Was Abiathar or Ahimelech high priest when David ate the shewbread?

Difficult Passages · Who, Where, and Which

Was Abiathar or Ahimelech high priest when David ate the shewbread?

Ahimelech gave the bread; it was “in the days of Abiathar,” who was there and became the high priest.

The Passages

Mark 2:25-26

25 And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? 26 How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him?

1 Samuel 21:1-6

1 Then came David to Nob to Ahimelech the priest: and Ahimelech was afraid at the meeting of David, and said unto him, Why art thou alone, and no man with thee? 2 And David said unto Ahimelech the priest, The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such a place. 3 Now therefore what is under thine hand? give me five loaves of bread in mine hand, or what there is present. 4 And the priest answered David, and said, There is no common bread under mine hand, but there is hallowed bread; if the young men have kept themselves at least from women. 5 And David answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out, and the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in a manner common, yea, though it were sanctified this day in the vessel. 6 So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was no bread there but the shewbread, that was taken from before the LORD, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away.

The Difficulty

Jesus says David “went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread” (Mark 2:26). But 1 Samuel 21 says David came “to Nob to Ahimelech the priest,” and Abiathar was Ahimelech’s son (1 Samuel 22:20). Critics say Mark named the wrong priest.

The Answer

The Lord didn’t say Abiathar gave David the bread, or that he was then high priest; He said it was in his days, epi Abiathar tou archiereōs. Abiathar was at Nob; he alone escaped when Saul slew the priests, fled to David with the ephod, and was David’s high priest throughout his reign (1 Samuel 22:20–23; 23:6). It was the beginning of his days, and the title is the one he bore in history, as “Matthew the publican” (Matthew 10:3) is called by what he had been, or as one speaks of what happened “in the days of” a famous man before he took office.

Gill adds that the son of a high priest acting as his father’s deputy was himself called high priest, and that the names Ahimelech and Abiathar alternate in this family: “Ahimelech the son of Abiathar” is priest under David (2 Samuel 8:17; 1 Chronicles 18:16), so both father and son seem to have borne both names. Either way, he concludes, Mark speaks “without incurring the charge of falsehood.”

Sources

John Gill, An Exposition of the New Testament, vol. 1 (1746–48), p. 352, on Mark 2:26

The evangelist does not say that Abiathar was high-priest, when David came and eat the shew-bread; he only says, “it was in the days of Abiathar the high-priest”: for certain it is, that this happened in his days.

Checked against: Internet Archive scan of the first edition, 2026-10-23
John W. Haley, An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (1874), p. 320

Since Abiathar was, from his long association with king David, much more famous than his father, his name, although he was not as yet high-priest, may be used here by a kind of historical anticipation.

Checked against: Internet Archive scan of the 1874 edition, 2026-10-19