Following the Ittai episode, the narrative plods along slowly, as David and his followers exit Jerusalem and escape to the Transjordan. Painting a poignant scene of forced migration, the narrator reports that the whole country wept in a loud voice when they witnessed the king and his entourage leaving the capital city and entering the wilderness.

Each stage of the itinerary is punctuated by a discrete episode – often introduced by the transitional marker wehinnê, “and behold” – from the edge of the city, over the Kidron Valley, up the Mount of Olives, arriving at the summit, a little past the summit, on to the town of Bahurim, at the edge of the Jordan River, and finally to the Transjordanian town of Mahanaim, where David and his followers take up temporary residence as refugees.

The growth of this complex itinerary resembles the expansion of other biblical travel narratives, such as the wilderness wanderings in the Pentateuch or Ezra’s return from Babylon, both of which furnished a framework for redactors to insert supplementary material.

In this and the following chapter, I examine how the Absalom account gradually evolved from a simple tale of an attempted putsch into a complex literary war memorial depicting how various political actors worked for and against David. I begin by looking at the way David’s individual fate anticipates Israel’s collective exile.