What Samuel reveals about coercive control, delayed justice, identity, and the body
I was doing well at work. At my six-month review, I received a 4.5 out of 5, along with two bonuses and a raise. Then my hair became a vortex of attention.
One coworker sat at a desk near mine and smirked. Another entered the room, stood behind me, and chuckled. Before a Chamber of Commerce meeting, a man stopped me outside and said, four times, “I like your hair.”
The coworker who had smirked made me sit far up front. I came to believe that the conspicuous seating was another way of putting my hair on display.
None of those moments, taken alone, would have been enough to name. That is how the pattern worked. Each gesture could be dismissed as friendliness, humor, or logistics.
Together they changed the air in the room. I began to feel arranged. She had her own hair dyed every six weeks. (She told me she made money, but liked to spend her money.)
My hair is ethnic, multi-textured and difficult to manage. I documented all of this to Human Resources.
More than two years have passed. During that time, I have written books about mobbing, manipulation, and weaponized belonging. I was brought low quickly, but that was not the end of the movement. I am flourishing now, and my life continues to get better.
When I began reading the books of Samuel, I recognized their rhythm before I understood their architecture. A person rises and falls. Grace is given and lost. Someone with authority fails to act, and someone without rightful authority acts violently. A beautiful body is assaulted. Luxurious hair is cut and weighed. A royal robe is torn. Bodies are left exposed. A woman spreads sackcloth on a rock and refuses to leave them. A proud man is stopped by a tree.
The story seems to move on two great forms: rock and tree.
The rock endures. It receives the record. It becomes shelter, weapon, grave, altar, and witness.
The tree grows. It sways, bears, sheds, catches, dies, and burns. It is alive in time.
Between them stands the human body, carrying the weight that power has refused to resolve.
The Rock Remembers
Stone appears throughout Samuel whenever memory, weight, judgment, or permanence must take material form. Samuel raises Ebenezer after deliverance, giving divine help a physical marker: “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12). David later takes a stone from the stream, hurls it from his sling, and kills a giant whose power has been measured through the weight of his armor and weapons. The small stone defeats the massive body.
After Abigail stops David from taking vengeance into his own hands, Nabal’s heart dies within him and becomes “like a stone” (1 Samuel 25:37). At Absalom’s end, his body is thrown into a pit and covered by a great heap of stones (2 Samuel 18:17). Stone remembers deliverance, carries force, describes a hardened body, and finally seals the grave.
The most devastating rock in the David story, however, belongs to Rizpah.
After three years of famine, David asks the Gibeonites what payment will make atonement for Saul’s violence against them. Seven of Saul’s male descendants are handed over and killed. Two are Rizpah’s sons. Their bodies remain exposed “from the beginning of harvest until rain fell on them from the heavens” (2 Samuel 21:10).
Rizpah spreads sackcloth for herself on a rock. From the beginning of barley harvest until the rain comes, she keeps birds away by day and wild animals away by night. The text does not give her a speech, an office, or an army. It gives her duration.
Her watch lasts longer than the political transaction that produced the bodies. The men in power have decided what justice requires, but Rizpah remains beside what their decision actually cost. Her presence turns the rock into a second court, one that does not measure policy alone. It measures flesh, kinship, exposure, weather, and time.
Only after David hears what Rizpah has done does he gather the bones of Saul and Jonathan along with the remains of the seven and give them burial. Her vigil moves the king when formal power had not moved itself.
The rock does not repair the loss. It holds the testimony long enough that it cannot be made convenient.
The Tree Lives in Alternating Time
If the rock is endurance, the tree is recurrence. Trees do not keep institutional time. They keep seasons. They put energy into roots before anyone sees fruit. They may bear heavily and then grow quiet. Their apparent inactivity can be preparation rather than absence.
I wrote about this in Mast Years: What Oak Trees Taught Me About Survival. Oaks sometimes produce enormous synchronized crops of acorns after quieter years. The rhythm is irregular, not a strict every-other-year schedule, but it unsettles the demand that visible output must be continuous in order to count as life.
