“And Saul sent messengers unto David's house, to watch him, and to slay him in the morning; and Michal, David's wife told him, saying: If you save not your life tonight, tomorrow you shall be slain.”
King Saul wanted his (perceived) nemesis and son-in-law, David, dead. Here we will look at Michal’s (Saul’s daughter and David’s wife) defiance. In open opposition to her father, Michal planned and executed her husband’s getaway. First, she warned David about the dangers of tarrying at home, stating that any delay would cost him his life. That is because King Saul stationed troops next to the couple’s front door, waiting for early dawn to detain David – and summarily killed.
Wasting no time, she improvised an escape hatch. “So Michal let David down through the
window; and he went, and fled, and escaped.” She improvised a second time. “And Michal took
the teraphim, and laid it in the bed, and put a quilt of goats' hair at the head thereof, and
covered it with a cloth.”
What are teraphim, Abravanel asks? He answers that there are three distinct kinds, as we will discuss. One type, early Bible commentators put forth, corresponds to figurines used by Laban, Jacob’s father-in-law. These dolls were used in pagan worship. We rule this out here because it lacks logic that David would allow Michal to indulge in such voodoo under his roof. Other writers suggest that teraphim acted as a magic ball, per se. Teraphim allowed a practitioner to decipher Zodiac forecasts etc. That, too, doesn’t make sense here in Samuel 19 for the same rationale stated above.
For Abravanel, a third possibility is the most likely. We’re speaking about a mannequin. Michal would have made and kept one in her house, bearing a likeness to her husband. Commonly, Abravanel teaches, married women would sew figurines of their husbands. Insofar as a wife loved and longed for her spouse, it would be a source of comfort to look upon it. In our chapter, that last possibility fits best. Seeing that there was no transgression in having one, and that it was readily at hand, Michal needed only dress it up for showtime when King Saul’s police banged on the front door with a ‘warrant’ for David’s arrest.