Probably few men have known domestic sorrows, so many and so great, as those which befell David.  He shared, in all its bitterness, the misery of a parent who sees his best hopes disappointed, and who is racked with anxiety as to what his wayward boy will do next, sometimes wishing that before such dishonour had befallen him his son had been laid to rest under the daisies, in the time of infant innocence.  David’s eldest son, Amnon, after committing a terrible crime, was assassinated by his brother Absalom.  In his turn, Absalom, the fairest of the family, rebelled against his own father, and was killed by Joab, as he hung in the oak.  Chiliah, or Daniel, died we know not how, and then Adonijah, the fourth son, the eldest of those surviving, followed in Absalom’s footsteps.

Adonijah’s sin appears at first sight so unnatural that, in justice to him as well as for our own instruction, we should try to discover the sources whence this stream of evil flowed which was so bitter and so desolating in its results.

This is not an easy task, because the full details of his life are not recorded.  There are, however, no less than three evil influences hinted at in these words:  “His father had not displeased him at any time, in saying, Why hast thou done so? and he also was a very goodly man, and his mother bare him after Absalom” (1 Kings i. 6).  Taking them in reverse order:  Heritage, Adulation, and Lack of Discipline, were three sources of moral peril, and these would tend to the ruin of any man.  Let us think of each of these, for they are not extinct by any means.

We know very little of Haggith, but she was probably a dancing girl who made her way to the front by her ambition and beauty.  From her and from his father we may assume that Adonijah inherited a tendency to ambition and self-conceit such as Absalom inherited from the union of David with Bathsheba.  It is one of the laws of life that “like produces like,” Evidence of this constantly appears in the lower animals, in the speed of the racehorse, in the scent of the hound, and so forth.  This asserts itself in men also.  We often notice what we call a “family likeness.”  Tricks of manner, and various mental qualities such as heroism, statesmanship, mathematical or artistic talent, descend from parents to children, and sometimes reappear for generations in the same family.  This cannot be due to example alone, because the phenomena is almost as frequent when the parents die during the child’s infancy.  Similarly, moral tendencies are transmitted, and the Bible gives us many examples of the fact.  The luxury-loving Isaac, who must have his savoury food, just as his son, Esau, who would sell his birthright for a mess of pottage, Rebekah, who, like her brother Laban is shrewd and cunning, sees her tendency repeated in her son Jacob, who needed a life of discipline and prayer to set him free from it.