Pistachio trees offer a related pattern. Cultivated pistachios are strongly alternate-bearing: a heavy crop in one year can be followed by a lighter crop in the next. The tree has not stopped living during the light year. It is living with the consequences of abundance and reallocating what it has.
This matters when we come to Absalom’s death. Many English translations say that he was caught in a “great oak” while riding through the forest of Ephraim (2 Samuel 18:9). The Hebrew word is elah, more precisely a terebinth. A terebinth belongs to the genus Pistacia, the same genus as the cultivated pistachio.
I would not claim that the author planted a lesson about orchard science inside this scene. The story does not need that argument. The botanical distinction only sharpens what the narrative already shows. Absalom is stopped by a living thing that knows how to wait and then bear, in a life already shaped by alternating years of display and waiting, access and exclusion, patience and explosion.
He waits two full years after Amnon assaults Tamar before arranging Amnon’s death at a sheep-shearing feast (2 Samuel 13:23). Later, after returning to Jerusalem, he lives for two full years without seeing his father’s face (2 Samuel 14:28). When Joab will not answer him, Absalom has Joab’s field set on fire.
The waiting does not become resolution. It becomes stored force, followed by drastic action.
His hair participates in the same cycle. Once a year he cuts it because it has become heavy, and the hair is weighed according to the king’s standard (2 Samuel 14:26). Then, during the rebellion, his head is caught in the terebinth while his mule continues beneath him. The biblical text says his head was caught; it does not explicitly say his hair caused it. Yet the earlier attention to the weight, annual cutting, and public glory of his hair makes the association almost impossible to avoid.
The luxuriant sign of his beauty becomes entangled with immobility. The animal that carried him keeps moving. Absalom remains suspended between heaven and earth, no longer fully borne by the living world and not yet returned to the ground.
Joab finds him there and kills him, despite David’s public command to deal gently with the young man. The forest has already blocked Absalom, but Joab decides what the blockage will mean.
Robes Are the Social Skin
Samuel is full of robes because clothing makes identity visible. A robe tells other people how a body is to be read: prophet, prince, king, daughter, messenger, mourner.
Hannah brings Samuel a little robe each year as he grows in the sanctuary (1 Samuel 2:19). Jonathan gives David his robe, armor, sword, bow, and belt, recognizing him in a way that anticipates a transfer of status (1 Samuel 18:4). When Saul tears Samuel’s robe, Samuel announces that the kingdom has been torn from Saul (1 Samuel 15:27–28). When David cuts the corner of Saul’s robe in the cave, he demonstrates that he could reach the king’s body but chooses not to take it (1 Samuel 24:4–7).
The robe can confer identity, transfer it, threaten it, or prove restraint. Tamar’s robe does something more terrible: it survives as evidence of an identity that violence has attacked.
Tamar wears the ornamented robe associated with the virgin daughters of the king. After Amnon rapes her and orders a servant to put her out and bolt the door, she tears the robe, puts ashes on her head, and goes away crying aloud (2 Samuel 13:18–19). The clothing records the change forced upon her. Her body and garment tell the truth publicly even when the household refuses to produce justice.
Absalom tells her to be quiet because Amnon is her brother. David becomes angry, but he does not act. Tamar remains “desolate” in Absalom’s house. The men continue to occupy the plot; Tamar is largely removed from it. Her injury becomes the ground on which their conflict grows.
She goes away because the door has been bolted against her. Rizpah, much later, refuses to go away from the bodies entrusted to weather. These women stand at opposite edges of the same structure. One is expelled after violence. The other creates a place beside violence and stays until a king notices.
This is why the many garments in Samuel matter. They are not decoration. They are social skin. When someone tears, cuts, strips, or marks a garment, the act reaches beyond fabric into belonging, rank, sexual status, dignity, and the right to appear before others.
Hair can function in the same way.
“Rebellious” Is a Word of Control
Absalom is a rebel in the political sense. He steals the hearts of the people, gathers supporters, declares himself king, and rises against David. The narrative presents a conspiracy and an attempted seizure of the kingdom. His rebellion is conduct, not texture.
