4. While in the wilderness, David heard that Nabal was shearing his sheep.
5. So David sent ten servants, telling them, "Go up to Carmel. When you get to Nabal, greet him for me.
6. Say this to him: ‘Peace to you, your household, and all that is yours!
7. I’ve heard that you are now shearing sheep. As you know, your shepherds were with us in the wilderness. We didn’t mistreat them. Moreover, the whole time they were at Carmel, nothing of theirs went missing.
8. Ask your servants; they will tell you the same. So please receive these young men favorably, because we’ve come on a special day. Please give whatever you have on hand to your servants and to your son David.’"
9. When David’s young men arrived, they said all this to Nabal on David’s behalf. Then they waited.
10. But Nabal answered David’s servants, "Who is David? Who is Jesse’s son? There are all sorts of slaves running away from their masters these days.
11. Why should I take my bread, my water, and the meat I’ve butchered for my shearers and give it to people who came here from who knows where?"
12. So David’s young servants turned around and went back the way they came. When they arrived, they reported every word of this to David.
13. Then David said to his soldiers, "All of you, strap on your swords!" So each of them strapped on their swords, and David did the same. Nearly four hundred men went up with David. Two hundred men remained back with the supplies.
14. One of Nabal’s servants told his wife Abigail, "David sent messengers from the wilderness to greet our master, but he just yelled at them.
15. But the men were very good to us and didn’t mistreat us. Nothing of ours went missing the whole time we were out with them in the fields.
16. In fact, the whole time we were with them, watching our sheep, they were a protective wall around us both night and day.
17. Think about that and see what you can do, because trouble is coming for our master and his whole household. But he’s such a despicable person no one can speak to him."
18. Abigail quickly took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five sheep ready for cooking, five seahs of roasted grain, one hundred raisin cakes, and two hundred fig cakes. She loaded all this on donkeys
19. and told her servants, "Go on ahead of me. I’ll be right behind you." But she didn’t tell her husband Nabal.
20. As she was riding her donkey, going down a trail on the hillside, David and his soldiers appeared, descending toward her, and she met up with them.
21. David had just been saying, "What a waste of time—guarding all this man’s stuff in the wilderness so that nothing of his went missing! He has repaid me evil instead of good!