It happened in the morning, when the wine was gone out of Nabal, that his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him, and he became as a stone.
Abigail wisely waited until morning before telling her husband what a close brush he had had with death. By then the wine had gone out of him. The writer made a clever play on words here. The Hebrew word for wineskin is nebel. It is as though he was suggesting that Nabal was a nebel. When the wine had gone out of him, he was nothing. The writer may even have been suggesting that all there was to Nabal was his bladder, his personal wineskin. David had earlier vowed, literally, that he would not leave anyone who urinated against the wall (i.e., any male) in Nabal’s household alive (1 Samuel 25:22). The writer pictured Nabal in the most uncomplimentary terms.