When Saul wanted him dead, David ran to the one man he trusted. “David fled, and escaped, and came to Samuel to Ramah,” and the two of them went to live in Naioth (1 Samuel 19:18). The name belongs to a spot in Ramah and turns up only in this short stretch of David’s flight. Saul was told where they were, and in the end David left Naioth to find Jonathan and ask what he had done to deserve this. First Samuel 19 and 20 tell it in order.
4 verses
So David fled, and escaped, and came to Samuel to Ramah, and told him all that Saul had done to him. And he and Samuel went and dwelt in Naioth.
And it was told Saul, saying, Behold, David is at Naioth in Ramah.
Then went he also to Ramah, and came to a great well that is in Sechu: and he asked and said, Where are Samuel and David? And one said, Behold, they be at Naioth in Ramah.
And David fled from Naioth in Ramah, and came and said before Jonathan, What have I done? what is mine iniquity? and what is my sin before thy father, that he seeketh my life?
Matthew George Easton, 1897
Dwellings, the name given to the prophetical college established by Samuel near Ramah. It consisted of a cluster of separate dwellings, and hence its name. David took refuge here when he fled from Saul (1 Sam. 19:18, 19, 22, 23), and here he passed a few weeks in peace (comp. Ps. 11). It was probably the common residence of the “sons of the prophets.”
William Smith, 1884
(habitations), or more fully, "Naioth in Ramah," a place of Mount Ephraim, the birthplace of Samuel and Saul, and in which Samuel and David took refuge together after the latter had made his escape from the jealous fury of Saul. (1 Samuel 19:18,19,22,23; 20:1) It is evident from ver. (1 Samuel 20:18) that Naioth was not actually in Ramah, Samuel’s habitual residence. In its corrected from the name signifies "habitations," and probably means the huts or dwellings of a school or college of prophets over which Samuel presided as Elisha did over those at Gilgal and Jericho.