Women in white raiment

by John Lemley

We next come to Michal. As Abigail had saved the life of Nabal, so Michal had saved the life of David. She was the younger of the two daughters of Saul, the first king in Israel. David had been very successful in the slaughter of the Philistines, and on his return the women came out singing songs of welcome, in which they chanted, “Saul hath slain thousands, and David ten thousands.” Saul was highly displeased with this popular welcome to David and said, “What can he have more but the kingdom?”

But, with a view of exposing the life of David, Saul promised his elder daughter, Merab, in marriage, if he would fight his battles. However, in this Saul had missed his calculations, for the Philistines were not able to take the life of David. So, no doubt, in order that he might have one more opportunity of exposing David to the dangers of war, he gave Merab to Adriel, the Mehoathite, to wife. It was a treachery such as Saul frequently practiced upon David. So he offered Michal, the second daughter, in marriage, fixing the price for her hand at no less than the slaughter of a hundred Philistines. David, by a brilliant feat, doubled the tale of his victims, and Michal became his wife.

Michal was not averse to the good luck of David, for she had so appreciated him that she had fallen violently in love with the young hero. It was not long, however, before the strength of her affections was put to the proof. After one of Saul’s attacks of frenzy, in which David had barely escaped being transfixed by the king’s spear, Michal learned that the house was being watched by Saul’s soldiers, and that it was intended on the next morning to attack her husband as he left his door. Michal seemed to have known too well the vacillating and ferocious disposition of her father when in these demoniacal moods, so, like a true soldier’s wife, she met stratagem by stratagem. She first provided for David’s safety by lowering him out of the window by means of a rope. To gain time for him to reach the residence of Samuel at Ramah, she dressed up the bed as if still occupied by him, by placing a teraphim in it, its head enveloped, like that of a sleeper, in the usual net used for protection from gnats—a sore pest in Palestine.

It happened as Michal feared. Her father sent officers to take David. Michal made answer that her husband was ill and could not be disturbed. At last Saul would not be longer put off, and ordered his messengers to force their way into David’s apartment, when they discovered the deception which had been played so successfully, Saul’s rage knew no bounds, and his fury was such that Michal was obliged to resort to another deception by pretending that David attempted to kill her.

When Michal let David down by a rope through a window on that memorable night in which she saved his life, it was the last time she saw her husband for many years. When the rupture between Saul and David became open, Saul gave Michal in marriage to Phaltiel, of Gallim, a village not far from the royal residence at Gibeah.

After the death of Saul, Michal and her new husband moved with the royal family to the east of Jordan.

It was at least fourteen years since she had watched David’s disappearance down the rope into the darkness of the night and had imperilled her own life to save his. During all these years, it would seem, his love for his absent wife had undergone no change, for he was eager to reclaim her when the first opportunity presented itself. That opportunity came when Abner revolted from Ishbosheth. Important as it was to him to make an alliance with the court of Ishbosheth, established at Mahanaim, and much as he respected Abner, he would not listen for a moment to any overtures till his wife was restored. And David sent messengers to Ishbosheth saying, “Deliver me my wife Michal.” There seemed to be no alternative, and Michal was taken from Phaltiel. That she had equally won the love of Phaltiel is manifest from the sad scene when she was taken from him, and now under the joint escort of David’s messengers and Abner’s twenty men, en route from Mahanaim to Hebron, he followed behind, bewailing the wife thus torn from him, and would not turn back until commanded to do so by Abner.

But when Michal was received into the royal home, then at Hebron, she was not the affectionate companion of David’s youth. And, doubtless, he was no longer to her what he was before she had bestowed her love upon another. They were no longer what they had been to each other. The alienation was probably mutual. On her side must have been the recollection of the long contest which had taken place in the interval between her father and David; the strong feeling in the palace at Hebron against the house of Saul, where every word she heard must have contained some distasteful allusion, and where at every turn she must have encountered men like Abiather the priest, or Ismaiah the Gibeonite, who had lost the whole or the greater part of their relatives in some sudden burst of her father’s fury. And more than all, perhaps, the inevitable difference between the husband of her recollections and the matured and occupied warrior who now received her. The whole must have come upon her as a strong contrast to the affectionate Phaltiel, whose tears had followed her along the road over Olivet until commanded to return home.

It also seems she did not enter into David’s religious sympathies. When he brought the Ark of Jehovah into Jerusalem, after the seat of government was transferred from Hebron to that city, Michal watched the procession approach from the window of the royal palace, and when she saw David in the triumphal march, “she despised him in her heart.” It would have been well if her contempt had rested there; but it was not in her nature to conceal it, and when the last burnt offering had been made, and the king entered his house to bless his family, he was received by his wife not with the congratulations which he had a right to expect and which would have been so grateful to him, but with a bitter taunt which showed how incapable she was of appreciating either her husband’s devotions, or the importance of the service in which he had been engaged. David’s answer showed that they were as wide apart religiously as he and her father had been politically. He said, “It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people.” This reproof gathered up all the differences between them which made sympathy no longer possible.

We must think of Michal what she was to David in her youth, and what she might have been had she not been given to another, perhaps against her own will. Thus David lost her womanly affection, which he so much needed, and Michal lost his brave, heroic but devout spirit, which would greatly have helped her to a correct knowledge of God, for, from the fact that she had a teraphim in her house, would indicate she was not wholly free from idolatry, and this doubtless accounts for her lack of sympathy with David in his religious nature, for his devotions to God were unquestioned. Her surroundings from childhood were bad every way, and her want of religious sympathy was not so much the want of faith as the lack of opportunity to know God. We give her a place here for what she was in her youth, in saving the life of David, and what she would have been could she have grown up under the religious influences of David.