That distinction matters because “rebellious” is also a word used to govern bodies, especially bodies that do not submit easily to another person’s preferred arrangement. Hair is called unruly, wild, difficult, unprofessional, or defiant. A description of texture slides into a judgment of character. The body’s refusal to look effortless is treated as the person’s refusal to obey.
My hair was not an insurrection. It was hair: multi-textured, visible, and difficult for me to manage. Yet other people’s attention changed the conditions in which I occupied a room. The smirk, the chuckle behind me, the repeated comment before the meeting, and the front-row seat all made visibility feel administered.
I felt underprotected. I documented what happened because the pattern, not any isolated gesture, carried the meaning.
Coercive control often works through accumulation. Any single act may be made to look too small to name. The person targeted is then required to prove the architecture using one brick at a time, while everyone else insists they can see only bricks.
A boundary is not a rebellion. Self-determination is not a coup. Declining to be arranged for someone else’s comfort is not the same thing as stealing a kingdom.
Who Owns the Clock?
David’s life repeatedly turns on action and inaction. He is powerful when he governs himself. He refuses Saul’s armor because it does not belong to his body. He spares Saul in the cave because opportunity is not the same as permission. He listens to Abigail and allows himself to be stopped before bloodguilt.
He becomes dangerous when he uses authority to organize other bodies around his desire. He summons Bathsheba, arranges Uriah’s death, and allows a commander and an army to carry out the consequences. He becomes weak when justice would require him to confront someone he loves. After Amnon assaults Tamar, David is angry, but anger without protective action leaves Tamar with the cost.
Absalom responds to that inaction with delayed vengeance. Joab responds to David’s command regarding Absalom with immediate disobedience. After Absalom dies, David collapses into grief so completely that Joab tells him he is humiliating the people who saved his life. In 2 Samuel 19:5–7, Joab is not the rightful king, but he is functioning as the brutal operator who forces the king back into public duty.
That does not quite make Joab a regent. It makes him the indispensable wielder of operational power. David holds the anointing. Joab controls what happens on the ground.
Absalom controls public affection for a time. The kingdom is divided among legitimacy, force, and visibility.
This is one of Samuel’s great fulcrums.
Authority without action becomes abandonment.
Action without rightful limit becomes vengeance or usurpation.
Control without self-command becomes coercion.
The question is not simply whether someone acts, but whether the action protects another person’s agency or consumes it.
The two-year intervals sharpen that question. Absalom waits two years after Tamar’s assault. He waits another two years without seeing David. The calendar passes, but nothing is integrated. Delay by itself is not patience. When there is no truthful acknowledgment, no boundary, and no accountable decision, delay becomes pressure.
Institutions often claim ownership of that clock. Report what happened. After I submitted my official documentation, I was told they would handle it. I was also told not to say anything to anyone.
Wait while we consider it. Wait while we investigate ourselves. Wait while the people with power decide whether your experience meets their threshold. Meanwhile, the body keeps its own time in the jaw, shoulders, stomach, sleep, breath, posture, and appetite.
Who owns justice during the delay?
The institution owns its duty. The people involved own their conduct. God may own final judgment. The harmed person still owns her testimony, her boundaries, her interpretation, and her future. Waiting for another authority to act does not require surrendering all four.
The two-year rhythm is not only biblical for me. It is also legal.
One month before the two-year statute of limitations expired, I sent a certified letter requesting all of my personnel files. I was ignored. The organization retained control of its private record, but it could not retain ownership of my story.
Now I am bringing that story into the marketplace for public consumption—not as an unprocessed account, but as books, frameworks, and body-centered work created from what I documented, studied, and survived. Their clock reached its limit. My authorship did not.
Who Gets to Weigh a Person?
The books of Samuel announce their concern with weight at the beginning. In Hannah’s song, the Lord is a God of knowledge “and by him actions are weighed” (1 Samuel 2:3). The entire story then keeps asking what human beings weigh and how badly power distorts the scale.
