Avishag

Avishag was a young woman from Shunem who attends the elderly King David in the biblical narrative. After David’s death, Adonijah’s request to marry her is interpreted by Solomon as a political claim to the throne.

In 1 Kings, Avishag is brought to the aged King David to attend him during his final illness, but the text says that David does not have sexual relations with her. After David’s death, Adonijah asks to marry her, a request Solomon interprets as a renewed claim to royal status. Solomon responds by ordering Adonijah’s execution, making Avishag central to the politics of succession despite her limited narrative voice.

Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord places Avishag in the final, increasingly fragile phase of David’s household. As the young woman brought into the ageing king’s service, she belongs to a court where intimacy cannot be separated from dynastic politics: David’s physical decline, the rivalry among his sons and the struggle over succession give her position a significance far beyond that of a domestic attendant. Brooks uses Avishag as part of the novel’s wider examination of how women around David are drawn into the consequences of male power, family violence and the attempt to control what happens after the king’s death.