Avshalom was the third son of David, born to Maakah, daughter of Talmai king of Geshur (2 Samuel 3:3). 2 Samuel 14:25–26 describes him as without blemish from head to foot, and famous for his hair — so heavy that it was cut only once a year and weighed, by one reading of the text, two hundred shekels. That same hair becomes the instrument of his death.
2 Samuel 13 sets the tragedy in motion: after their half-brother Amnon raped their sister Tamar, Avshalom waited two years and then had Amnon killed at a feast, fleeing afterward to his mother’s homeland of Geshur. Yoav eventually brokered a return, but David would not see his face for two more years even after Avshalom was back in Yerushalayim (2 Samuel 14).
The reconciliation did not hold. Avshalom set himself up at the city gate to win the people’s grievances and their hearts, then launched a rebellion from Hebron that forced David to flee his own capital (2 Samuel 15). In one of the rebellion’s darkest scenes, Avshalom took his father’s concubines publicly on the palace roof — fulfilling, almost to the letter, Natan’s earlier prophecy against David (2 Samuel 16:20–22; cf. 12:11). He then rejected the counsel of Achitofel in favor of Chushai’s — unknowingly buying David the time he needed (2 Samuel 17).
2 Samuel 18 brings it to an end. Defeated in the forest of Efrayim, Avshalom’s mule ran beneath the branches of a great oak, and his famous hair caught fast, leaving him suspended and helpless. Yoav killed him there, directly against David’s order to “deal gently” with him. David’s grief — “O my son Avshalom, my son, my son Avshalom! would God I had died for you” (2 Samuel 18:33) — is one of Scripture’s rawest laments. Having no son to carry his name, Avshalom had already built a pillar for himself in his own lifetime (2 Samuel 18:18) — a monument that, in the end, stands for a rebellion rather than a dynasty.
David 
Solomon 