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Resources - Absalom

Because Absalom was vainglorious about his hair, he was hanged by it (Sotah 9b).

Absalom has no share in the World to Come (Sanhedrin 103b).

He deceived the hearts of three: his father, the court, and Israel. Therefore, three darts were thrust into his heart (Sotah 9b).

As suggested earlier, the advent of the monarchy brought neither happiness nor fulfillment into the lives of Israel’s leaders and their families. There were pain and anguish in the court of Saul, travail and mourning in the house of David. Indeed David, the sensitive soul, the national poet of Israel, endured more suffering than any other biblical figure, excluding the ineffable life of Job. David suffered, but he could also dish out suffering, sometimes brutally, as in the case of Uriah the Hittite.

Amidst the raging struggle for power and supremacy between Saul (king of the northern realm of Israel) and David (leader of the southern kingdom of Judah) stood soldiers, advisers, sons, and daughters who took sides either for political, romantic, or personal aggrandizement. Absalom, son of David and Maacah, joined the fray; unfortunately, in the process, he lost his place not only in this world but also in the world to come. This began when, in a fit of righteous pique, he killed his half-brother Amnon, who had dishonored his sister Tamar.

If this had been all, Absalom could probably have survived, but he suffered from an acute case of "blind ambition." Trying to secure his position as David’s successor, and fearing the candidacy of David and Bath-sheba’s newest, and most brilliant prodigy, Solomon, he centralized his forces at Hebron, and prepared a revolt against his father, the king. In the resulting battle in Transjordan, Absalom’s tribal combatants were outmatched by David’s veteran army forces.

This could have been enough, but the Bible exacts a symbolically gruesome punishment. Riding on his mule (a la the future messiah of the New Testament), Absalom is accidentally raised up to the scaffold of a great terebinth, his head and glorious Nazirite hair caught in the tree’s thick boughs (II Samuel 18:9). Affixed to this biblical version of the "cross," Absalom’s shame is pierced by three "heart-directed" darts of David’s general, Joab. It is too much for David, who, having already mourned the death of an infant son, for whose death he bore direct responsibility, repetitively laments the loss of his oldest, wayward child: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" The wailing continues until Joab reminds the king that Absalom was an adversary, and prolonged mourning over him would endanger the support of his own troops.

Nearly three millenia later William Faulkner would reformulate this story through the complex and tortuous narrative Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner depicted what the Bible had already revealed. The decay, tragedy, unfulfilled passion, and fury of David’s House of Israel became a vision of the ruin of the South.