Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament · 1 Samuel Capitolo 30

David surprised them in the midst of their security, and smote them from the evening twilight till the evening of the next day, so that no one escaped, with the exception of four hundred young men, who fled upon camels. Nesheph signifies the evening twilight here, not the dawn, - a meaning which is not even sustained by Job 7:4. The form מחרתם appears to be an adverbial formation, like יומם .

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1 Samuel 30:20 is obscure: “ And David took all the sheep and the oxen: they drove them before those cattle, and said, This is David's booty.” In order to obtain any meaning whatever from this literal rendering of the words, we must understand by the sheep and oxen those which belonged to the Amalekites, and the flocks taken from them as booty; and by “ those cattle,” the cattle belonging to David and his men, which the Amalekites had driven away, and the Israelites had now recovered from them: so that David had the sheep and oxen which he had taken from the Amalekites as booty driven in front of the rest of the cattle which the Israelites had recovered; whereupon the drovers exclaimed, “ This (the sheep and oxen) is David's booty.” It is true that there is nothing said in what goes before about any booty that David had taken from the Amalekites, in addition to what they had taken from the Israelites; but the fact that David had really taken such booty is perfectly obvious from 1 Samuel 30:26-31, where he is said to have sent portions of the booty of the enemies of Jehovah to different places in the land. If this explanation be not accepted, there is no other course open than to follow the Vulgate, alter לפני into לפניו , and render the middle clause thus: “ they drove those cattle (viz., the sheep and oxen already mentioned) before him,” as Luther has done. But even in that case we could hardly understand anything else by the sheep and oxen than the cattle belonging to the Amalekites, and taken from them as booty.

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