And the angel said unto me. "Behold these shall dwindle in unbelief" 1 Nephi 12:22
Posted: Friday 22 December 2006 ( 18 years ago )
But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him. And when he polled his head [cut his hair], (for it was at every year's end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king's weight. 2 Samuel 14:25-26
Absalom was the best looking guy in all of Israel -- with one hell of a head of hair. He'd let it grow all year and then cut it, which he had to do each year because it got so darned heavy. One year's growth weighed 200 skekels.
And how heavy is 200 shekels? Well, one shekel weighed about 11 grams. So Absalom's haircut trimmings weighed in at 2.2 kilograms.
How does this compare with normal human hair?
An average head hair has a diameter of about 0.007 cm (70 micrometers) and grows 15 cm per year. And an average head has about 100,000 hair follicles on it. Since human hair has a density of 1.32 g/cm3, we can estimate the weight of an average person's yearly hair production.
weight = pi * (.0035 cm)2 * 15 cm * 100,000 hairs * 1.32 g/cm3 = 76 g
So an average person produces about 0.076 kilogram of hair annually -- about than 1/30th that of Absalom.
Of course Absalom wasn't an average person. He was, after all, the best looking guy in Israel. So maybe his hair was 30 times as thick or 20 times as dense as normal human hair. Or maybe the Bible was just making stuff up.
