5. Psalm 34: The Fear of the Lord
Were it not for the superscription to this psalm, Psalm 34 could be read as a beautiful response of praise and instruction based upon some unknown incident in which David was delivered from
5. Psalm 34: The Fear of the Lord
Were it not for the superscription to this psalm, Psalm 34 could be read as a beautiful response of praise and instruction based upon some unknown incident in which David was delivered from danger. Our difficulty in understanding the psalm arises from its historical setting:104 “A Psalm of David when he feigned madness before Abimelech, who drove him away and he departed.”105 I am immediately troubled by these words. Should David have been in Gath? Is his feigned insanity consistent with the dignity of the office of a king? Should God be praised because David pretended to be insane and thus escaped danger? Should others be taught (cf. vv. 11-22) on the basis of this kind of behavior? How can a psalm which condemns deceit (v. 13) be based upon the actions of a deceiver?
One might reason that these questions surface because of an inaccurate perception of the incident referred to in the superscription.106 Actually the opposite is true. The more one studies 1 Samuel 21:10-15 in context, the more distressing becomes David’s conduct when he was pursued by Saul. While I had previously viewed this time in David’s life as one of spiritual vitality and personal piety, a more careful study reveals that he was a man with feet of clay. Since the superscription is intended to turn our attention to the historical setting of the psalm, let us begin by considering David’s conduct as he fled from Saul. We will approach this broadly at first, looking at the context in which 1 Samuel 21:10-15 is found, and then consider the incident in Gath specifically.
The death of Goliath and the rout of the Philistines (1 Sam. 17) quickly swept David from obscurity to renown as a military hero. The women of Israel sang, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Sam. 18:7). The popularity of David surpassed Saul, making the king extremely jealous (18:8-9). Saul began to look upon David as his rival, and eventually he was marked out for death (cf. 18:10-11, 20-29).
Just as Saul sinfully responded to David’s popularity, David also reacted wrongly to the danger occasioned by Saul’s murderous intentions. Deception became David’s way of dealing with danger. The events leading up to Psalm 34 begin in 1 Samuel 19 when David escaped Saul’s assassination plot (19:10). He fled Saul’s spear, being lowered from a window by Michal, his wife. She then (at David’s instruction?) deceived her father. To allow time for David to escape, Michal placed a dummy made from a household idol in his bed (19:11-17). Sometime later David was expected to sit at Saul’s table to celebrate the feast of the new moon. Fearing for his life he asked Jonathan to lie about his absence from the festivities. Jonathan falsely explained to his father that David had gone to offer a sacrifice for his family at Bethlehem (20:6).
Later David fled to Nob. There Ahimelech the priest questioned David as to why he appeared alone. David fallaciously replied to the priest that Saul had commissioned him to carry out an urgent task and that he was to rendezvous with his men at an appointed place (21:1-2). David requested provisions and a weapon from Ahimelech. He was given some of the consecrated bread107 and the sword he had taken from Goliath.
David’s flight to Nob was costly. Along with eighty-four other priests, Ahimelech was executed at Saul’s command. Saul’s paranoid purge included the slaughter of the men, women, children and cattle of Nob (22:6-19).108 David acknowledged to Abiathar, the only son of Ahimelech to survive the massacre at Nob, that he was morally responsible for the slaughter (v. 22).
How was it possible for David, in the words of Psalm 34, to “seek and pursue peace” (v. 14) with a sword? When David went out to do battle with Goliath he said that he did not require a sword for the Lord was on his side:
“This day the Lord will deliver you up into my hands, and I will strike you down and remove your head from you. And I will give the dead bodies of the army of the Philistines this day to the birds of the sky and the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not deliver by sword or by spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and He will give you into our hands” (1 Sam. 17:46-47).
God was not only able to deliver David from Goliath without a sword, but He could also protect David from the treachery of Saul without David resorting to the use of Goliath’s sword. In 1 Samuel 19 we are told that David fled to Samuel at Ramah, after