62 pages • 2 hours read
Geraldine BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Maacah summons Natan and Yoav, hoping they can persuade David to allow her son to return from exile. Natan is reluctant, but Yoav says David already wants his son home, and he praises Avshalom for the decisiveness and cunning with which he took revenge on Amnon. In Yoav’s view, the crime Avshalom has avenged is not a crime against Tamar but against David’s own public, masculine honor. He says, “It was necessary” (254), causing Natan to shudder as he remembers all those whom David has killed with those words.
Yoav continues to insist that Avshalom will be a good king. He accuses Natan of wanting to put Shlomo on the throne in his own bid to become the power behind the throne. He warns that uncertainty about the heir to the throne could cause strife.
Natan goes to see David and finds him in a deep depression. What good is it, David wonders, to have built a kingdom but raised “rapists and murderers” as sons? Natan reminds David that he has other sons and takes David out on the balcony, where they see Shlomo with his eagle. David finds new hope and comfort in this son. He does not, however, name him heir.
Natan learns through court gossip that a growing party, led by Maacah and Yoav, is conspiring to bring Avshalom back. A widow appears at David’s court, saying that one of her two sons has killed the other. She asks that the guilty one be spared so she at least has one child to comfort her. David sees through the ruse and realizes Yoav is trying the replicate Natan’s earlier strategy of fabricating a court case to persuade David to pardon Avshalom. David tells Yoav that Avshalom may return to the outskirts of Jerusalem but not to the court.
Avshalom immediately begins to build a following. He gathers a retinue of armed young men. He stands outside the city gates, talking with the people who come to present petitions and court cases to David, and hints they would find better justice with him. Yoav soon realizes that he has no control over the young man. When Yoav refuses to talk to him, Avshalom sets fire to Yoav’s fields. Yoav ruefully tells Natan that he plans to ask David to bring his son back to court rather than risk angering the prince anymore. David accepts Yoav’s recommendation.
Later, Yoav tells Natan that Avshalom and his followers are going to Hevron to make sacrifices at the home of his ancestors. Hevron is the site where David was crowned king. Thanks to his prophetic gift, Natan once again knows disaster looms, but the same gift imposes silence on him.
Avshalom claims the throne at Hevron, and Natan’s tongue is released. He prophetically warns David of his son’s rebellion. David decides to flee Jerusalem to spare the civilian population the horrors of war. He also feigns panic and defeatism to lull the rebels into a false sense of complacency. Yoav and Natan go with him, along with Ittai, leader of his loyal foreign-born soldiers. As David retreats, some come out to mock him and others come to help. He sends one old advisor, Hushai, to serve as a double agent in Avshalom’s retinue.
In Jerusalem, Hushai and the priests loyal to David manage to delay Avshalom with bad advice. While tarrying there, Avshalom demands Batsheva. Informed that David’s wives and other children have fled, he demands David’s concubines. In a brutal show of power, he rapes the concubines publicly. Then he sets out after David. Hushai and the priests secretly send David warning.
David has recovered his old courage and vitality, including his singing. He sings of “fear and faith, but faith the stronger” (276). With new confidence, the king plans his ambush of Avshalom’s army. David remains behind, sending out his soldiers with instructions not to harm his son. Shlomo fights too, showing courage without bloodlust. In the end, David’s army is victorious. Avshalom tries to flee on his mule, but the panicked beast runs him into a grove where he is caught around the throat by a tangle of tree branches, slowly choking. When Yoav learns of this, he rushes to Avshalom’s side and kills him. Shlomo reverently buries his brother’s body.
On hearing the news of Avshalom’s death, David is overcome with grief and retreats from public view. Yoav, enraged at this apparent disrespect toward his soldiers’ sacrifice in defeating the rebel prince, shouts at David. David bitterly goes out to greet his followers but removes Yoav from his position as commander-in-chief. In Yoav’s place, David says he will appoint Amasa, formerly Avshalom’s top commander, saying, “You killed my son, and he served them” (284). Yoav is shocked that David has put traitorous family over hard political facts and Yoav’s years of dedicated service. Natan warns Yoav against reckless action, but the old general storms away in a fury.
