But when Michal was received into the royal home, then at Hebron, she was not the affectionate companion of David’s youth. And, doubtless, he was no longer to her what he was before she had bestowed her love upon another. They were no longer what they had been to each other. The alienation was probably mutual. On her side must have been the recollection of the long contest which had taken place in the interval between her father and David; the strong feeling in the palace at Hebron against the house of Saul, where every word she heard must have contained some distasteful allusion, and where at every turn she must have encountered men like Abiather the priest, or Ismaiah the Gibeonite, who had lost the whole or the greater part of their relatives in some sudden burst of her father’s fury. And more than all, perhaps, the inevitable difference between the husband of her recollections and the matured and occupied warrior who now received her. The whole must have come upon her as a strong contrast to the affectionate Phaltiel, whose tears had followed her along the road over Olivet until commanded to return home. It also seems she did not enter into David’s religious sympathies. When he brought the Ark of Jehovah into Jerusalem, after the seat of government was transferred from Hebron to that city, Michal watched the procession approach from the window of the royal palace, and when she saw David in the triumphal march, “she despised him in her heart.” It would have been well if her contempt had rested there; but it was not in her nature to conceal it, and when the last burnt offering had been made, and the king entered his house to bless his family, he was received by his wife not with the congratulations which he had a right to expect and which would have been so grateful to him, but with a bitter taunt which showed how incapable she was of appreciating either her husband’s devotions, or the importance of the service in which he had been engaged. David’s answer showed that they were as wide apart religiously as he and her father had been politically. He said, “It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people.” This reproof gathered up all the differences between them which made sympathy no longer possible.