21 Then David came to Nob to Ahimelech the priest. Ahimelech came to meet David trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no man with you?” ² David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has commanded me to do something, and has said to me, ‘Let no one know anything about the business about which I send you, and what I have commanded you. I have sent the young men to a certain place.’ ³ Now therefore what is under your hand? Please give me five loaves of bread in my hand, or whatever is available.”

⁴ The priest answered David, and said, “I have no common bread, but there is holy bread; if only the young men have kept themselves from women.”

⁵ David answered the priest, and said to him, “Truly, women have been kept from us as usual these three days. When I came out, the vessels of the young men were holy, though it was only a common journey. How much more then today shall their vessels be holy?” ⁶ So the priest gave him holy bread; for there was no bread there but the show bread that was taken from before Yahweh, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away.

⁷ Now a certain man of the servants of Saul was there that day, detained before Yahweh; and his name was Doeg the Edomite, the best of the herdsmen who belonged to Saul. ⁸ David said to Ahimelech, “Isn’t there here under your hand spear or sword? For I haven’t brought my sword or my weapons with me, because the king’s business required haste.”

⁹ The priest said, “Behold, the sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the valley of Elah, is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod. If you would like to take that, take it; for there is no other except that here.”

David said, “There is none like that. Give it to me.”