Context No. 3023 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

1 Samuel 21:1-6: in context

1Then David came to Nob to Ahimelech the priest. Ahimelech came to meet David trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no man with you?” 2David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has commanded me to do something, and has said to me, ‘Let no one know anything about the business about which I send you, and what I have commanded you. I have sent the young men to a certain place.’ 3Now therefore what is under your hand? Please give me five loaves of bread in my hand, or whatever is available.” 4The priest answered David, and said, “I have no common bread, but there is holy bread; if only the young men have kept themselves from women.” 5David answered the priest, and said to him, “Truly, women have been kept from us as usual these three days. When I came out, the vessels of the young men were holy, though it was only a common journey. How much more then today shall their vessels be holy?” 6So the priest gave him holy bread; for there was no bread there but the show bread that was taken from before the LORD, to be replaced with hot bread in the day when it was taken away.

David, fleeing Saul, comes alone and hungry to the priest Ahimelech at Nob and asks for bread. The only bread there is the holy showbread, just removed from before the LORD, reserved for the priests. But seeing David's need, Ahimelech gives it to him and his men. Long afterward, Jesus would point to this very incident to defend his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath.

The showbread was set apart for the priests, and yet in David's hunger it was rightly given to him, and Jesus cites this as evidence that human need and mercy take precedence over a ceremonial rule. God's laws about holy things were never meant to let a hungry man starve beside the bread. The priest's compassion, bending the letter of the regulation to meet a real need, was right, and Jesus commends it. Mercy is not the enemy of God's law; it is the deeper intent behind it.

Do I ever use rules, even good ones, to withhold mercy, when God's deeper will is that real need be met?

Sources

1 Samuel 21:6: "So the priest gave him holy bread; for there was no bread there but the show bread."
Mark 2:27: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
Hosea 6:6: "For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."