Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 30:7

"And David said to Abiathar the priest, the son of Ahimelech, I pray thee, bring me hither the ephod. And Abiathar brought thither the ephod to David." — 1 Samuel 30:7 (ASV)

Abiathar. —Abiathar had doubtless been with David, and he had joined him at Keilah. Through all his wanderings, however, we hear nothing of prayer and of consultation of the Urim. Regarding the unfortunate Philistine sojourn, David seems to have determined upon that step entirely on his own; distrustful and despairing, he had fled the country and taken refuge with the enemies of his people. An unbroken series of sin and calamity was the result of his fatal error.

And Abiathar brought there the ephod. —Modern commentators, as a rule, prefer to disbelieve in any response coming through the medium of the Urim in the ephod. They either pass over the whole transaction in silence or assume that some divine inspiration came to the high priest when vested with the sacred garment. The plain meaning, however, of the frequent references tells us that in some way or other the divine will was made known through the agency of the mysterious Urim and Thummim. See, for instance, in the case of Saul, where it is definitely stated that the Lord did not answer him by Urim (1 Samuel 28:6), where this peculiar divine response is carefully distinguished from the manifestation of the will of God in a dream or a vision, or through the divine agency of the prophet or seer.

The ancient Hebrews had no hesitation in attributing to the sacred precious stones an occasional special power of declaring the oracles of God. The Talmudic traditions are clear and decisive here.

Now, while not giving implicit credence to these most ancient Hebrew traditions—many of them fanciful and wild, many written in a cryptograph or secret cipher to which Christians in most cases do not possess the key—it still seems highly arbitrary to reject the ancient traditional belief of the Hebrew people, contained in the Talmud, regarding this most mysterious ephod and its sacred gems, and to adopt another interpretation which fits very poorly with the plain text. The whole question regarding the traditions of the Urim and Thummim is discussed at some length in the short Excursus M on the Urim, at the end of this Commentary on the First Book of Samuel.