Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 8 · January 8
Michal at the Window
“And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.”
A window, a woman at it, and a street below full of people who are not in the room with her.
Michal had been married to David, taken from him and given to another man, then taken back as a clause in a settlement no account records anyone consulting her about; the husband she was taken from followed her down the road weeping until Abner sent him home. The ark is coming into Jerusalem now, and David dances before the LORD with all his might, girded with a linen ephod, a priest's garment on a king, in the street. She despises him in her heart, and meets him at his own door with it: how glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants. The narrator calls her Saul's daughter here, not David's wife.
His answer is your verse, and one word in it has drifted since 1611. Vile now means wicked. The Hebrew word is about weight: to be made light, held cheap, counted for little, and David glosses it in the next clause: and will be base in mine own sight. He is promising to go on lowering himself. Translations reach for undignified, or contemptible. He intends to be less impressive than that, in front of exactly the people she named.
The modern version of this is common: somebody becomes visibly glad about God and somebody else in the house has a speech ready for when the door shuts. Keep the difference in view. What Michal throws is a Saul's-daughter sentence about how kings should look, and the history behind your own window will not be hers.
Then the chapter stops. Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death. It supplies no cause, and the discipline is refusing to supply one. David is right about the dancing; the narrator never takes her side. The chapter still closes on a house, and the last thing recorded of the woman who once lowered him out of a window to save his life is that she never speaks again. Being right at the door is one achievement. Living in the house afterwards is another, and Scripture prints the bill.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 8 is What Manner (1 John 3:1).