I Shmuel 19: Dovid ben Yishai's Day Off

In the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris, played by Matthew Broderick, is a wise cracking high school kid. Ferris has a grand idea of playing hooky from school with his girlfriend and his best friend. First, though, he needs to convince his parents that he is sick. To do this, he builds an elaborate ruse. He rigs his door with a string. When someone opens the door to his room, the string activates a contraption that turns on a tape recording of him snoring. It also manipulates a mannequin that he placed in his bed. The person opening the door will think the person inside is snoring away. It tricks his mother, but later in the film (spoiler alert), his sister comes crashing into his room and pulls the strings revealing the mannequin under the bed. Perhaps John Hughes, the director of the film, got this idea from chapter 19. Shaul’s son Jonathan is infatuated with David, but so is his sister, Michal. David was originally slated to marry Shaul’s eldest daughter, but Shaul gives her away before David can actually marry her. Instead, Shaul sends his officers to encourage David to marry Michal, Shaul’s other daughter. Shaul thinks Michal will help spy on David, but instead, like her brother, she supports her husband. In a scene reminiscent of Rachav and the two spies in the book of Joshua, Shaul’s soldiers race to David and Michal’s house to kill David. Michal warns David and lowers him out the window. To trick the officers, she places the house terafim under the sheets with goatskin. Like Ferris’ mother, Shaul’s guards are tricked into thinking David is sick in the bed. What are these terafim? The word is usually translated as an idol. Rachel stole her father’s terafim back in Genesis. Metzudat Zion is troubled by the idea that David and Michal would have idols in their house. Instead, he explains that the word could be used as idol, but also that women would have statues of their husbands so they could think about them while they were away. These were not idols, but Michal’s David mannequins. Me’am Loez believes that these were certain devices that one used to read the constellations, something that was not considered idol worship. Radak also brings this answer but rejects it as such devices would not be in a human shape. A simple answer is that terafim is simply a term used to mean statue, not necessary one that is for idol worship. Whatever the terafim were, the ruse worked, and David was able to play hooky with his friends.