by Lore Segal
So Amnon lay down and made as if he were ill and when the king came to see him, Amnon said: I wish my sister Tamar would come and cook me some cakes and serve them to me.
The plot works:
Tamar went to her brother Amnon’s house and he was in bed. She took dough, kneaded it, and made cakes, and he watched her, and she took them from the pan, but Amnon would not eat. He said: Everybody leave the room!
When everybody had gone, Amnon said: Bring it inside to me. Serve it to me!
She brought the cake that she had made him and came into his room and gave him the cake, and he caught hold of her and held her by force and said: Come, sister, lie with me!
Tamar cried, Don’t, my brother! Oh don’t force me! In Israel we don’t do such things! I would not know where to take my shame, and you would be a criminal in Israel.
But Amnon…overpowered her and took her by force. And afterward he felt a loathing for her that was greater than the love that he had felt for her before.
He said, Get up! Go away!
She said, If you send me away now you do me a greater wrong than the one that you have done me!
But he would not listen and called his servant and said: Get that woman away from me. Put her out in the street and bolt the door behind her!
And the servant led her out into the street and bolted the door behind her, and Tamar took dust and put it on her head and tore her tunic and covered her face with her hands and walked along screaming.
Her brother Absalom asked her, Was it your brother Amnon? Sister, be quiet! He is your brother! Don’t think about it any more.
Absalom, himself, meanwhile thinks of nothing else for the next two years. He is plotting his vengeance. He invites the king and all the royal sons to a sheep-shearing celebration. We rejoin the story.
The king said: We can’t all come. It would be too much for you.
Absalom said: Let my brother Amnon come.
But the king said: Why do you want him to come to your feast?
And the king sent Amnon and all the princes to Absalom’s shearing feast.
Absalom told his servants, Keep your eye on Amnon and when he is full of wine and in good spirits fall on him, kill him.
Don’t be afraid. It is I who tell you to do it, and do it with a will.
The servants do it and Absalom exiles himself from the king’s wrath. Count the plots: Amnon plots to get the virgin (who lives under strict supervision in the virgins’ quarters) into the rapist’s house. Amnon takes it from there and manipulates her into his bed. Brother Absalom plots his revenge which depends on manipulating the king into letting the princes come to the sheep shearing. This is only the beginning.
David’s chief captain, Joab, sees the king unhappy—one son dead, one in exile—and hires a wise woman to tell King David a story—a story in the sense of a fiction, in the sense of a lie, in the sense of which we say to a child, “Don’t tell me a story, you did eat the cookies!” The woman tells King David an elaborate story of fictional sons and a fictional fratricide which operates on the king’s feelings and gets him to allow himself to forgive his son Absalom and recall him to Jerusalem. But he refuses to talk to him. Captain Joab refuses to talk to him.
A new plot: Absalom burns down Joab’s fields to manipulate Joab to come and complain, in order to manipulate him into manipulating the king into talking to Absalom.
After the reconciliation, Absalom gets started on an elaborate plot to overthrow his father and make himself king. Observe the master plotter at his work:
After this Absalom got himself a chariot and horses, and fifty men to run before him. Mornings he would go out and stand on the path to the city gate. If anybody came along with some matter of justice to bring before the king, Absalom would call the man over and say: Where are you from—what town?—the man would say: Your servant is of such and such a tribe of Israel!—and then Absalom would say: Your case is perfectly clear to me and you are in the right, but no one in the king’s court is going to listen to you—then he would say: If I were made judge in this country, anyone with a case or a dispute could come to me, and I’d see justice done!—or if someone approached and was about to prostrate himself before Absalom, Absalom would reach out his arm and draw him close and kiss him, and in this way Absalom stole the heart of the people of Israel.
Four years went by and Absalom came to the king and said: I must go to Gershom. I vowed that if the Lord would let me come home to Jerusalem I would go and worship Him.
The king said: Go in peace!
Absalom set out for Hebron and sent his messengers to all the tribes of Israel saying: When you hear the sound of the horn raise your voices and shout: Absalom is king in Hebron!
We have here the veritable anatomy of plotting. Absalom must know the workings of Israel’s human heart in order to work upon it: He understands the effect of sheer power and advertises it with chariots, horses, and men; he knows the seduction of power acting humble and friendly. He trusts the human heart not to be overly particular, not to notice or care, or take care not to notice that it’s being conned. And Absalom knows the seduction of the human touch; he handles with hands, embraces, kisses. Oh designing Absalom!
And, oh! artful writer! To our primitive pleasure in sheer recognition—yes, that’s just what people are like!—is added the moral pleasure of our indignation. What a hateful demagogue! Look at those stupid patsies! How cleverly the story handles us! How artfully, how cannily it plots the contrast between the scheming egotism of the son and the father’s grace under the pressure of his own forced exodus from Jerusalem. We stand with King David, reviewing the endless march-past of his many loving subjects willing to follow the king into exile. How lovingly—how intentionally—the story lingers over David’s sensitive awareness of the effect of his calamity upon others:
When the king saw Attai, the Gathite, marching by he said: You don’t have to come with me! Go back and stay with the new king. You are a stranger and have traveled a long way from your home. It was only yesterday that you arrived, why should you leave today and go who knows where? I must go where I can, but you should turn back—you and all your kin—and may faith and kindness go with you!
