Strange Story: I Kings 1 Abishag Did Not Fit Our Idea of Beauty

The text says they looked for a lovely/desirable virgin and found one who fit that description very well. In modern America and a few other parts of the world, people probably read that and imagine someone that looked like a Hollywood actress. But did the ancient Jews see it that way? It is quite possible that they did not.

What I am getting at is that they may have been looking for a young woman who had a much larger body frame and was more plump than the average Israelite girl. Her purpose was to keep the king warm, so they looked for someone who had plenty of body heat to offer.

Even today, in a number of cultures of the world, having extra body fat is considered a good thing. In parts of the world where hunger and starvation are common, being fat is desirable because it shows you have plenty to eat. In those cultures everyone wants to be fat but most of them are skinny because they only have enough food to survive. I do not know what the mentality of the ancient Israelites was on this matter because it is never mentioned, but my educated guess is that American culture is the one that is abnormal with its unnatural fetish about being thin. I believe that most ancient cultures did not see being fat as a bad thing. It was rare but it was not looked down upon.

So in my opinion we need to put out of our minds the idea that this young lady had to be thin in order to be considered beautiful. In this case being plump was desirable in order to have more heat to offer the shivering king.

The description of Abishag found in I Kings 1:4 is very interesting. Besides the word which can mean “lovely, fair, pleasant or desirable,” there are two other words that describe this adjective. One is a preposition meaning “unto, until, as far as, up to,” etc. The other one is an adverb meaning “with muchness, excessively.” The text says literally “And the young lady was lovely/pleasant/desirable unto very much” or we could say, “And the young lady was lovely/pleasant/desirable to the point of excess.”

I take this to mean that they found a young lady who was just right for the role of keeping the king warm. While many people in our culture have assumed the words “to the point of excess” referred to a perfectly formed face and body (i.e. thin), I think they point to a large, plump body with lots of body fat. She was abnormal in that she was large when most women in her culture were not, but everyone was OK with that and so was she.

But it was probably hard to find such a girl. Most of the plump young ladies would have been girls who did not have to work and had more than enough of the wrong kinds of foods to eat, i.e. sugars. The place to find such girls would be among the nobility but those types of families would not want their daughter to become a concubine even to a king, rather they would want her to become a wife with all the privileges of a wife. So David’s officials and servants had to look for a “desirable” girl among the middle and lower classes, where she was less likely to be found. When they found Abishag they were pleased with themselves for she was a rare find.

Now place yourself in her shoes and consider the task given to her. She was the kind that felt warm when everyone else was a bit chilly. She usually threw off the covers at night, but here she could not throw them off. She had to stay under the covers and maintain as much bodily contact as possible, all the while feeling like she was burning up. The very characteristics that made her desirable for this task also made it a mild form of torture for her.