for money. They accepted bribes and perverted justice.

⁴ Finally, all the elders of Israel met at Ramah to discuss the matter with Samuel.⁵ “Look,” they told him, “you are now old, and your sons are not like you. Give us a king to judge us like all the other nations have.”

⁶ Samuel was displeased with their request and went to the Lord for guidance.⁷ “Do everything they say to you,” the Lord replied, “for they are rejecting me, not you. They don’t want me to be their king any longer. ⁸ Ever since I brought them from Egypt they have continually abandoned me and followed other gods. And now they are giving you the same treatment. ⁹ Do as they ask, but solemnly warn them about the way a king will reign over them.”

Samuel Warns against a Kingdom

¹⁰ So Samuel passed on the Lord’s warning to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹ “This is how a king will reign over you,” Samuel said. “The king will draft your sons and assign them to his chariots and his charioteers, making them run before his chariots. ¹² Some will be generals and captains in his army,^[a] some will be forced to plow in his fields and harvest his crops, and some will make his weapons and chariot equipment. ¹³ The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake and make perfumes for him. ¹⁴ He will take away the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his own officials. ¹⁵ He will take a tenth of your grain and your grape harvest and distribute it among his officers and attendants. ¹⁶ He will take your male and female slaves and demand the finest of your cattle^[b] and donkeys for his own use. ¹⁷ He will demand a tenth of your flocks, and you will be his slaves. ¹⁸ When that day comes, you will beg for relief from this king you are demanding, but then the Lord will not help you.”

¹⁹ But the people refused to listen to Samuel’s warning. “Even so, we still want a king,” they said. ²⁰ “We want to be like the nations around us. Our king will judge us and lead us into battle.”

²¹ So Samuel repeated to the Lord what the people had said, ²² and the Lordreplied, “Do as they say, and give them a king.” Then Samuel agreed and sent the people home.

1 Samuel 7

1 So the men of Kiriath-jearim came to get the Ark of the Lord. They took it to the hillside home of Abinadab and ordained Eleazar, his son, to be in charge of it.² The Ark remained in Kiriath-jearim for a long time—twenty years in all. During that time all Israel mourned because it seemed the Lord had abandoned them.

Samuel Leads Israel to Victory

³ Then Samuel said to all the people of Israel, “If you want to return to the Lordwith all your hearts, get rid of your foreign gods and your images of Ashtoreth. Turn your hearts to the Lord and obey him alone; then he will rescue you from the Philistines.” ⁴ So the Israelites got rid of their images of Baal and Ashtoreth and worshiped only the Lord.

⁵ Then Samuel told them, “Gather all of Israel to Mizpah, and I will pray to the Lordfor you.” ⁶ So they gathered at Mizpah and, in a great ceremony, drew water from a well and poured it out before the Lord. They also went without food all day and confessed that they had sinned against the Lord. (It was at Mizpah that Samuel became Israel’s judge.)

⁷ When the Philistine rulers heard that Israel had gathered at Mizpah, they mobilized their army and advanced. The Israelites were badly frightened when they learned that the Philistines were approaching. ⁸ “Don’t stop pleading with the Lord our God to save us from the Philistines!” they begged Samuel. ⁹ So Samuel took a young lamb and offered it to the Lord as a whole burnt offering. He pleaded with the Lord to help Israel, and the Lord answered him.

¹⁰ Just as Samuel was sacrificing the burnt offering, the Philistines arrived to attack Israel. But the Lord spoke with a mighty voice of thunder from heaven that day, and the Philistines were thrown into such confusion that the Israelites defeated them. ¹¹ The men of Israel chased them from Mizpah to a place below Beth-car, slaughtering them all along the way.

¹² Samuel then took a large stone and placed it between the towns of Mizpah and Jeshanah.^[a] He named it Ebenezer (which means “the stone of help”), for he said, “Up to this point the Lord has helped us!”

¹³ So the Philistines were subdued and didn’t invade Israel again for some time. And throughout Samuel’s lifetime, the Lord’s powerful hand was raised against the Philistines. ¹⁴ The Israelite villages near Ekron and Gath that the Philistines had captured were restored to Israel, along with the rest of the territory that the Philistines had taken. And there was peace between Israel and the Amorites in those days.

¹⁵ Samuel continued as Israel’s judge for the rest of his life. ¹⁶ Each year he traveled around, setting up his court first at Bethel, then at Gilgal, and then at Mizpah. He judged the people of Israel at each of these places. ¹⁷ Then he would return to his home at Ramah, and he would hear cases there, too. And Samuel built an altar to the Lord at Ramah.

Judges 13  The Birth of Samson

1  Again the Israelites did evil in the Lord’s sight, so the Lord handed them over to the Philistines, who oppressed them for forty years.

² In those days a man named Manoah from the tribe of Dan lived in the town of Zorah. His wife was unable to become pregnant, and they had no children. ³ The angel of the Lord appeared to Manoah’s wife and said, “Even though you have been unable to have children, you will soon become pregnant and give birth to a son. ⁴ So be careful; you must not drink wine or any other alcoholic drink nor eat any forbidden food.^[a] 5 You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and his hair must never be cut. For he will be dedicated to God as a Nazirite from birth. He will begin to rescue Israel from the Philistines.”

