5. So David sent ten young men and told them, “Go to Carmel, visit Nabal, and greet him for me.
6. Say to him, ‘May you live ⌊long⌋! May you, your home, and all you have prosper!
7. I hear that your sheepshearers are with you. Your shepherds have been with us, ⌊and⌋ we have not mistreated them. Nothing of theirs has been missing as long as they’ve been in Carmel.
8. Ask your young men, and let them tell you. Be kind to my young men, since we have come on a special occasion. Please give us and your son David anything you can ⌊spare⌋.’ ”
9. When David’s young men came to Nabal, they repeated all of this to him for David, and then they waited.
10. “Who is David?” Nabal answered David’s servants. “Who is Jesse’s son? So many servants nowadays are leaving their masters.
11. Should I take my bread, my water, and my meat that I butchered for my shearers and give them to men coming from who knows where?”
12. David’s young men returned and told him all this.
13. “Each of you put on your swords!” David told his men. And everyone, including David, put on his sword. About four hundred men went with David, while two hundred men stayed with the supplies.
14. One of the young men told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, “David sent messengers from the desert to greet our master, who yelled at them.
15. Those men were very good to us. They didn’t mistreat us, and we found that nothing was missing wherever we went with them when we were in the fields.
16. They were a wall protecting us day and night as long as we were watching the sheep near them.
17. Now, consider what you should do because our master and his whole household are doomed. And he’s such a worthless man that it’s useless to talk to him.”
18. So Abigail quickly took 200 loaves of bread, 2 full wineskins, 5 butchered sheep, a bushel of roasted grain, 100 bunches of raisins, and 200 fig cakes and loaded them on donkeys.
19. “Go on ahead,” she told her young men, “and I’ll follow you.” But she didn’t tell her husband Nabal about it.
20. She was riding on her donkey down a hidden mountain path when she met David and his men coming toward her.
21. David had thought, “I guarded this man’s stuff in the desert for nothing! Not one of his possessions was missing. Yet, he has paid me back with evil when I was good to him.
22. May God punish me if I leave even one of his men alive in the morning.”
23. When Abigail saw David, she quickly got down from her donkey. She immediately bowed down in front of David with her face touching the ground.
24. After she bowed at his feet, she said, “Sir, let me be held responsible for this wrong. Please let me speak with you. Please listen to my words.