David returns to Jerusalem, where he pursues a policy of reconciliation. In many ways, he has been revitalized as a ruler and once again brings a firm hand to the kingdom for the sake of peace and justice.
However, old weaknesses continue. He tries to train Adoniyah, his eldest surviving son, in the art of ruling, but the young man lacks intelligence and patience. Soon, Adoniyah returns to his dissolute partying. Yoav, however, cultivates him and starts forming a new political party around him. Yoav also contrives to murder Amasa. Like his earlier murder of Avner, this killing of his rival for power goes unpunished.
David eventually falls ill and seems unlikely to recover. Adoniyah cannot restrain his eagerness for his father to die and leave him the throne: “He did not tap his foot, but one had the sense that he wished to, so impatient was he for this death” (292). In contrast to this callousness, Batsheva and Shlomo bring comfort to the dying king, although Batsheva does so in hopes of securing the throne for her son. Still, she spares no effort in caring for the king and finding him a healer. Shlomo, who alone seems to have no ulterior motive, keeps David company and writes down his father’s final psalms.
When Shlomo reports that Adoniyah and Yoav have invited all the other princes to a great feast, Natan knows that matters have reached the crisis point. He instructs Batsheva to tell David that Adoniyah is about to claim the throne and then to lie to the king, saying that he had promised her that Shlomo would be his heir. Natan enters the king’s chamber after her to confirm what she says. David announces that Shlomo should be anointed king immediately. He entrusts the priest Zadok and the leader of his foreign mercenaries with making it happen.
Natan stays by David’s bedside and describes the wonders of Shlomo’s future peaceful reign. David smiles as Natan lovingly details the future temple that Shlomo will build. Natan also promises that David will recover enough to guide Shlomo for some time. Natan then goes to Shlomo’s anointing. The rejoicing of the city swells into a mighty song, bringing peace to David’s ears.
The self-destructive actions of David’s elder sons continue at a breakneck pace in these final chapters. Avshalom, Natan notes, could easily have come to power if he had been a little more patient. Instead, his impulsive greed leads him to act too soon and to underestimate the ability of his father’s followers to resist. That is why he dies. The defeat of Avshalom’s rebellion marks the climax of the conflict between a kingdom of violence and one of peace. His defeat demonstrates that Yoav was wrong in his debate with Natan: A kingdom based on The Patriarchal Abuse of Power and Necessity as a Justification for Violence will fail. It is a natural consequence of the wanton violence of David’s sons; implicitly, it also is a reminder that David’s tragic flaws of pride and lust have prevented him from creating the kingdom of peace that Shlomo will create. Though brave in war, Shlomo is a man of peace, and his coronation marks the happy resolution of David’s tumultuous life story, with peace triumphing over violence. The happy chorus of the city—described as a brief, miraculous chord—reveals that the dream David chased all his life was always a civic one: It was about the happiness of a nation, not the fulfillment of one man’s ambition. David failed to see that, and for this reason he could not be the one to build the temple.
Brooks’s vision of civic happiness is also, importantly, multicultural. Brooks foreshadows this very modern aspect of David and Shlomo’s eventual triumph earlier in the book. For example, Natan’s tribal animosity toward the Plishtim turns into admiration during his stay at Ziglag. David triumphs over Avshalom in large part because foreign immigrants to Israel remain loyal to him, especially the Plishtim mercenaries led by Ittai. In a key moment of David’s escape from Avshalom, Natan struggles while crossing the Yarden River. He finds inspiration in the scenes:
Foreigners and natives of the Land, working together as brothers, those who were strong swimmers supporting those who clung for dear life to the ropes we’d strung from bank to bank. David’s army—this polyglot, mongrel force, forged out of loyalty and love (276).
Love and tolerance for others triumph over the older tribal culture of violence. Working together, this multicultural force triumphs over the river and then over Avshalom’s army. Fittingly, the men who lead Shlomo to his coronation are Zadok, the priest who served the original non-Jewish king of Jerusalem, and Benaiah, David’s other foreign captain. This multicultural aspect of David’s kingdom, only hinted at before, now appears in its own right as a key pillar of the great kingdom of peace.
By Geraldine Brooks