Goliath is described through the weight of his armor and weapon. Eli is old and heavy when he falls and dies. The Hebrew word kavod can carry the sense of glory, honor, or weight, while the name Ichabod marks glory’s departure. Absalom’s cut hair is weighed “according to the king’s weight.” David’s people tell him that he is worth ten thousand of them. His census turns persons into military quantity. Seven bodies become the price of political atonement.
Who is being weighed? By whose standard? For whose purpose?
At work, I had already been measured through the approved system. A 4.5 out of 5, two bonuses, and a raise said I was doing good work. Yet a different scale appeared in the room, one that measured conformity, manageability, and who was permitted to be visible without explanation.
Formal success did not protect me from informal power.
That is one reason sudden descent can be so disorienting. The person keeps trying to reconcile two incompatible verdicts. How can I be valuable and treated as a problem? How can I be praised and displayed, rewarded and diminished?
Samuel does not resolve that contradiction by pretending that one side was never real. David is anointed and capable of terrible misuse. He is courageous and weak. Absalom is loved, injured, beautiful, controlling, patient, and murderous. Grace and grave wrongdoing coexist in the same life.
The pattern is not a clean alternation between good people and bad people. It is the on-and-off movement of power inside human beings and families: restraint, appetite, silence, explosion, remorse, return. One generation’s inaction becomes the next generation’s hasty action. The unresolved thing changes bodies, but it remains in the family.
The Body Carries What Power Refuses to Resolve
This is the bridge from Samuel to coercive control.
When power will not metabolize its own desire, guilt, conflict, or responsibility, it transfers the load into another body. Tamar carries what Amnon did and what David would not confront. Rizpah’s body keeps vigil beside the cost of a king’s bargain. Absalom turns injury into a private claim to vengeance and then into public rebellion. David’s household carries what he has refused to govern in himself.
Coercive control is not only a sequence of visible commands. It is the gradual replacement of self-determination with administered existence. Someone else begins to govern when you may speak, where you may sit, how you may appear, what meaning may be assigned to your reactions, and how long you must wait before your reality is acknowledged. Eventually the body may organize itself around anticipating that control.
That is the territory I later named in Heavy Bags. The work begins with a simple recognition: something heavy has been carried for a long time. The weight may be stored in the shoulders, chest, jaw, belly, breath, and the instinct to become still. The purpose is not to win one more argument with the person or system that imposed the weight. It is to help the body set the weight down and recover choice.
Heavy Bags: For Bodies That Survived Coercive Control
A body-centered work about carrying the residue of coercive control, reclaiming choice, and discovering what becomes possible when you no longer have to organize yourself around someone else’s control.
This is what EMBODY means to me. Insight matters, but the body also needs an ending to the command. It needs to discover that it no longer has to organize every movement around someone else’s control. It needs the ground beneath it again.
The Rock, the Tree, and the Life After
The rock and the tree offer different forms of survival.
The rock preserves what happened. It does not hurry the witness or soften the evidence for the comfort of passing power.
The tree does something else. It converts seasons into form. A quiet year is not necessarily an empty year. Roots thicken. Energy moves out of sight. A later season may reveal what the earlier one was preparing.
That is where my own story stands now. I documented what happened. I made books from what I learned about mobbing, manipulation, and weaponized belonging. I did not receive control over everyone else’s conduct or over the institution’s clock, but I retained authorship over what the experience would become in my life.
In Making It Work, I wrote about the difference between acceptance and approval. Acceptance does not make the past acceptable. It means I no longer have to solve the past as if it is still happening in order to move forward. I can keep the signal, recognize the pattern, and stop offering my nervous system as the place where someone else’s unresolved power gets to live.
Samuel does not give us a sentimental world in which anointing guarantees self-command, authority guarantees justice, or time automatically heals a household. It gives us rocks, trees, robes, hair, ash, bodies, and weather. It shows us that power becomes visible in what it asks a body to carry.
The rock remembers what was done.
The tree remembers how to grow.
And the person who was made to carry the weight can become the one who decides where it ends.
