Abigail

By Lenny Cacchio

My friend Ramon Coleman gave a sermon recently about a woman named Abigail. You can read her story in I Samuel 25.

Abigail was the wife of a rich but foolish man named Nabal. More than foolish, Nabal was coarse and greedy, profane and selfish. He and Abigail lived in an area where the soon-to-be king David and his 600-man retinue were active, and those men, being honorable men, protected Nabal and his flocks from poachers and predators.

Nabal, crude as he was, returned the favor by delivering insults to David and his band. The verbal slugfest escalated into near warfare, with David vowing to kill Nabal and all his men.

Enter Abigail. She heard about the impending attack, and — with cool head, wise words, and big heart — she encountered David and his men on their way to attack and persuaded him to return to camp.

After the sermon my younger daughter asked me a question. “Why is it that we stereotype women as reacting with emotion?” A corollary question might be, “Why do we stereotype men as the ones who act on cool logic?”  Here is an example from Scripture of a woman acting with grace under pressure while the men were hurling insults at each other and going for their swords.  People might be surprised that this is what the Bible holds up as a good example of womanhood, but there it is right in the middle of the Old Testament.

Scripture confirms what we often see in life, that men’s egos and pride often lead to emotional reactions with potentially lethal results. Just as important, the Biblical view of the ideal woman might not be what you have been told it is.

Lenny Cacchio has a blog on the Bible Sabbath Association website. You can follow him at the following weblink: http://biblesabbath.org/index.php?pr=Lenny_Cacchio_Blog

This blog was originally posted on Sunday, March 6, 2016