David prophesies the punishment that will fall upon him, stating "the sword shall never depart from your house." When David acknowledges that he has sinned, Nathan advises him that his sin is forgiven and he will not die, but the child will. In fulfillment of Nathan's words, David's son Absalom, fueled by vengeance and lust for power, rebels. Absalom's forces are routed at the battle of the Wood of Ephraim, and he is caught by his long hair in the branches of a tree where, contrary to David's order, he is killed by Joab, the commander of David's army. David laments
Red hair the negative figure of Esau, even though the original Hebrew Torah implies that both King David and Esau had 'fiery red hair'. In his 1885 book "I Say No", Wilkie Collins wrote "The prejudice against habitual silence, among the lower order of the people, is almost as inveterate as the prejudice against red hair." In his 1895 memoir and history "The Gurneys of Earlham", Augustus John Cuthbert Hare described an incident of harassment: "The second son, John, was born in 1750. As a boy he had bright red hair, and it is amusingly recorded that one day in the streets