ABSTRACT
In the little enchanting tale of Abishag, the beauty queen of Ancient Israel, readers shall see all these ambivalences explicitly and daringly revealed. The mean snivelling scribes, rather than acknowledge the success of his relationship with Abishag that is displayed so vividly in the dynamism of his last years, depicted David as senile, whimpering, and impotent. But they failed in their attempt to protect their orthodoxies. Inter-generational sex reminiscent of incest should have ended in disaster and punishment but here, to their consternation, it was bounteously rewarded. The idiosyncratic, the creative eccentric, is happily ever a threat to the innate conservatism of rulebound Establishments. The redactors’ obfuscations came no less to grief in their clumsy effort to pronounce Abishag an inadequate woman unable to arouse the sexual desire of the aged David. When David died, we do not find her languishing: she is too beautiful and desirable to be depicted as a retreating young woman withering in her virginity.
