Nabal: the wealthy sheep owner of Carmel in Judah, husband of Abigail, who repaid David's protection with contempt and died ten days later; the name is spelled with the everyday Hebrew word for a scoundrel whose conduct shatters the community
In Hebrew this man's name is spelled and said exactly like an ordinary Hebrew word, נָבָל, which English Bibles usually render "fool" but which scholars read far more harshly: not someone unintelligent, but a scoundrel whose conduct tears the community apart. Giving a son that name is close to naming him Outrage. The story does not leave the joke for the reader to notice. His wife says it out loud in 1 Samuel 25:25: as his name is, so is he, and the matching word for the deed itself (נְבָלָה) goes with him.
All eighteen verses that carry the name point to one man, and his story runs in a straight line:
- He is introduced as harsh and mean, with three thousand sheep to shear.
- He answers David's polite request for provisions with "Who is David?"
- He throws himself a feast fit for a king and drinks himself senseless.
- Ten days after his wife intercepts David on the road, the LORD strikes him and he dies.
- After that the name survives only as the tag that identifies his widow among David's wives.
The chapter keeps his name ringing against other words. Abigail loads her donkeys with two skins of wine, and the Hebrew word for such a skin (נֵבֶל) is written with the same three letters as his name; the next morning, when the wine has "gone out of" him, his heart dies inside him and he goes stiff as a stone, an emptied jar of a man. Many scholars also read him as a stand-in for Saul: he owns three thousand sheep where Saul commanded three thousand soldiers, he repays loyal service with insult exactly as Saul does, and he dies at God's hand rather than David's, which is the very thing David refuses to do to Saul in the chapters on either side.
Whether this was his real name is a separate question from what the name says. Most scholars take it as a label rather than a birth name, either a nickname his neighbors used or a name the storyteller assigned to fit the man. A minority keep open an older proposal that the name genuinely came from a root meaning "noble," which a related Arabic word supports, and that the story then turns it inside out. The closing words of his introduction are also read two ways: most English Bibles print that he was a Calebite, naming his clan, while some read the same letters as a jab about the man's own heart, echoing the line in Psalm 14 about the scoundrel who says in his heart that there is no God.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether Nabal was the man's actual given name or a characterizing name attached to him, as a nickname or by the storyteller.
- majorityThe name is a literary or mocking label rather than a birth name: the narrator (or local usage) supplies a name that convicts the man, and Abigail's play on it in 1 Samuel 25:25 seals the characterization.; Jon D. Levenson, '1 Samuel 25 as Literature and as History,' Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978): 11-28, esp. 13; P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel (AB 8; Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 388-402; Robert Alter, The David Story (New York: Norton, 1999), 152-161; David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 577-599
- minorityThe name may reflect a genuine Semitic root with a positive sense, related to the Arabic word for "noble," so that a real given name is turned inside out by the narrative rather than invented for it.; J. J. Stamm, 'Der Name Nabal,' in Beitraege zur hebraeischen und altorientalischen Namenkunde, OBO 30 (Freiburg: Universitaetsverlag, 1980), 205-213; BDB, s.v. nabal (citing Arabic nabil, 'noble,' as cognate)