Absalom and Achitophel advice of the double agent Hushai over the good advice of Achitophel. Achitophel, realising that the rebellion is doomed to failure, goes home and hangs himself. Absalom is killed (against David's explicit commands) after getting caught by his hair in the thick branches of a great oak tree: "His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on" (NRSV 2 Sam. 18:9). The death of his son, Absalom, causes David enormous personal grief. A second allegory in the poem, beginning on line 425, is the
David A. King (historian) David A. King (historian) David A. King (born 1941) is a British-born orientalist and historian of astronomy. At an early age he decided not to follow in the footsteps of his father, Henry C. King (1915 - 2005), author of "The History of the Telescope" (1956) and the first director of the London Planetarium and later of the McClaughlin Planetarium in Toronto. Instead he learned Arabic and went off to the Near East and then to the U.S to immerse himself in Medieval Islamic Studies. However, after one year of graduate school he found himself, not unwillingly, deeply entrenched in