Then said Achish to his servants, Look, you see the man is mad; why then have you brought him to me?
Now in the New Testament Jesus makes reference to this particular incident. When the Pharisees are trying to nail Him in some of the fine, technical aspects of the law, Jesus said, "Did not David take the shew bread, which was not lawful for a man to eat?" They were getting on Him because they felt He had violated the Sabbath, one of the fine points of the law of the Sabbath. The disciples had gone through the field on the Sabbath day and they took some wheat, corn of wheat. They called it the wheat, the tassel of wheat tares, they called it the corn actually. They took it and they were rubbing it in their hands.Now you can take the dry wheat from the stalk and you can rub it in your hands, and as you rub it in your hands it has the effect of sort of threshing it. What you're doing is rubbing off the hard, outside hull. Then you can hold it in your hands and blow on it and you can actually blow off the hulls, then you can eat the wheat raw. It's actually very good.One of the trips over in Israel we were there in the latter part of May when the wheat fields were about ready for harvest. Up in the area near Mount Gilboa where Saul and Jonathan were ultimately killed, which is up at one end of the Valley of Megiddo. It's about eight miles, ten miles south of the Sea of Galilee, Mount Gilboa there. There in that valley are some beautiful wheat fields. So we were there and I went out and I took some of this wheat. I rubbed it in my hands, and blew off the hulls and ate this wheat.Of course when we were kids we discovered out of the chicken feed, if we took the wheat out of the chicken feed, we were kids, it's soft enough that you can crunch it in your teeth and chew it. If you chew it long enough it turns into a gum. We used to always chew wheat gum when we were kids. We didn't have enough money to buy regular chewing gum. So we'd pick all the wheat out of the chicken feed and then we'd chew it and after awhile it turns into gum. Then we'd have our gum with wheat. So it's very nutritional, very healthy.So the disciples were with Jesus, they were hungry; it was the Sabbath Day. They were going through the wheat fields, and they began to pick the corn of wheat and rub it in their hands, and blow it off and began to eat it. So they said, "Oh, look at your disciples. They're doing that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day. You're not supposed to do any work." So that constituted work rubbing the wheat in your hands.So Jesus said, "Don't you remember what David did when he was hungry, how he went in and ate the shew bread which was not lawful for a man to eat?" So Jesus makes an illusion to this thing of David showing that human need rises above the law. Human hunger, these guys are hungry, forget this little work bit of rubbing the wheat in your hands, their hunger. The hunger supercedes the fine point of the law, even as with David, the guys are hungry. Yes, it's not lawful that they should eat this shewbread. Yes, it's supposed to be only there for the priest to eat but the guys are hungry. The human hunger supercedes the fine points of the law. The point that Jesus was making, and of course using this particular instance with David as the illustration of the point, which of course everybody accepted that David had done. In other words, there was no wrong doing here."So the priest gave him the hallowed bread," verse six, "for there was no bread except the shewbread, that was taken from before the Lord, and put hot bread in the day it was taken away."So they ate the bread that had been sitting there all week before the Lord when it was replaced by this new hot bread.