The weather in North Carolina has been confused these first few weeks of 2025 – one day might be in the 70’s (F, 20’s C) and the next might be in the 30’s (F, 0’s C). The trees don’t quite seem to know if they should bud. Today is splitting the difference: a crisp 46 (F, 8 C). Lent is starting cold, this year for us.
1 Kings, my Lenten task, also begins with chill. The very first verse begins: King David was old and advanced in years, and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm (1 Kings 1:1). King David, mighty warrior, king of 40 years, is freezing and he cannot get warm. The solution his attendants come up with is rather strange:
2So his servants said to him, “Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king and be his attendant; let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may be warm.” 3 So they searched for a beautiful young woman throughout all the territory of Israel and found Abishag the Shunammite and brought her to the king. 4 The young woman was very beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and served him, but the king did not know her sexually. (1 Kings 1:2-4)
Lest we forget, David has a whole harem of women at his disposal. He is not exactly wanting for comforts of flesh, sexual or otherwise. Why does he need a young virgin for this? Why did they need to search throughout the whole territory of Israel for this woman? Why is it so important she be beautiful? Why does it matter that he did not know her sexually, she simply warmed his bed? On the one hand, some of these themes are familiar from other biblical palace intrigue stories, like that of Esther, who competes in a beauty contest to become the queen. But the story remains peculiar.
This strange and beautiful woman, Abishag the Shunammite, appears in two other places in 1 Kings. First, she is part of the background to the conversation between Bathsheba and King David about an attempted coup that prompts the anointing of Solomon, David’s successor (1 Kings 1:15). Second, she is the subject of what Solomon interprets as another coup attempt – his brother, who tried to usurp him before, asks for the hand of Abishag the Shunammite. The brother’s reasons are not given, but Solomon puts his brother to death in response to the request. Something about asking to marry Abishag the Shunammite really did not go over well with Solomon. Modern biblical scholars have noted that Abishag the Shunammite would have been part of David’s harem, sex or no, and that it seems that the new king inherited the old one’s harem – but that doesn’t explain this peculiar scene. Other scholars have noted that this is a story about the control and trafficking of women, something by which men in the ancient world asserted their authority and power – maybe Solomon’s brother was challenging Solomon in some way (especially given that he made his request not to Solomon directly, but through his mother Bathsheba).
The Church Father most famous for tackling this story is Jerome, who in his Letter 52 writes “it not seem to you — if you keep to the letter that kills (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:6) — like some farcical story or some broad jest from an Atellan play? A chilly old man is wrapped up in blankets, and only grows warm in a girl’s embrace. Bathsheba was still living, Abigail was still left, and the remainder of those wives and concubines whose names the Scripture mentions. Yet they are all rejected as cold, and only in the one young girl’s embrace does the old man become warm.”[1]
It’s a weird story – and Jerome wonders why Isaac was content with Rebekah, Moses with Zipporah, and yet David could not keep warm with Bathsheba and Abigail.
The answer, for Jerome, is that the young Shunamite is not a woman at all: “this wife and maid, so glowing as to warm the cold, yet so holy as not to arouse passion in him whom she warmed? 1 Let Solomon, wisest of men, tell us of his father’s favorite; let the man of peace recount to us the embraces of the man of war…”[2] The woman is…Wisdom. Jerome cites Proverbs 4:5-9:
Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget nor turn away
from the words of my mouth.
6 Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
7 The beginning of wisdom is this: get wisdom,
and whatever else you get, get insight.
8 Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
9 She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.
What King David, after his long life, finally got – that Solomon jealously guarded from his brother – was Wisdom. Wisdom kept him warm, without arousing his passion. Wisdom brought him life, when nothing else could. Part of his reading is explicitly motivated by misogyny: Abishag the Shunammite is not a woman, because women are dangerous to holy men (for the clergy: “A woman’s foot should seldom, if ever, cross the threshold of your home… Do not linger under the same roof with them, and do not rely on your past continence,”).[3]
Jerome, however, is also interested in reflecting on age, and this is where we can connect Abishag the Shunammite with Lent. He says “Almost all bodily excellences alter with age, and while wisdom alone increases all things else decay. Fasts and vigils and almsdeeds become harder. So also do sleeping on the ground, moving from place to place, hospitality to travellers, pleading for the poor, earnestness and steadfastness in prayer, the visitation of the sick, manual labor to supply money for almsgiving. All acts, in short, of which the body is the medium decrease with its decay.”[4]
When David is failing at everything else, when he can’t keep warm, when he lacks virility – he finally finds what he never had before. He used to fast and do other acts of holiness. Now, finally, in his old age, when zeal has left him, he found what he never had before: wisdom.
***
Ancient and modern commentaries have been largely uninterested in this obscure woman. In the whole of published Syriac literature, her name only appears 12 times – in one hymn, in the Bible, and in three authors. This is scanty, compared to say, Jezebel, who appears almost 300 times or Vashti who appears 25 times. She is a small and insignificant figure in a story about men and succession – it makes sense. She is also not well represented in ancient Jewish interpretation, appearing really a few times Talmud, around the question of Kingship and marriage (and unfavorably compared to Sarah in beauty in Sanhedrin 39b21). But where she has gained more traction is in the world of poetry, especially Jewish women’s poetry, where she takes on a whole new life and is transformed from electric-blanket to human being with motivations, desires, and hopes. Consider, for example, a stanza from Louise Glück’s “Abishag”:
In the recurring dream my father
stands at the doorway in his black cassock
telling me to choose
among my suitors, each of whom
will speak my name once
until I lift my hand in signal.
On my father’s arm I listen
for not three sounds: Abishag,
but two: my love[5]
I am not sure what to do with the story of Abishag the Shunammite – but it does make me wonder what small, forgotten things God might want to draw my attention to in this time of slowing down. It makes me wonder what it would really mean to be warm – and it does make me wonder what old things are not helping me, that God might be calling me to remove, so that I can experience real warmth and life.
[1] Letter 52, 2 – Fremantle translation.
[2] Letter 52, 3 – Fremantle translation.
[3] Letter 52, 5 – Fremantle translation
[4] Letter 52, 3 – Fremantle translation
[5] For more, see: Anat Koplowitz-Breier, “The Power of Words: The Biblical Abishag in Contemporary American Jewish Women’s Poetry,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 37, no. 1 (2018): 21–36, https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerjewilite.37.1.0021.
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