Not every reader, of course, comes away from the Bible with the impression that Bathsheba was an abused and exploited woman. Some modern Bible scholars, not unlike the Talmudic sages, condemn Bathsheba as a willful seducer, a woman “whose unchecked animal appetites had tragic consequences for him, his family, and the community he governed.”26 Perhaps she was “not as blameless as a first reading of the text might suggest,” argues J. Blenkinsopp, who wonders out loud whether her rooftop bath was intended all along to snag the king. If so, her blunt report to David—“I'm pregnant” (2 Sam. 11:5) (AB)—might be seen “as more a cry of triumph than an SOS.” And even if “we simply do not know whether she was a silent accomplice in the death of her husband,” Blenkinsopp concludes, “there is no indication that her new situation was distasteful to her.”27
Or perhaps David and Bathsheba were simply and truly in love with each other, as novelist Joseph Heller concluded after reading the biblical depiction of their affair. “We trysted secretly,” David explains in God Knows, “embraced on the way to the couch, made giddy jokes and laughed excessively, and enjoyed every other kind of cozy, intimate hilarity together until the day the roof caved in with the news that she was pregnant.”28 In fact, the Bible confirms that David was so smitten with Bathsheba that he would one day yield to her in the most fundamental matters of state.
Still, even if Bathsheba was a willing sex partner, as most of us prefer to believe, we cannot deny that plenty of other women in King David's court were conscripted for sexual duty to kings and generals without their consent. David's first wife, Michal, is dragged from her second husband and restored to David's harem merely because David demands it, and, as we shall shortly see, the concubines of David's royal harem are sexually humiliated en masse and in public. Each of these outrages is less a matter of sexual pleasure than of political advantage—yet another reminder that, in the Bible as in life, sex and politics cannot be teased apart.
CITY OF JOAB
So distracted was David by all of these upheavals in the royal household that it fell to Joab alone to campaign against the king of Ammon and conquer the royal city of Rabbah. But Joab was loyal enough to reserve the final triumph for his old comrade, even if his message carried a barb of reproach to the king who had called his own capital the City of David.
“I have fought against Rabbah, yea, I have captured the citadel. So muster the rest of the army, encamp against the city, and capture it yourself,” warned Joab, “lest I take the city, and it be called after my name.” (2 Sam. 12:28)29
David finally stirred from his palace, placed himself at the head of an army, and marched out to pluck the apple of victory before it dropped of its own weight into Joab's hands. The city fell, and David enjoyed the special pleasure of lifting the be-jeweled golden crown from a statue of Milcom, god of the Ammonites, and placing it on his own head. Then he ordered the plunder of Rabbah and the destruction of its defensive fortifications. At last, “David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem,” the Bible notes.
What lay before David and his people on the king's return to Jerusalem was not a golden age of imperial glory, even if some Bible historians delight in depicting his reign in precisely that way. Rather, just as Nathan had warned, the house of David would come to be a snake pit of sexual predation and political conspiracy, deception and betrayal, blood feuds and blood-vengeance.
The first blow to David's kingship—his dalliance with Bathsheba and its tragic aftermath—had been entirely self-inflicted, unless the pious reader is willing to follow the Talmudic rabbis in putting the blame on Bathsheba, Uriah, Satan, and God, too. Soon enough, a second blow would fall on the house of David, but this next one would originate wholly within David's intimate family circle.
* See chapter 5.
* Nowhere does the Bible confirm Nathan's remarkable suggestion that Saul's wives ended up in David's harem. To explain the accusation, the Talmud speculates that Ahinoam of Jezreel, one of David's wives (1 Sam. 27:3), was the same woman identified as “Ahinoam the daughter of Ahimaaz,” the only woman actually named in the Bible as a wife of Saul. (1 Sam. 14:50)
Chapter Eleven
THE RAPE OF TAMAR
Oh miserable men, who destroy your own species through those pleasures intended to reproduce it, how is it that this dying beauty doesn't freeze your fierce lusts?
—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE LEVITE OF EPHRAIM
Two women named Tamar figure crucially in the life of King David. The first Tamar was a Canaanite who disguised herself as a harlot in order to seduce her father-in-law, Judah, so that she might conceive a child.* She was a remarkable woman, beautiful and beguiling, assertive and brave. Despite her sins of incest and fornication and prostitution, the Bible pronounces her a righteous woman. David was a distant but direct descendant of Tamar and Judah, founder of the tribe of which he was king, and her passionate blood ran in his veins.
At first glance the linkage between Tamar and David may seem odd and off-putting to the devout reader of the Bible. Is it not ironic that David—God's anointed, king of all Israel, and progenitor of the Messiah—traced his ancestry back to the bastard son of a foreign woman who played the harlot with her own father-in-law? By now, however, we know enough about David to realize that his bloodlines are perfectly appropriate. The very qualities that enabled the first Tamar to survive and prevail against the stern patriarchy of tribal Israel are the same qualities that allowed David to survive and prevail in the cutthroat political landscape of royal Israel—boldness and courage, guile and willfulness, and a taste for sexual adventure.
