²⁴ She fell at his feet and said, “Upon me alone, my lord, be the guilt; please let your servant speak in your ears and hear the words of your servant.^{(A) 25} My lord, do not take seriously this ill-natured fellow, Nabal, for as his name is, so is he; Nabal^[a] is his name, and folly is with him, but I, your servant, did not see the young men of my lord, whom you sent.^(B)

²⁶ “Now then, my lord, as the Lord lives and as you yourself live, since the Lord has restrained you from bloodguilt and from taking vengeance with your own hand, now let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my lord be like Nabal.^{(C) 27} And now let this present that your servant has brought to my lord be given to the young men who follow my lord. ²⁸ Please forgive the trespass of your servant, for the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house, because my lord is fighting the battles of the Lord, and evil shall not be found in you so long as you live.^{(D) 29} If anyone should rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living under the care of the Lord your God, but the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling. ³⁰ When the Lord has done to my lord according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you and has appointed you prince over Israel, ³¹ my lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause or for having saved himself. And when the Lord has dealt well with my lord, then remember your servant.”

³² David said to Abigail, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you to meet me today!^{(E) 33} Blessed be your good sense, and blessed be you, who kept me today from bloodguilt and from avenging myself by my own hand! ³⁴ For as surely as the Lord the God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from hurting you, unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by morning there would not have been left to Nabal so much as one male.” ³⁵ Then David received from her hand what she had brought him; he said to her, “Go up to your house in peace; see, I have heeded your voice, and I have granted your petition.”^(F)

³⁶ Abigail came to Nabal; he was holding a feast in his house like the feast of a king. Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk, so she told him nothing at all until the morning light.^{(G) 37} In the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him; he became like a stone. ³⁸ About ten days later the Lord struck Nabal, and he died.

³⁹ When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, “Blessed be the Lord, who has judged the case of Nabal’s insult to me and has kept back his servant from evil; the Lord has returned the evildoing of Nabal upon his own head.” Then David sent word to Abigail to make her his wife.^{(H) 40} When David’s servants came to Abigail at Carmel, they said to her, “David has sent us to you to take you to him as his wife.” ⁴¹ She rose and bowed down, with her face to the ground, and said, “Your servant is a slave to wash the feet of the servants of my lord.”^{(I) 42} Abigail got up hurriedly and rode away on a donkey; her five maids attended her. She went after the messengers of David and became his wife.^(J)

⁴³ David also married Ahinoam of Jezreel; both of them became his wives.^{(K) 44} Saul had given his daughter Michal, David’s wife, to Palti son of Laish, who was from Gallim.^(L)

¹⁴ But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, “David sent messengers out of the wilderness to salute our master, and he shouted insults at them.

⁴ instructing them, “Thus you shall say to my lord Esau: Thus says your servant Jacob, ‘I have lived with Laban as an alien and stayed until now,^{(A) 5} and I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, male and female slaves, and I have sent to tell my lord, in order that I may find favor in your sight.’ ”^(B)

⁶ The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau, and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him.”^{(C) 7} Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed, and he divided the people who were with him and the flocks and herds and camels into two companies,^{(D) 8} thinking, “If Esau comes to the one company and destroys it, then the company that is left will escape.”

⁹ And Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good,’^{(E) 10} I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two companies.^{(F) 11} Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children.^{(G) 12} Yet you have said, ‘I will surely do you good and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.’ ”^(H)

¹³ So he spent that night there, and from what he had with him he took a present for his brother Esau,^{(I) 14} two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, ¹⁵ thirty milch camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. ¹⁶ These he delivered into the hand of his servants, every drove by itself, and said to his servants, “Pass on ahead of me, and put a space between drove and drove.” ¹⁷ He instructed the one in the lead, “When Esau my brother meets you and asks you, ‘To whom do you belong? Where are you going? And whose are these ahead of you?’ ¹⁸ then you shall say, ‘They belong to your servant Jacob; they are a present sent to my lord Esau, and moreover he is behind us.’ ” ¹⁹ He likewise instructed the second and the third and all who followed the droves, “You shall say the same thing to Esau when you meet him, ²⁰ and you shall say, ‘Moreover your servant Jacob is behind us.’ ” For he thought, “I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me, and afterwards I shall see his face; perhaps he will accept me.”^{(J) 21} So the present passed on ahead of him, and he himself spent that night in the camp.