- verses
- 5
- first named
- 1 Kings 1:3
- last named
- 1 Kings 2:22
- period
- United Monarchy
- role
- Woman
Description
Who was Abishag?
Abishag was a beautiful young woman from Shunem who was chosen to serve King David in his old age (1Ki.1.3). She was brought to the king to keep him warm and to attend to his needs, but David did not have sexual relations with her (1Ki.1.4).
After David's death, his son Adonijah, who had previously attempted to claim the throne, approached Bathsheba, Solomon's mother. He requested that she ask King Solomon to give him Abishag as his wife (1Ki.2.17). However, Solomon perceived this request as a challenge to his kingship, as taking the king's concubine was a symbolic claim to the throne (2Sa.16.21-22).
Solomon responded with anger, interpreting Adonijah's request as tantamount to asking for the kingdom itself. He vowed that Adonijah's request would cost him his life (1Ki.2.22-23). Subsequently, Solomon ordered Benaiah to execute Adonijah (1Ki.2.25). The incident with Abishag reveals the political intrigues and power struggles that occurred during the transition of power from David to Solomon. It also underscores the significance of the king's concubines in the context of royal succession in ancient Israel.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
Associated with
Stands in the same events as
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Abishag is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
5 verses across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in 1 Kings (5).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 5, across 1 book.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Where they appear
Chapter by chapter
Atlas's reading of each chapter this person appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources