Psalm 52 is placed in a historical setting by the superscription written above it. The maskil (meaning instructive psalm) is of David, “when Doeg the Edomite had gone to Saul and told him: “David has gone to the house of Ahimelech.”

I don’t want to be accused of intimating that we, in this BAPTIST church, are biblically challenged. Nor that we aren’t on the best of terms with Doeg the Edomite, or Ahimelech the priest, or that our memory of David’s travel to Nob is shaky. But just in case we have some non-Baptists in the house… let me remind you of the details in this story.

David is disgustingly talented. He is one of those people we average people love to hate. He is good looking, strong, faithful, great with a sling shot, able to kill the bear, not to mention slay the ladies. He threatens those in a room who want to be the center of it. Saul, the present king, is initially taken with David. His faith and courage were unmatched, and he could play the harp in a way that soothed Saul’s soul. But as David’s shadow begins to outgrow his own, Saul’s love mixed with envy morphs into hate. David, once a bright and beautiful prodigy, has become a threatening reminder that his days are numbered. David becomes a youthful indictment of his aged and disobedient state. David’s presence echoes with the painful realization: before comprise, before expediency eroded all devotion, this is what you were.

In 1 Samuel 20 we read about David’s extraordinary friendship with Jonathan. Jonathan was the son of Saul, who should have been threatened by David, but he loved him. In fact he loved him so much, he told him to run from his father, to escape the wrath of the king who was ready to kill anyone who threatened his legacy. Saul thought his legacy was threatened by the acts of others, but his legacy had been lynched by his own impatient power-hungry self. How sad that we spend so much time worrying about how others see us, how others treat us, what is beyond our power to control… when our real legacy is built or destroyed by what we do.

But I digress. David, so warned by Jonathan about his dad’s evil intentions, travels to Nob. There he meets up with a priest. His name is Ahimelech. Ahimelech was concerned that David was traveling alone. He didn’t understand how such a famed person could be traveling without an entourage. He assumed that David would only travel with soldiers and protective infantry. He didn’t know that David was running from the king. He had no idea that David was alone and hungry – the anointed of God, a scared fugitive seeking a meal, looking for a sword.

David asks for bread. Ahimelech gives him the bread which was consecrated for worship. It’s all he had. David asks for a sword. Ahimelech tells David that they only have one sword. It happens to be the sword of Goliath, wrapped up like a relic, kept there as a reminder of the power of faith.

David takes the sword. It’s a symbol of how our faithful past will sometimes catch up with us in good ways. The old preachers used to say: “your sin will find you out!” And that is true enough. It is also true that your good deeds will sometimes pay you forward. If David hadn’t killed that evil giant, there would have been no sword of Nob. Sometimes the things God gives us to do today may not make sense until we reap the result tomorrow.

But I digress. David is seen getting supplies from the priest by Doeg. Doeg is from neighboring Edom. He is Saul’s head shepherd, the leader of the Sanhedrin and Saul’s closest adviser. As head of the Sanhedrin he would have known the Torah backwards and forwards. But knowing the law and doing the law, as we all know, are two different things. In chapter 22 of 1 Samuel we read that Saul is ranting and raving about his young nemesis and Doeg speaks up. You can’t imagine a man with a name like Doeg being a nice man. In fact his name literally means the worrier, indicating a serious defect in his character. He sounds like he would have looked like the child of Phyllis Diller and Marty Feldman on steroids. You can’t be well-adjusted and grow up as Doeg the Edomite. As it turns out he is an early proto-type of those Jesus called white-washed tombs – righteously clean on the outside, full of dead men’s bones on the inside.

Doeg the worrier, is worried that David is a threat to Saul and so a threat to himself, and he says to Saul: “oh Saul, guess who I saw feeding and arming David? That sorry old priest Ahimelech.” See where worrying will get you! Not only does Doeg have the worst name in history, he’s a nark. And there’s not much worse than a nark who tells on an innocent man. So, as the story goes, Saul does what Doeg had to know he would do. Saul calls for the priest and confronts him for his kindness to David. He calls him a traitor. He accuses him of aiding and abetting the enemy. Poor Ahimelech… he had no clue. He had no idea that David, Saul’s son-in-law, his captain bodyguard, this respected and beloved patriot had suddenly lost favor with the king. He didn’t know!

By this point Saul has lost all perspective. Everything is gone, all is meaningless, save killing David. And so he does the unthinkable. He tells his guards to kill the priest. And not only Ahimelech, but all the priests with him. 85 men of the cloth. Just kill them! Now I know that today you don’t have any superstitious ideas about us clergy folk, but this is 3,000 years ago, when the priests were God’s reps – this is an unthinkable command, much less doable!

And guess what? The king’s officials didn’t do it. They refused. They wouldn’t raise a hand to strike the priests of the LORD. They weren’t about to do something so revolting and soul-destroying as killing one of God’s anointed. They were saved by the faith of the faithful, who knew better. Theses officials could see that Ahimelech was just doing what any sensible person would have done. And undoubtedly they could see that Saul had lost is moral compass. It reminds me of those times in history when an army refuses to shoot on a revolutionary crowd… knowing they are right and that their leaders are wrong. It reminds me of whistle-blowers and truth-tellers who stand up for what is right, knowing there is more at stake than their careers or even their lives.

