Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 20:19

"And when thou hast stayed three days, thou shalt go down quickly, and come to the place where thou didst hide thyself when the business was in hand, and shalt remain by the stone Ezel." — 1 Samuel 20:19 (ASV)

Go down quickly. —“Quickly” represents, but not faithfully, the Hebrew m’od. “Quickly” comes from the Vulgate, descende ergo festinus. The literal rendering of m’od is “greatly,” and probably Dean Payne Smith’s rendering, “and on the third day go a long way (greatly) down into the valley,” represents the meaning of the original, which has been a general stumbling block for the versions. The Chaldee, Arabic, and Syriac here interpret rather than translate, “on the third day you will be missed the more.” “It did not matter,” writes the Dean, “whether David went fast or slow, since he was to hide there for some time, but it was important that David should be far away, so that no prying eye might happen to catch sight of him.”

When the business was in hand. —The expression, b’yom hammaăseh, rendered in our version by “when the business was in hand,” is difficult to understand. Perhaps the best translation is that adopted by Gesenius, De Wette, and Maurer, who render it quite literally “on the day of the deed,” and understand by “deed” King Saul’s design of killing David (see 1 Samuel 19:2).

By the stone Ezel. —This stone, or cairn, or possibly ruin, is mentioned nowhere else. Some have supposed it to have been a road-stone, or stone guide-post. The following ingenious conjecture is put forward in the Speaker’s Commentary: “The Septuagint here, and again in 1 Samuel 20:41 (where the spot, but not the stone, is spoken of), read argab, or ergab, a word meaning a heap of stones. If this is the true reading, David’s hiding place was either a natural cavernous rock, which was called argab, or some ruin of an ancient building equally suited for a hiding place.” Ewald, slightly changing the text, understands the word as signifying “the lonely waste.”