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Particularly in the Old Testament of Holy Writ, monuments, often of stone, were erected by different people to help remind them and others (e.g. their offspring) of a particular event.
A battle, a dream, or maybe nothing.
The absence of something.
The son of king David, Absalom, erected one in the King’s Valley because, he said, he had no son to carry on his lineage.
Or memory.
One didn’t have to be good (Absalom attempted to usurp the throne from his father, slept with his wives, and was rewarded with an unusual and untimely death) to be a monument builder.
The fair maiden Rapunzel, of fairy tale fame, had nothing on Absalom.
Rapunzel’s hair may have been longer, but Absalom’s was still long enough to get caught in the branches of an oak tree whilst he rode a mule trying to escape.
The mule rode on without him.
Absalom’s hair was his undoing.
Similar stones with which he erected his monument were cast onto his dead body after he was killed by Joab’s men.
There are multiple examples of monuments.
They helped preserve the often feeble memory of man, and served to remind that some things that happened in the past were often worth…