But I digress. And so the officials refuse, and the story ends happily ever-after… well expect for this next part. We’ve been worried about Doeg the worrier and for good reason. When Saul can’t get his officials to do the dirty work, he ordered Doeg to do it. Doeg, besides having the ugliest name in all of history, and being a Nark, is bent on destroying David. Any decent person would have warned the priest that David was now the king’s enemy. Any decent person would not have narked on an innocent man. But he wasn’t decent. He had worried himself into thinking that he had to sell his soul to the god of power. Don’t think that Jesus says “do not worry about tomorrow,” for naught. Worry can lead you right into the abyss of obsessive self-protection.

And so when asked to kill 85 priests by the god of power, the king, he does the deed. He kills all 85 priests. And in good OT fashion: “he also put to the sword ... women, children, infants, cattle, donkeys, and sheep.” Slaughters them all, the whole town of Nob, wiped out by Doeg.

And David, in Psalm 52, asks: “Why do you boast?... (implied) Doeg…”

Huh? … “Umm, excuse me, but David, he’s the one standing with the bloody sword. He’s won the battle, tossed the heads in the pile, he’s done the king’s bidding, he’s got you on the run… why wouldn’t he boast?!”

On the evening of September 11, 2001, I walked around the corner from our Paris apartment and walked into our bakery where I almost daily bought bread from North Africans immigrants… Muslim by culture, and they were laughing, having a good time. And I was revolted. How could anyone smile on this day?

A few years later, I saw the images of the smiling American torturers of Abu Ghriab prison, and I was revolted. How could anyone smile doing that to a human being?

Why do you boast of evil, you mighty man?
Why do you boast all day long,
you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God?
2 Your tongue plots destruction;
it is like a sharpened razor,
you who practice deceit.

3 You love evil rather than good,
falsehood rather than speaking the truth.
Selah

4 You love every harmful word,
O you deceitful tongue!

5 Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin:
He will snatch you up and tear you from your tent;
he will uproot you from the land of the living.
Selah

Do you think David is angry at the man who killed his helpful priest? He is passionately angry and he has a reason to be. But it isn’t empty anger; this isn’t a poem of pointless passion. The Psalm points to a fundamental difference here, and it’s not reducible to political parties or power games. There is a moral difference. Doeg trusted his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others.

6 The righteous will see and fear;
they will laugh at him, saying,

7 "Here now is the man
who did not make God his stronghold
but trusted in his great wealth
and grew strong by destroying others!"

David, knows he also is a sinner. But he knows that his life is qualitatively different from the wicked. He knows that while he is a man who will fail, his commitments keep bringing him back:

But I am like an olive tree
flourishing in the house of God;
I trust in God's unfailing love
for ever and ever.

9 I will praise you forever for what you have done;
in your name I will hope, for your name is good.
I will praise you in the presence of your saints.


The rabbinic tradition says that the olive tree has a unique fruit, which is a picture of our lives. The untreated fruit is bitter to the taste, but when crushed it produces the most beautiful, life sustaining and light providing oil. Paul says that we are crushed but not destroyed… by our afflictions. David claims that that while the wind may blow the leaves, his roots are deep.

This last week I was amused at all the press about who might reveal the end of the end of Harry Potters end, before the book was officially released. If you’ve not read it yet, don’t worry, neither have I; which means we’re both not real fans. If we were real fans (and some of you are, I know) then you already know the end of the story. You stayed up Friday getting to the end of the story.

We want to know how things turn out. Narratives, stories, only make sense after we know the ending. David asks about boasting, because while he hasn’t read the ending, he knows who is writing it. The One who writes the story, is still writing.

The Hebrew cannon does not tell us, with clarity, the end of Doeg’s story. There are three options in the rabbinic tradition. One is that Doeg is actually the Amalekite David has killed in 2 Samuel 1 (Pesika). The other is that Doeg is killed by a group of his students who realize that more and more he is distorting the Torah for his own ends (Yalkut Shimoni). And so they wrap a rope around his feet and drag him to death. And the Talmud states that three angels of destruction accosted him. One caused him to forget his learning, the other burned his soul, and the other scattered his ashes.

All of these are story-book, Hollywood-like, endings. The bad guy gets it, and really bad. But maybe, just maybe, the reason the cannon itself is silent is because our focus ought to be on Doeg’s real ending, which started when he began to trust his political scheming over God’s unfailing love. However his body died, his soul was already dead. It began the day he didn’t warn the priest. It ended the day he killed women and children. David wonders at the boasting of one whose ending was already determined. And he rejoiced that his ending was only the beginning.

And so now we all know more about Doeg, Ahimelech, and Nob. I guess I could have saved us all the trouble, and just asked this: “do you boast in yourself or do you rejoice in God?” The answer tells your story.