1 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 the Lord, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away.