8. Ask your servants and they will tell you! Let the young men find favor in your eyes because we have come on a feast day. Please give whatever you have on hand for your servants and for your son David.”
9. So David’s young men came and they spoke all these words to Nabal in the name of David. Then they waited.
10. But Nabal answered David’s servants and said, “Who is David? And who is the son of Jesse? Today, there are many servants breaking away from the presence of their masters.
11. Should I take my bread and my water and my meat which I have slaughtered for my shearers and give it to men whom I do not know where they are from?
12. So David’s young men turned on their way and returned and came and told him according to all these words.
13. Then David said to his men, “Each man strap on his sword!” So each one strapped on his sword, and David also strapped on his sword. About four hundred men went up after David, while two hundred remained with the baggage.
14. But a young man of the servants told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, saying, “Look, David sent messengers from the desert to greet our master, but he addressed them angrily,
15. even though the men were very good to us; we were not mistreated and did not miss anything all the days we went about with them while we were in the field.
16. They were a wall to us both night and day, all the days we were with them keeping the sheep.
17. And so then, know and consider what you should do, for evil has been decided against our master and against all his household, and he is such a wicked man, nobody can reason with him!”
18. Then Abigail quickly took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five prepared sheep, five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred raisin cakes, and two hundred fig cakes, and she put them on the donkeys.