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.