⁶ The woman ran and told her husband, “A man of God appeared to me! He looked like one of God’s angels, terrifying to see. I didn’t ask where he was from, and he didn’t tell me his name. ⁷ But he told me, ‘You will become pregnant and give birth to a son. You must not drink wine or any other alcoholic drink nor eat any forbidden food. For your son will be dedicated to God as a Nazirite from the moment of his birth until the day of his death.’”

⁸ Then Manoah prayed to the Lord, saying, “Lord, please let the man of God come back to us again and give us more instructions about this son who is to be born.”

⁹ God answered Manoah’s prayer, and the angel of God appeared once again to his wife as she was sitting in the field. But her husband, Manoah, was not with her.¹⁰ So she quickly ran and told her husband, “The man who appeared to me the other day is here again!”

¹¹ Manoah ran back with his wife and asked, “Are you the man who spoke to my wife the other day?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I am.”

¹² So Manoah asked him, “When your words come true, what kind of rules should govern the boy’s life and work?”

¹³ The angel of the Lord replied, “Be sure your wife follows the instructions I gave her. ¹⁴ She must not eat grapes or raisins, drink wine or any other alcoholic drink, or eat any forbidden food.”

¹⁵ Then Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, “Please stay here until we can prepare a young goat for you to eat.”

¹⁶ “I will stay,” the angel of the Lord replied, “but I will not eat anything. However, you may prepare a burnt offering as a sacrifice to the Lord.” (Manoah didn’t realize it was the angel of the Lord.)

¹⁷ Then Manoah asked the angel of the Lord, “What is your name? For when all this comes true, we want to honor you.”

¹⁸ “Why do you ask my name?” the angel of the Lord replied. “It is too wonderful for you to understand.”

¹⁹ Then Manoah took a young goat and a grain offering and offered it on a rock as a sacrifice to the Lord. And as Manoah and his wife watched, the Lord did an amazing thing. ²⁰ As the flames from the altar shot up toward the sky, the angel of the Lord ascended in the fire. When Manoah and his wife saw this, they fell with their faces to the ground.

²¹ The angel did not appear again to Manoah and his wife. Manoah finally realized it was the angel of the Lord, ²² and he said to his wife, “We will certainly die, for we have seen God!”

²³ But his wife said, “If the Lord were going to kill us, he wouldn’t have accepted our burnt offering and grain offering. He wouldn’t have appeared to us and told us this wonderful thing and done these miracles.”

²⁴ When her son was born, she named him Samson. And the Lord blessed him as he grew up. ²⁵ And the Spirit of the Lord began to stir him while he lived in Mahaneh-dan, which is located between the towns of Zorah and Eshtaol.

Judges 12

Ephraim Fights with Jephthah

1 Then the people of Ephraim mobilized an army and crossed over the Jordan River to Zaphon. They sent this message to Jephthah: “Why didn’t you call for us to help you fight against the Ammonites? We are going to burn down your house with you in it!”

² Jephthah replied, “I summoned you at the beginning of the dispute, but you refused to come! You failed to help us in our struggle against Ammon. ³ So when I realized you weren’t coming, I risked my life and went to battle without you, and the Lord gave me victory over the Ammonites. So why have you now come to fight me?”

⁴ The people of Ephraim responded, “You men of Gilead are nothing more than fugitives from Ephraim and Manasseh.” So Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and attacked the men of Ephraim and defeated them.

⁵ Jephthah captured the shallow crossings of the Jordan River, and whenever a fugitive from Ephraim tried to go back across, the men of Gilead would challenge him. “Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?” they would ask. If the man said, “No, I’m not,” ⁶ they would tell him to say “Shibboleth.” If he was from Ephraim, he would say “Sibboleth,” because people from Ephraim cannot pronounce the word correctly. Then they would take him and kill him at the shallow crossings of the Jordan. In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time.

⁷ Jephthah judged Israel for six years. When he died, he was buried in one of the towns of Gilead.

Ibzan Becomes Israel’s Judge

⁸ After Jephthah died, Ibzan from Bethlehem judged Israel. ⁹ He had thirty sons and thirty daughters. He sent his daughters to marry men outside his clan, and he brought in thirty young women from outside his clan to marry his sons. Ibzan judged Israel for seven years. ¹⁰ When he died, he was buried at Bethlehem.

Elon Becomes Israel’s Judge

¹¹ After Ibzan died, Elon from the tribe of Zebulun judged Israel for ten years.¹² When he died, he was buried at Aijalon in Zebulun.

Abdon Becomes Israel’s Judge

¹³ After Elon died, Abdon son of Hillel, from Pirathon, judged Israel. ¹⁴ He had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy donkeys. He judged Israel for eight years. ¹⁵ When he died, he was buried at Pirathon in Ephraim, in the hill country of the Amalekites.