By Joel H. Cohen
In ancient documents recently discovered by archeologists, Absalom charged that his brother Solomon’s ascendancy to the throne was “rigged.”
Absalom told an ancient scribe, “Crooked Sol conned the corrupt media into believing he was the smart one, but I had him beat by an incredible number of cubits. When he wasn’t chasing skirts, counting his money, or writing beat poetry, he supposedly spent his time making decisions, most of them bad ones. He made some of his famous ones by flipping a coin, or reading entrails. But nobody writes about that. He was a total disaster.”
Asked by the scribe whether his mother had had any input into the anointment of Solomon as king, Absalom responded, “Nobody has greater respect for women than I do, but they have no place in politics. Especially the overweight ones. They should just stick to doing whatever it is that women do.”
Their father David, he said in the same interview, clearly favored him over Solomon. “Dad gave his famous sling shot (with which he slew Goliath) to me, not Solomon, and I had it bronzed.”
What made David ultimately back Solomon, according to Absalom, was “one more evidence of corruption.” In an aside, Absalom said he didn’t want to introduce the subject for fear of offending some of David’s grandchildren, but there were reports that many of David’s psalms had been written by ghostwriters — “hundreds of them, thousands.”
Acknowledging “it’s good to be king,” Absalom claimed “I was the wise one, the good-looking one, the kingly one, with millions of unbelievable supporters. I love them all, and they love me. I’m also a marvelous counter-puncher, as evidenced by how I avenged the rape of my sister.
More than anyone else, including my disastrous kid brother, I would have kept out the foreigners, and made non-Jews pay for that temple. Evil Sol wouldn’t mention it — he was too politically correct – but a lot of the streets were a disaster to walk on. I had the backing of the National Sword Association and I would have made Jerusalem safe again, and made the kingdom great again.”
As to why, then, he wasn’t anointed as his father’s successor to the throne. “One simple answer: the system is rigged. Bigly.”
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San Diego Jewish World reminds readers who are new to this column that it is all in fun, and nothing above should be taken seriously. Cohen is a freelance writer based in New York.