Attai chooses to go with the king and becomes his trusted general. God’s elect, David, is nobody’s fool: He makes sure God will have the assistance of a well-plotted fifth column to frustrate his son’s inner council, and, of course, Absalom dies in battle and the king, howling with grief, is reinstated.
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To manipulate is to “handle” other people, purposefully to maneuver them into changing what they think and what they feel in order to change what they do. It is interesting that the language does not differentiate between the benevolent and the self-serving act and offers no choice of neutral verbs: To manipulate, to handle, operate, contrive, maneuver sound the same disagreeable note. “Scheme,” a neutral noun, turns nasty as a verb. Does that nice verb “design” show its true color as an adjective? Our dislike of designing people who act upon our reason from outside our reason goes as deep as language.
Nor does the language have a different vocabulary for the designing political plotter and the plotting novelist, or the design which the painter makes. When we read a story, look at a picture, or eat a piece of pie, for that matter, we are choosing to hand ourselves over into the maker’s hands to be manipulated. I’m talking about the manipulation of the sugar which the baker designs us to read as so “sweet” and no sweeter by the addition of a judicious scraping of rind of lemon which only the educated palate of another pro troubles to identify through its effect combined with every other ingredient as well as the length, calibration, and means of heating learned at Grandmother’s oven modified by subsequent education working upon a native talent that depends on God alone knows what concatenation of personality, history, and happenstance. It is mystery that falls into the mouth of that other mystery, the one who takes the bite, sees the picture, and reads the story.
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I want to look at the things this side of mystery which our Bible writers do to our modern reader’s understanding, and from which the modern writer can learn a lesson. Look at what the Bible does not do: The Second Book of Samuel begins with the raw news of King Saul’s death told by the young Amalekite who brings it straight from the morning’s battle.
The young man said: It was by chance that I was walking on Mount Gilboa—and there he was—Saul leaning himself onto his spear with the chariot and horse closing in! He looked around and saw me and called to me. I said, Here I am! He said, Who are you? I said, An Amalekite. He said, Come over here and kill me. Pain has got me in its grip but life will not let go.—So I went to him and killed him, because I could tell that he would never rise again where he had fallen. And I took the crown that he wore on his head and the bracelet from his arm and have brought them to you, my lord!
The Bible’s writers might have attended a course in “creative” writing, they tell so little, render so much, use so few adjectives and fewer adverbs. An A student and a minimalist, the Amalekite knows how to pare a story to the essential event, the telling details, and a lot of dialogue. The time is two thousand years in the future in which we writers would have had the reader climb inside Saul’s skin to “identify” with the sensations of his mangled flesh. Bible, myth, and fairy story are not in the business of giving the experience of nerve or muscle. (I remember Queen Jocasta on a Chicago stage walking over to poor harassed Oedipus and massaging his neck and shoulders for him.)
The Bible does not know the formulation “King Saul felt that…” or “thought that…” The Amalekite only says he saw “Saul leaning himself onto his spear with the chariot and horse closing in” and, mysteriously and for ever, even after King Saul lies dead, after David has recovered his sacred carcass and given it honorable burial, King Saul still and simultaneously leans himself onto his spear, turns, sees the young stranger. The trampling enemy horse continues to approach.
That’s the miracle I mean which manipulates the reader. If the Bible doesn’t use our common modern means to get its story told, how does it do it then?
Here is another tale of lust leading to crime and punishment visited down the generations—the story of David and Bathsheba.
It was the season when kings go into battle, and David sent Joab and the army of Israel out into the field, and they destroyed the Ammonites and surrounded the city of Rabbah. But David remained at home in Jerusalem.
Now it happened at evening time that David rose from his couch and walked up and down on the roof of his palace. He looked down and saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful. King David inquired about her and they said: Isn’t that Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
David sent his messenger to bring the woman to him, and she came, and he lay with her, and then she went back to her own house.
The woman conceived and sent word to David to say: I am with child.
Has King David put himself into the way of sin by laziness and luxury? Notice that the story does not say so. The story only says that it is the fighting season and the king has sent his officer and men out into the field, while he has stayed at home in Jerusalem. What is the king doing in Jerusalem? Waking from a nap.
“Sleep” operates in the Bathsheba/Uriah story like Martin Buber’s notion of a Leitwort—a “leading word” that holds the story together and pulls it along. Our story depends on who sleeps and where. If King David were out fighting the Lord’s battles and sleeping in the field with his soldiers, he would not be waking from sleeping on the roof of his palace, would not be strolling there, would not be seeing Bathsheba taking a bath.
Roger Fry quipped that “what you don’t tell them they don’t know” where “you” is the writer and “they” the reader. The story makes sure to mention that David inquires and is told that the woman is married to one of King David’s soldiers, who is out in the field, and is fighting King David’s battles.
