When Keeping the Peace Means Keeping Quiet

Half past five in the morning.

The sky is just starting to go pale at the edges, and the coffee isn’t made yet. Soon the house will wake up, or the phone will, and the day will bring back the person who’s hardest to talk to. If there’s something you haven’t said for the sake of peace, it sits closest at this hour, near enough to the day that you can almost hear it.

There’s a kind of peace a lot of us learned young, usually at a kitchen table. You don’t bring it up. You don’t poke the person who’s in a mood. You change the subject and wait for it to blow over. If nobody’s yelling, that counts as peace, and the price of it is that you stay quiet.

One of the oldest stories about a peacemaker goes the other way. Its peacemaker loaded up donkeys and rode toward an army.

Her name was Abigail. She lived about three thousand years ago in the dry hill country south of Jerusalem, in a small town called Carmel (not the mountain in Elijah’s story), and she was married to a man named Nabal. He was rich: three thousand sheep, a thousand goats. She was intelligent and beautiful. He was harsh, and hard to deal with.

It was shearing season, when a sheep owner threw a feast for the workers.

Out in the wilderness nearby lived David. Later he’d be Israel’s most famous king. Now he was a young man on the run from the king he used to serve, living rough in the hills with about six hundred men. All season his men had camped near Nabal’s shepherds and kept them safe, like a wall around them, one shepherd said later.

So David sent ten young men to Nabal to ask for a share of the feast. Listen to the greeting he sent.

Long life to you, and peace to you and to your house and to all that belongs to you.

Peace, three times in one sentence.

Nabal’s answer was a question. Who is David? Why should I give my bread and meat to men from who knows where? To be fair to him, armed men in the hills asking a rich man for food could look a lot like a shakedown. But he didn’t wonder it quietly. One of his own workers said he screamed at them.

When David heard, his reply was short. Strap on your swords. Four hundred men started down the road, and David swore that not one male in Nabal’s household would be alive by morning.

Two angry men, and nobody standing between them.

One of Nabal’s young shepherds saw what was coming. He didn’t go to Nabal. He went to Abigail, and said the line that tells you what life in that house was like.

For he is such a scoundrel that nobody can speak to him!

Nobody can speak to him. Everybody knew it. Everybody worked around it. For years that house had kept the peace the usual way, by everyone staying quiet. And on this day, the quiet was about to get every man and boy on the place killed.

Abigail didn’t call a meeting. The story says she hurried. Two hundred loaves of bread. Two skins of wine. Five sheep, already butchered. Roasted grain, raisins, two hundred cakes of pressed figs. She loaded it all on donkeys, sent her servants on ahead, and rode behind them. And the story adds one small thing. She did not tell her husband.

She came down into a ravine, and there they were, coming the other way: David and four hundred men with their swords on.

She got off and went down on her face in the road. Then she talked. She took the blame onto herself, though she’d never even seen his messengers. She told David her husband’s name meant Fool and he lived up to it. Then came the bravest thing: she didn’t argue about the insult at all. She reminded David who he was going to be. Someday, she said, you’ll lead this whole people, and when that day comes, you won’t want this day on your conscience.

David stopped. He thanked God for sending her, and thanked her for her good sense. He took the bread out of her hands, and said this:

Go home in peace. See, I have heeded your voice and granted your request.

Look at where she heard that word. Not in a quiet room. On a road in a ravine, just up off her face, with four hundred armed men around her. And nothing at home had been settled. Nabal was still Nabal, and she still hadn’t told him. The same peace David had sent to that house earlier, and been screamed at for, came back down to her before a single thing there had changed.

When she got there, Nabal was throwing a feast fit for a king, in high spirits and very drunk. So she waited.

So she told him nothing until morning light.

David had said that without her, no male of Nabal’s would have been left alive by morning light. Because of her, there was a morning. When it came and Nabal was sober, she told him everything.

That’s the part a quick reader misses. She was quiet twice in this story, once before she rode out and once the night she got back. Both times her quiet had an end on it. It was waiting, not hiding. Morning came, and she said it.

The rest is told flatly. When Nabal heard what had happened, his heart failed him. About ten days later, the story says, God struck him dead. When David heard, he sent word asking Abigail to marry him, and she went. It isn’t told as revenge, and it isn’t told as a romance. This happened. Then this.

What this says about peace

The peacemaker, in most of our heads, is the one who keeps quiet and keeps things smooth. In this story, the quiet was the danger. Everyone in that house had kept the peace by not speaking, and it nearly cost them their lives.

The word peace went to the one person who spoke, while home was still the same house. Keeping the peace and making it turned out to be two different jobs. One stays still. The other packs bread and goes.

This morning

Go before it reaches you. Sometimes you can see two people headed for a collision today: two coworkers, two siblings, a partner and a client. Abigail hurried to the angrier one first. Go to the one you can reach, in person, with something in your hands. Coffee. The file they’ve been waiting on.

Remind them who they are. Somebody you love may be about to do the thing they’ll regret: send the email, quit in the parking lot. Abigail didn’t argue the insult. She reminded David of the person he’d be later. Say one sentence to them about who they are when they’re not this angry.

Pick the hour. Some things couldn’t be said last night, after the drinks, in the middle of the fight. She waited for morning light, and then she told him. If the hard conversation is still waiting, choose the hour for it today and write it down. Waiting with a time on it isn’t the same as staying quiet.