The Blogs: King David’s ‘Harp’ like Trump’s, was unable to make her aging king great again

A very strange story pops up at the end of the King David narrative in the Bible. The great king is old (just 70 – sheesh, and he looks like hell – after 40 years on the throne, and evidently 40 years without a shave), and he’s perpetually cold. So rather than throwing him an afghan, his staff decided to do the next best thing: bring in an attractive young woman. They found Abishag the Shunammite:

King David was now old, advanced in years; and though they covered him with bedclothes, he never felt warm. His courtiers said to him, “Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, to wait upon Your Majesty and be his attendant; and let her lie in your bosom, and my lord the king will be warm.” So they looked for a beautiful young woman throughout the territory of Israel. They found Abishag the Shunammite and brought her to the king. This young woman was exceedingly beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and waited upon him; but the king was not intimate with her (1 Kings 1-4)

So no sex, the Bible tells us, because, well, let’s not get into that, because I would then have to discuss the current analogy with regard to sex, which I suspect you would prefer I not do. Jon Ossoff didn’t go there, and neither will I.

Abishag was by all accounts a reputable, loyal and caring servant, as dedicated to her master as Natalie Harp has been to her boss. And she had greater access to him than anyone else, including his 18 wives.

Let’s look at where Abishag came from.

Shunem was an ancient town located in the north, opposite Mount Gilboa, and it was also home to the Bible’s second most famous Shunammite woman, whose name was, memorably, “Shunammite Woman.” She was the mother whose child’s birth was foreseen by the prophet Elisha, who years later resurrected the boy (2 Kings 4 and 8)1. She was unequaled in her faith, going above and beyond the call to assist the prophet, to the point of obsequiousness.

That’s how they grew them in Shunem.

Abishag was like that too, independent in her own way, yet loyal to a fault when it mattered. Much like Natalie, who wrote to Trump in her letters, “”You are all that matters to me.”

There is no record of Abishag or Elisha’s Shunammite woman running after golf carts or sleeping in a locker room, and we don’t have possession of any of their personal letters. And Elisha’s Shunammite was so humble – or forced to be – that, as mentioned, we never even learn her name.

We do know of another, more contemporary literary connection to Shunem, in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, where the Shunammite is ambitious, status-conscious, and fully trained to embrace the societal expectations of The Handmaid Tale’s Gilead. And like Elisha’s Shunammite – and in the spirit of Handmaid’s Tale – she has no name, just that biblical moniker.

Throw it all together and we have the picture of two duteous Shunammite women, completely dependent on men to save them – yet despite their compliance, assertive in their devotion to those men and in their willingness to sacrifice everything, including their very identities, in service to the crown.

Another thing. Aside from being home to notable women, Shunem was situated in just about the most strategic spot in the ancient world, in the geographical center of the most traversed valley in the Galilee, close to Megiddo, at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and Europe. It was the center of it all, the Washington DC of the Galilee.

As early as the 14th century BCE, Shunem is a presence, mentioned in one of the pivotal texts of ancient times, the Amarna letters. It was also the site of the Philistine encampment for the battle that took the life of King Saul and later Egyptian campaigns during the reign of King Solomon.

Why do I mention this? Because those who lived in Shunem, at least at times when it was not in ruins or being overrun, understood what it was like to live at the center of world affairs. They knew what it meant both to have power and to be powerless. Something Natalie clearly understands. That printer she zealously carries contains within it Trump’s connection to reality, as filtered through her. Natalie’s adoring letters and MAGA-juiced social media posts speak volumes, even if most were taken down when her Twitter account was closed.

Harp’s brother suggests that Trump is a father figure to her. This might have something to do with the fact that one of the aspects of Natalie’s biography that appears beyond question is her father’s suicide in 2020. Interestingly, Abishag’s (Avi-shag) name in Hebrew means, “My father was a wanderer.” In other words, she lost her father too. A shogeg in Hebrew (the root letters for “wanderer”) connotes one who has wandered off physically and also strayed morally – a sinner, even if only by mistake.

On the upcoming High Holidays, Jews will ask for forgiveness for sins done both on purpose and b’shogeg, accidentally. It’s a word that keeps on reappearing in the Yom Kippur liturgy.

It seems that both Natalie and Abishag were placed in the most intimate inner sancta of their geriatric and patently unwell father-figures, because these dying, weakened old men had lost their way. Both had strayed morally, but only one sought forgiveness. And both were also wandering mentally and physically when these muses came into their lives.

Both faced the long, cold dark night, and only these two young women could save them. But they ultimately could not. While David’s actual harp soothed King Saul, his human harp could not soothe King David himself.

Neither will Donald’s Harp save him. The only soothing music in DC used to be at the Kennedy Center, back when the National Symphony Orchestra played there – and now that sacred space has fallen silent. Now the only music he hears is the whirring of the printer in Natalie’s hands.