Absalom

Historical scholarship

Passages quoted verbatim from public-domain reference works. They reflect the scholarship of their time, not current consensus, and may use obsolete spellings.

• 1884From the archives

  Absalom— “father of peace”

  Counter to his name was the course of the “Father of Peace.” He is Abishalom, or Absalom in the narrative of his life, a history that one would have thought entailed eternal discredit on the name; but it seems that in the earlier Christian times of Denmark, as well as in some other countries, a fashion prevailed, especially among the clergy, of supplementing the native name with one of Scriptural or ecclesiastical sound, and thus, about the middle of the twelfth century,…

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  Counter to his name was the course of the “Father of Peace.” He is Abishalom, or Absalom in the narrative of his life, a history that one would have thought entailed eternal discredit on the name; but it seems that in the earlier Christian times of Denmark, as well as in some other countries, a fashion prevailed, especially among the clergy, of supplementing the native name with one of Scriptural or ecclesiastical sound, and thus, about the middle of the twelfth century, Absalom was adopted by a distinguished Danish bishop as the synonym of what Professor Munch conjectures to have been his own name of Aslak (reward of the gods), though Danish tradition has contracted it into Axel. This last is a national Danish name, and it seems as if Absalom had been popularly supposed to be the Latin for Axel; since, in a Latin letter of 1443, Olaf Axelsson is turned into Olaus Absalonis.

  Yonge, History of Christian Names (1884), Part I, Chapter II (Patriarchal Names), Section II (Abi) · Public domain (Project Gutenberg)