1 Samuel 30:16

DAVID SLAUGHTERED THE AMALEKITES; RESCUED HIS PEOPLE; AND RECOVERED MUCH BOOTY

"And when he had taken him down, behold, they were spread abroad over all the land, eating and drinking and dancing, because of all the great spoil they had taken from the land of the Philistines and from the land of Judah. And David smote them from twilight until the evening of the next Day; and not a man of them escaped, except four hundred young men, who mounted camels and fled. And David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken; and David rescued his two wives. Nothing was missing, whether small or great, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that had been taken; David brought back all. David also captured all the flocks and herds; and the people drove those cattle before him, and said, `This is David's spoil.'"

"And when he had taken him down, behold, they ..." (1 Samuel 30:16). Sometimes the Biblical use of pronouns is amazing. Here "he" stands for the Egyptian slave; "him" stands for David, and "they" refers to the celebrating Amalekites!

"They were spread abroad over all the land" (1 Samuel 30:16). H. P. Smith believed that this feast they were having, "Was very possibly a religious feast."[11] Their being deployed over such a wide area shows that they were utterly helpless against the kind of ferocious attack David and his men brought against them.

"From twilight till the evening of the next day" (1 Samuel 30:17). Twilight may mean the morning twilight or the evening twilight. If the attack began in the morning twilight, it ended in the evening of the same day, as we would reckon the time; but the Jewish day began at sundown, so it is called the "evening of the next day" here.

"Not a man ... escaped, except the four hundred" (1 Samuel 30:17). From this, we must conclude that perhaps as many as a couple of thousand made up the force of the raiding Amalekites; and, in answer to the question of how could David and only four hundred men have killed so many people, the answer is simple enough. As Henry suggested: "They were celebrating, eating and drinking; many of them were doubtless drunk; they were off their guard; they might not even have had their weapons ready, and they were completely surprised";[12] and David's 400, angry, hardened soldiers would have had no difficulty at all in killing four men each, which is all it might have taken.

"This is David's spoil" (1 Samuel 30:20). Caird's comment here is important. "The text here is corrupt beyond recovery, but it is clear that David and his men captured additional booty besides recovering their own possessions. However, it is not necessary to accept this libel on David that he appropriated all the cattle for himself. Indeed, it is abundantly clear from the sequel that he did not."[13] Porter[14] also concurred in this judgment, quoting Kennedy that, "To the suggestion that this sounds selfish, he says, `A corrupt and unintelligible text is responsible.'"[15]