1 Samuel 25 Bible study: As his name is, so is he

The chapter opens with two words in Hebrew: "Samuel died" (25:1). "All Israel gathered themselves together and mourned for him, and buried him at his house at Ramah" (25:1). The book will say it again before Saul's last battle: "Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had mourned for him and buried him in Ramah, even in his own city" (28:3). Samuel had mourned for Saul (15:35), until the LORD asked him, "How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel?" (16:1), and sent him to anoint David (16:13). Now the man who anointed David is gone, and in the same verse, "David arose and went down to the wilderness of Paran" (25:1). Samuel's death comes in the middle of David's flight from Saul, between the cave where he spared Saul (24:3-7) and the night he spares him again (26:7-12).

1 Samuel 25:11→leads toLuke 12:20

Nabal "was very great", with "three thousand sheep and a thousand goats" (25:2), and he answered David's men, "Shall I then take my bread, my water, and my meat that I have killed for my shearers, and give it to men who I don’t know where they come from?" (25:11). When Abigail came home, "he held a feast in his house like the feast of a king" (25:36), and "About ten days later, the LORD struck Nabal, so that he died" (25:38). Jesus told of a rich man who said, "I will pull down my barns, build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods" (Luke 12:18). "But God said to him, ‘You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared—whose will they be?’" (Luke 12:20). No New Testament passage cites 1 Samuel 25, so setting the two side by side is a reading. Some see a likeness in what happens: in both, a rich man speaks of his goods as his own, and then God takes his life (25:11, 25:38; Luke 12:18-20). Others read each in its own setting: Jesus told the parable after warning against covetousness (Luke 12:15), while 1 Samuel 25 names Nabal's wrong as the way he answered David: "he insulted them" (25:14), and "He has returned me evil for good" (25:21). Luke is written in Greek, so nothing here rests on Nabal's name (25:25) or on the English word "foolish".

נְבָלָהnevalahsay ne-va-LAH

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "senselessness (as shewn in disregard of moral and religious claims), esp. of disgraceful sins". Strong's: "foolishness, i.e. (morally) wickedness". Abigail says of her husband, "for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him" (25:25). In Hebrew the name Nabal (נָבָל) and nevalah (נְבָלָה) share the same three letters, and Strong's gives nevalah as the feminine of the word nabal, which Brown-Driver-Briggs defines "foolish, senseless". Isaiah puts the two words side by side: "For the fool will speak folly" (Isaiah 32:6), in Hebrew nabal nevalah. This is the word's only use in 1 Samuel. In Judges it is the old man's word at Gibeah, "don’t do this folly" (Judges 19:23), and in Genesis, "he had done folly in Israel" (Genesis 34:7).