The second Tamar was the daughter of King David, the only one actually named in the Bible, and surely he was mindful of the exploits of the first Tamar when he chose the name for the baby girl. Tamar, like her father, earned a rare word of praise for her physical beauty from the biblical author—“a fair sister” is how she is introduced (2 Sam. 13:1)—and, as we shall see, she was no less desirable than the Canaanite woman whose name she carried. But the daughter of David was doomed to a tragic fate; her intimate sexual encounter with a near relation would be sordid rather than sublime, and it would end in tragedy rather than exaltation.
LOVE HURTS
Among the admirers of the fair Tamar in King David's court was a man named Amnon, the crown prince of Israel and Tamar's half brother. Amnon, firstborn son of David, was destined to replace his father on the throne one day, and the Bible allows us to understand that he was pampered by a doting father and feared by his many siblings. Perhaps that is why Amnon felt free to satisfy his every urge and impulse, no matter how grotesque or even criminal, and perhaps that's why nothing cautioned him against the longing he felt for his half sister.
“Amnon the son of David loved her,” the Bible reports. “And Amnon was so distressed that he fell sick because of his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin, and it seemed hard to Amnon to do anything unto her.” (2 Sam. 13:1–2)
The Bible may call it “love,” but what Amnon felt for Tamar was only lust, a demanding sexual hunger that he was unable to repress. So besotted was Amnon with unwholesome yearning for his half sister that he lost his appetite—his appetite for food, that is—and he began to grow thin and wan.
Soon enough, Amnon's pale face and shrunken frame and sulky mood caught the attention of his cousin and constant companion, a man named Jonadab.
“Why, O son of the king,” Jonadab asked his cousin, “are you so low-spirited morning after morning?” (2 Sam. 13:4)1
“I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister,” Ammon replied, identifying his half sibling by reference to Tamar's full brother, Absalom, as if to downplay the fact that he himself and Tamar were brother and sister. (2 Sam. 13:4)
Jonadab was “a very subtle man,” as the biblical author tells us, and he devised a diabolical plan to put Tamar within reach of Amnon. (2 Sam. 13:3) “Take to your bed and pretend to be ill,” Jonadab suggested. “When your father comes to see you, say to him: ‘Let my sister come, I pray thee, and
give me my food. Let her prepare it in front of me, so that I may watch her and then take it from her own hands.’ ” (2 Sam. 13:5–6)2
Amnon did exactly as his cousin had suggested—“Let my sister come, I pray thee,” he begged of his father, “and make a few cakes in front of me”—and King David did exactly as his favorite son asked.
“Go now to thy brother Amnon's house,” the king ordered Tamar, “and prepare a meal for him.” (2 Sam. 13:6–7)3
“COME LIE WITH ME, MY SISTER”
At the command of her father the king, Tamar dutifully presented herself at the house of her half brother and set to work preparing food for Amnon as he watched from his sickbed. The Bible pauses to describe the making of the meal in detail—we are hearing a woman's voice, perhaps, and it is the voice of a storyteller who knows how to stoke the fear and anticipation of the reader.
And she took dough, and kneaded it, and made cakes in his sight, and did bake the cakes. And she took the pan, and poured them out before, but he refused to eat.
(2 Sam. 13:8–9)
Amnon, agitated and aroused but not by the meal his sister had prepared for him, suddenly ordered the rest of his household to leave: “Have out all men from me.” When he was alone with his half sister—just as he had intended—Amnon instructed Tamar to bring the cakes to his bedside “that I may eat of thy hand.” And when she approached his bed, Amnon seized her and spoke out loud what he had really wanted of her all along.
“Come lie with me, my sister.” (2 Sam. 13:9–11)
The phrase that Amnon spoke was a standard biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse, although the literal translation that appears in most English-language Bibles is attenuated and oblique. Tamar would have understood the sexual demand that Amnon was making upon her. And Tamar, unwilling to submit herself to her half brother's pleasure, argued passionately and eloquently to change Amnon's mind.
“No, my brother, do not force me, for no such thing ought to be done in Israel,” she protested. “Do not behave like a beast!” (2 Sam. 13:12)4
Unable to resist Amnon's superior physical strength, Tamar resorted to her own powers of speech—she tried to talk Am-non out of raping her. Both of them, she argued, would be disgraced by what he proposed to do: “Where could I go and hide my disgrace? And you would sink as low as any beast in Israel.” (2 Sam. 13:13)5 And she improvised an ingenious argument to save herself from forcible rape by holding out the tantalizing prospect that Amnon could have what he wanted if he only asked their father for permission. “Why not speak to the king?” she urged. “He will not refuse you leave to marry me.” (2 Sam. 13:13)6 But Amnon ignored her desperate plea.
“Being stronger than she,” the biblical author bluntly reports, “he forced her, and lay with her.” (2 Sam. 13:14)
Once Amnon had spent himself atop his sister, his self-proclaimed “love” turned suddenly to hatred—or perhaps more accurately, his lust turned to disgust. To explain Amnon's sudden change of heart, which makes an ugly scene even uglier, the Talmudic sages speculated, remarkably enough, that “Amnon hated Tamar because, when he raped her, he became entangled in her pubic hair and injured himself.” