1 Samuele 20:19

Scendi velocemente. — “Presto” rappresenta, ma non fedelmente, il m'od ebraico . “Velocemente” deriva dalla vulg., scende ergo festinus. La resa letterale di m'od è "molto", e probabilmente la resa di Dean Payne Smith, "e il terzo giorno scendi molto (molto) giù nella valle", rappresenta il significato dell'originale, che è stato un generale ostacolo con le versioni.

The Chaldee, Arabic, and Syriac here interpret rather than translate, “on the third day thou will be missed the more.” “It did not matter,” writes the Dean, “whether David went fast or slow, as he was to hide there some time, but it was important that David should be far away, so that no prying eye might chance to catch sight of him.”

When the business was in hand. — The expression, b’yom hammaăseh, rendered in our version by “when the business was in hand,” is one hard to understand. Perhaps the best translation is that adopted by Gesenius, De Wette, and Maurer, who render it quite literally “on the day of the deed,” and understand by “deed” King Saul’s design of killing David (see 1 Samuele 19:2).

By the stone Ezel. — This stone, or cairn, or possibly ruin, is mentioned nowhere else. Some have supposed it to have been a road-stone, or stone guide-post. The following ingenious conjecture is hazarded in the Speaker’s Commentary: — “The LXX. here, and again in 1 Samuele 20:41 (where the spot, but not the stone, is spoken of), read argab, or ergab, a word meaning a heap of stones.

If this is the true reading, David’s hiding place was either a natural cavernous rock, which was called argab, or some ruin of an ancient building equally suited for a hiding place.” Ewald, slightly changing the text, understands the word as signifying “the lonely waste.”