This was the last time she saw her husband for many years; and when the ru])ture between Saul and David had become open and incurable, ^lichal was married to another man, Phalti, or Phaltiel, of Gallim ( 1 Sam. xxv, 44 ; 2 Sam. iii, 15), a village apparently not far from Gib- eah. Her father probably did not believe her storj' concerning David's escape ; but he had taken advantage of it by cancelling her former marriage, David, how- ever, as the divorce had been without his consent, felt that the law (Deut. xxiv, 4) against a husband taking back a divorced wife could not apply in this case; he therefore formally reclaimed her of Ish-bosheth, who employed no less a personage than Abner to take her from Phaltiel, and conduct her with all honor to David, It was under cover of this mission that Abner sounded the elders of Israel respecting their acceptance of David for king, and conferred with David liimself on the same subject at Hebron {i Sam. iii, 12-21). As this demand was not made by David until Abner had contrived to intimate his design, it has been supposed by some that it was managed between them solely to afford Abner an ostensible errand in going to Hebron ; but it is more pleasant to suppose that, although the matter happened to be .so timed as to give a color to this suspicion, the demand really arose from David's revived affection for his first wife and earliest love. After the death of her father and brothers at (iilboa, ^lichal and her new hus- band appear to liave betaken themselves, with the rest of the family of Saul, to the eastern side of the Jordan. If the old Jewish tradition inserted by the Targum in 2 Sam. xxi may be followed, she was occupied in bring- ing up the sons of her sister Merab and Adriel of Mcho- lah. At any rate, it is on the road leading up from the Jordan valley to the IMount of Olives that we first en- counter her with her husband — ^lichal under the joint escort of David's messengers and Abner"s twenty men, en route to David at Hebron, the submissive Phaltiel behind, bewailing the wife thus torn from liim. It was at least fourteen years since David ami she had parted at (jlibeah, since she had watched biin disa|)i)ear down the cord into the darkness, and had iicrillcd her own life for his against the rage of her insane father. That Da- vid's love for his absent wife had undergone no change in the interval seems certain from the eagerness with which he reclaims her as soon as the opportunity is af- forded him. Important as it was to him to make an al- liance with Ishboshcth and the great tribe of Benjamin, and much as lie respected Al)iu>r, he will not listen for a moment to any overtures till his wife is restored. Every circumstance is fresh in his memory. "I will not see thy face except thou first bring Saul's daughter
. . . my wife Michal whom I espoused to mc for a hun- dred foreskins of the Philistines" (2 Sam. iii, 13, 14). The meeting took place at Hebron, B.C, cir, 1047. How Michal comported herself in the altered circum- stances of David's household, how she received or was received by Abigail and Ahinoam we are not told ; but it is (ilain from the subsequent occurrences that some- thing had happened to alter the relations of herself and David, They were no longer what they had been to each other. The alienation was probably mutual. On her side must have been the recollection of the long con- tests which had taken place m the intcn-al between her father and David; the strong anti-Saulite and anti- Benjamite feeling prevalent in the camp at Hebron, where every word she heard must have contained some distasteful allusion, and where at ever}' turn she must have encountered men like Abiathar the priest or Isma- iah the Gibeonite (1 Chron. xii, 4; comp. 2 Sam. xxi, 2), who had lost the whole or the greater part of their relatives in some sudden burst of her father's fury. Add to this the connection between her husband and the Philistines who had killed her father and brothers ; and, more than all perhaps, the inevitable difference between the boy-husband of^ her recollections and the matured and occupied warrior who now received her. The whole must have come upon her as a strong contrast to the affectionate husband whose tears had followed her along the road over Olivet, and to the home over which we cainiot doubt she ruled supreme. On the side of David it is natural to put her advanced years, in a cli- mate where women are old at thirty, and ]irobably a petulant and jealous temper inherited from lier father, one outburst of which certainly produced the rupture between them w hich closes our knowledge of ^lichal.
It was the day of David's greatest triumph, when he brought the Ark of Jehovah from its temporary resting- place to its home in the newly-acquired city. It was a triumph in every respect peculiarly his own. The procession consisted of priests, Levites, tlie captains of the host, the ciders of the nation ; and conspicuous in front, "in the midst of the damsels playing on the tim- brels" (comp. Psa. Ixviii, 2.i), was the king dancing and leaping. Michal watched this proecssii)n ajiproach from the window of her apartments in the royal harem ; the motions of her husband, clothed only in a thin linen ephod (1 Chron. xv, 27), shocked her as undignified and indecent — "she despised him in her heart." B.C. cir. 1043. It would have been well if her contempt had rested there; but it was not in her nature to conceal it, i and when, after the exertions of the long day were over — the last burnt-offering and the last peace-offering of- fered, the last portion distriliuted to the crowd of wor- shippers— the king entered his house to bless his fam- ily, he was received by bis wife, not with the congratu- lations which he had a right to expect, and which would have been so grateful to him, but with a bitter taunt, which showed liow incapable she was of appreciating either her husband's temjier or the service in which he had been engaged. David's retort was a tremendous one, conveyed in words which once s]ioken could never be recalled. It gathered up all the differences between them wliich made sympathy no longer possible, and we do not need the assurance of the sacred writer, that '"Mi- chal had no child unto the day of her death,'" to feel quite certain that all intercourse between her and David must have ceased from that date. Josejiluis (.1///. vii, 4,.^) intimates that she returned to Phaltiel. but of this there is no mention in the records of the Bible; and it would be difficidt to reconcile such a thing with the known ideas of the Jews as to women who had once shared the king's bed. SeeAinsuAo; Adom.iaii. The j fanciful Jewisli tradition, jireserved in tlie Targum on Ruth iii, 3, states tliat Phaltiel had from the first acted ! in accordance witli the i<lea alluded to in the text. He j is placed in the same rank with Joseph, and is com- I raemorated as " Phaltiel, son of Laish, the pious (X^'^Cn,