re: #37 EmmmieG

She was kind of a pillow pet, wasn’t she?

Basically. The story is that they find her to keep the king warm in bed—literally—at the end of his life.

My old landlady in London was a nurse, and saw her sort of in that light.

What interests me about her is that there’s no apparent reason she’s super-important—she’s just a beautiful young virgin who sleeps with the king—but when David died, Adonijah asks for permission to marry her, and that clearly alerts Batsheva that he’s going to try to grab the throne from Solomon. Avishag married Solomon, and Adonijah ends up getting killed.

It’s as though there’s some sort of ritual significance to her, beyond ‘concubine he wasn’t well enough to actually have sex with’.