A feminist digression: Notice that the story has nothing to say about Bathsheba’s side of the matter. Does she want to come? Was she forced? Seduced? Does she raise no objection on moral grounds? Perhaps she wasn’t a faithful wife? The commentaries variously speculate that she might have been afraid to say the king nay, might have been flattered to be asked. They do not consider that she might have had a yen for the king’s person.
I say that I digress because the story does not cue me to worry about Bathsheba, whereas the manner in which the story does not give us King David’s reasons for not going to the wars, does invite speculation. It raises the issue; it never raises the issue of Bathsheba’s heart’s reasons. If we choose to speculate we inject ourselves into the narrative. We inject ourselves in the rabbinic tradition of the midrash. The rabbis did and do make up stories with which to speculate about troublesome portions of the text. The Ewe Lamb story: It represents Bathsheba as pet lamb slaughtered to entertain a passing guest. Later in the tale her iron will, like Rebekah’s, manipulate…her favorite son—God’s favorite, Solomon, into the place of succession. Here Bathsheba has no voice except to tell the king she is with child.
David sent word to his captain Joab to say: Send me Uriah the Hittite.
Joab sent Uriah to Jerusalem and Uriah came to David and David asked him, how Joab was, how was the army doing, how was the war coming along. And then David said, Why don’t you go home to your own house and bathe your feet after your journey?
Uriah left the palace with presents of meat from the king’s table coming behind him, but Uriah lay down and slept at the door of the king’s palace with the king’s soldiers and did not go home to his own house.
They came and told David: Uriah didn’t go down to his own house!
David said to Uriah: You’ve come a long way—why don’t you go home to your own house?
Uriah said: How can I go home into my own house and eat and drink and lie with my wife while the Ark of the Lord, and the armies of Israel and Judah live in tents, and my captain Joab and the king’s soldiers are sleeping in the open field? As the Lord lives and as your soul lives, my king, I would not do such a thing!
David said: Stay another day, and tomorrow I will send you back.
Uriah stayed in Jerusalem and David invited him to eat and drink with him, and made Uriah drunk. But in the evening Uriah left, and slept with the king’s soldiers and did not go down into his own house.
The witty story never explains that the king is attempting a cover-up and failing. Unrighteous David, out of God’s favor, hasn’t the power to manipulate one of his own soldiers into the soldier’s own bed to sleep with his own wife so it can look as if he were his wife’s child’s father. For three nights self-righteous Uriah resists his own ease: So long as Joab and David’s army sleep in the open field, Uriah will sleep on the ground with David’s soldiers, pointing with ineluctable emphasis to the king’s laxness in the matter of sleeping around.
The next morning David wrote a letter and gave it to Uriah to take to Joab. The letter said: Send Uriah to the front lines where the fighting is heavy so that Uriah will be hit and will be killed.
Joab sent David an account of the battle and told the messengers: If the king is angry and says: Why did you fight so close to the city?…you must say: Your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead too.
The messenger repeats this message.
David said: Go back. Tell Joab…not to let things like this weigh on his mind! What difference does it make if war kills this man instead of that man? Tell Joab to fight harder and to take the city. Talk to him. You have to encourage Joab!
With what subtle complexity this spare account renders the understanding these two men have of one another. Joab makes it impossible for the sovereign conveniently to forget his instructions and blame Joab for bad generalship. How well the king understands that his captain’s guilt in having carried out the king’s dastardly plan might unman him and affect his ability to pursue the siege. How admirably t
he story conveys all this without the use of such words as “dastardly” “guilt” “unman.” Meanwhile
When Uriah’s wife heard her husband was dead she mourned for him, and after the mourning was over David sent for her and brought her to the palace, and she became his wife and bore him a son.
A wise woman’s fiction helps David ease his own heart and bring his son Absalom home from exile. But here it’s not the king’s heart, it is his humane and moral education that’s at stake, and the Lord brings a higher story-telling agency into play.
And the Lord was angry with David, for what he had done. And He sent the prophet Nathan to the king and he came to him and said:
There were two men who lived in the same city. One was rich, the other was poor. The rich man had great herds of cattle and sheep, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb he had bought and nursed, and it grew up with his children and shared his bite of bread with him and drank from his cup and slept on his lap and was like a daughter to him.
There came a traveler to the rich man’s house, but the man didn’t want to kill any of his own sheep or cows to serve to the traveler, so he took the poor man’s lamb and cooked it and served it to his visitor.
David was enraged and said: As the Lord lives, a man who can do such a thing deserves to die, even if he pays back the value of the sheep four times over! That man had no pity!
And Nathan said, That man is you.
Here is a lesson to be learned and the Lord does not trust King David to understand it without some sermonizing, done not by the narrator but by the character Nathan speaking in the voice of the character God, to the character of David.
It was I who put your wives into your lap and gave you the House of Israel and Judah, and if that is not enough I will give you twice as much and more. Why did you put Uriah the Hittite to the sword and take his wife to be your wife? It was you who murdered him with the sword of the Ammonite.