Mark 2.25-26, 1 Samuel 21.1-6
| 2.25 καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς· | Heα told them,β |
|---|---|
| οὐδέποτε ἀνέγνωτε τί ἐποίησεν Δαυὶδ | “You’ve never read what David did |
| ὅτε χρείαν ἔσχενκαὶ ἐπείνασεν αὐτὸς | when he was needy and hungry— |
| καὶ οἱ μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ, | he and those with him— |
| 2.26 πῶς εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸν οἶκον τοῦ θεοῦ | how he entered God’s house |
| ἐπὶ Ἀβιαθὰρ ἀρχιερέως | when the high priest was Ev’yatar,γ |
| καὶ τοὺς ἄρτους τῆς προθέσεως ἔφαγεν, | and he ate the bread of the Face,δ |
| οὓς οὐκ ἔξεστιν φαγεῖν εἰ μὴ τοὺς ἱερεῖς, | which isn’t right to eat except by priests. |
| καὶ ἔδωκεν καὶ τοῖς σὺν αὐτῷ οὖσιν; | And he gave some to his people.”ε |
This one’s gonna be controversial, because this is about errors in the bible. Yeah, you read right. Errors in the bible.
Read that bit that Jesus relates to the Pharisees. Now, read the original story from 1 Samuel.
| 21.1ζויבא דוד נבה | David goes to Nov, |
|---|---|
| אל אחימלך הכהן | to Achimelekhη the priest. |
| ויחרד אחימלך לקראת דוד | Achimelekh feared to meet David. |
| לו מדוע אתה לבדך | He tells him, “For what reason are you alone, |
| ואיש אין אתך׃ | and no man with you?” |
| 21.2ויאמר דוד לאחימלך הכהן | David tells Achimelekh the priest, |
| המלך צוני דבר | “The king assigned me a task.θ |
| ויאמר אלי איש אל ידע מאומה | He tells me, ‘No other man knows anything |
| את הדבר אשר אנכי שלחך | about the word which I give you |
| ואשר צויתך | and which I command you.’ |
| ואת הנערים יודעתי | I will make it known to my servants |
| in a certain undisclosed place. | |
| 21.3ועתה מה יש תחת ידך | Now, what do you have in your hand? |
| חמשה לחם | Five loaves of bread. |
| תנה בידי או הנמצא׃ | Give them to me—or whatever you find.” |
| 21.4ויען הכהן את דוד ויאמר | The priest answers David and says, |
| אין לחם חל אל תחת ידי | “I have no secular bread in my hand, |
| כי אם לחם קדש יש | for there’s holy bread here. |
| אם נשמרו הנערים אך מאשה׃ | If the servants keep away from women…” |
| 21.5ויען דוד את הכהן ויאמר | David answers the priest and says, |
| לו כי אם אשה עצרה לנו | “Of course women are kept away from us, |
| כתמול שלשם בצאתי | just as I usually doι when I go out. |
| ויהיו כלי הנערים קדש | The men’s things are holy, |
| והוא דרך חל | even though the road is secular. |
| ואף כי היום יקדש בכלי׃ | For today is holy in its purpose.”κ |
| 21.6ויתן לו הכהן קדש | The priest gives him the holy bread, |
| כי לא היה שם לחם | for there is no bread there |
| כי אם לחם הפנים | except the bread of the Face— |
| המוסרים מלפני יהוה | that which had been removed from the Face of Yahweh |
| לשום לחם חם | to be replaced by warm bread |
| ביום הלקחו׃ | on the day it was removed. |
Obviously the version of the story Jesus tells the Pharisees differs from the story in the bible in a couple different ways.
Jesus refers to David “and those with him.” But David had no one with him. Ahimelech made a point of asking, “For what reason are you alone, and no one with you?” David made up some story about how Saul had sent him on a mission and he was gonna catch up with his servants later. And while it’s entirely possible that he had some friends he was staying with, the fact is that David is alone in the story before this, and alone in the story after this. There are no people with him. There are people with Jesus—His students—and so He retold the story so as to include companions with David. But in the original story we have, David has no companions.
Gleason Archer, in his Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, says that when Jesus refers to Abiathar the high priest, he doesn’t mean to say that Abiathar was high priest at this time. He compares it to saying, “Now, when King David was a shepherd boy…” even though David wasn’t a king yet when he was a shepherd. Good point; but Abiathar doesn’t figure into this particular story at all. His father Ahimelech does. If you’re gonna talk about King Saul, you’re not gonna describe him as living in the days of King David; you’re gonna refer to his own reign, and not mix your kings up, ’cause it’s kind of important to the story to keep straight which fellow was king at the time. Same with high priests.
Abiathar was likely serving at Nov with his father at this point in the story. It’s entirely possible that Abiathar was an assistant high priest, or a co-high priest at that time. You won’t find evidence for it in the bible, though.
Walter W. Wessel in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, points out that there appears to be a confusion between Ahimelech and Abiathar in the Old Testament—sometimes it reads “Ahimelech son of Abiathar” when “Abiathar son of Ahimelech” might be more appropriate (2Sa 8.17, for instance) which brings up the possibility that everyone including Jesus, was mixed up about this. M.R. Mulholland, in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, speculates this mixup might have become an entire tradition that resulted in Jesus thinking Abiathar was priest, not Ahimelech.
Finally, there’s the idea that because Mark literally wrote, “in Abiathar the high priest,” it suggests there’s a book of Abiathar that Jesus is referring to instead of the bible. That’s an idea… but ultimately an iffy one. We know of no such book.
Well, that does it for all the possible interpretations of Mark. So obviously we’re not dealing with a bad interpretation. Every interpretation leads us to the inevitable conclusion: Something’s wrong here.
Either Jesus read it from the wrong Old Testament, or got it from the wrong tradition; or Jesus read it from the right Old Testament and we got the wrong one; or Jesus simply mixed up His facts in retelling the story; or Mark mixed up his facts in retelling the story; or some monk-copyist royally botched things in making a copy of Mark and now all our copies of Mark are wrong. Which is it?
Um…
If you’re a biblical inerrantist—someone who believes, completely, that there are no errors in the bible, anywhere, maybe you’d better leave now. Go home and pull the covers over your head, and don’t ever, ever read Mark again. (’Cause this ain’t the only part of Mark that does this.)
Now, for the rest of us. Obviously—because of this and many other parts of the bible where there are clear discrepancies—I am not an inerrantist. Anyone with half a brain can tell mistakes were made. Everyone else is simply going through verbal or theological gymnastics in order to try to support a theory that has no evidence for it. The bible never claims for itself that it is error-free. It only claims to be reliable and faithful. And it definitely is. Any errors, such as we have here, are ridiculously minor and are hardly relevant to the more important truth that Jesus is teaching: Shabbat is meant to free us, not bind us. So there’s a mixup between priests and whether or not David has companions. So what?
If we have to pinpoint where the error is, let’s notice this: Whatever Jesus taught, the Pharisees accepted. Mark never says they objected to it. (Maybe they did, but we don’t see it here.) So whatever Jesus told them was, as far as they knew, an accurate depiction of the bible—because they could easily have objected, “You got the priest wrong,” or “David didn’t have anyone with him in that story.” As could any of Mark’s original hearers who knew their bibles. But they didn’t.
So this leads to three conclusions: (1) The Pharisees—and every subsequent hearer—didn’t care whether the story was exactly right in every detail. Or: (2) The Old Testament (or the version of this story that was popularly told) that Jesus and the early Christians knew of, got the story wrong. Or: (3) A later copier of Mark botched his copy. Your average inerrantist would probably go with #3. But the problem is that we have no historical evidence for #2 or #3. We only have evidence for #1. Heck, it’s in the bible: Compare 2 Samuel with 1 Chronicles. Compare Matthew with Luke. Compare Paul’s testimony in Acts 22 with his testimony in Acts 26. They aren’t going for detail-by-detail accuracy; they’re going with the general idea. Only moderns are so anal as to nitpick fine details and construct a whole belief-system about them.
Yeesh.
Okay, may as well expound upon this passage, since I’m here anyway.
David was on the run from Saul, who by this point was paranoid, schizophrenic, and had had enough of the young upstart. So, for no good reason, he decided to kill David, and David had gone into hiding. In 1 Samuel 20 he had asked Saul’s son Jonathan to sound out his father; after Saul called Jonathan an S.O.B. and tried to put a spear through him it was kinda obvious that Saul meant business.
This “bread of the Face,” also called showbread, consisted of twelve pieces of matzo, each baked from a fifth of an ephah of flour—about two-thirds of a cup per matzo. These were to be placed on a gold table every Shabbat, and displayed for a week, and then eaten “in a holy place” by the priests. (Lv 24.5-9) Jesus is correct in saying that only the priests were to eat it; it wasn’t appropriate at all for Abimelech to offer it to David. Abimelech obviously figured if David was on a holy mission from the king—which he wasn’t, though David certainly let him think so—then it would be okay for David to have it, just this once.
Jesus takes this act of Abimelech—an act which violates God’s directions about how holy bread is to be properly disposed of—and uses it to point out that if it was okay to feed David with the bread of the Face, what’s the big deal about a few students gleaning on Shabbat?
This is actually a Hebrew logical argument, called a kal v’chomér:
P is true.
Q is similar to P, but not as important.
If P is true, then Q is definitely true.
Jesus uses this argument a few different times. You might be familiar with, “So if you corrupted beings know how to give good gifts to your children, how much better your Father who is in heaven will give good things to those asking Him!” (Mt 7.11) Paul, and other writers of scripture, likes to use this form of logic too.
In Western logic, we call the kal v’chomér an a fortiori argument. Admittedly, it can be taken to absurd extremes (“If vitamins are good for you, fifty vitamins are great for you!”) but we leave it to the hearers to determine whether it’s reasonable, and Jesus likewise left it to the Pharisees to determine whether they thought the David-eating-holy-bread story applied to picking grain on Shabbat.
Which is a pretty reasonable application of the scriptures. If our easy act of good works or obedience compares with a much harder act of good works or obedience from the bible, then that’s all the more reason we should do the easy thing. The Pharisees recognized this, which is why their objections stopped. And—to use some of this very same logic on you—if the Pharisees could recognize the truth of this, then shouldn’t we?
α. Jesus.
β. The Pharisees.
γ. Abiathar.
δ. Lit. “the display bread,” which refers to the
ε. Lit. “he gave also to those being with him.”
ζ. I use the English verse numbers. The Hebrew version of 1 Samuel 21 actually starts with part of our 1 Samuel 20.42.
η. Ahimelech.
θ. Lit. “commands me a word.”
ι. Lit. “just as yesterday and three days ago.” An idiom meaning “as I usually do.”
κ. Or, “Surely today is made holy in [the men’s] things.”
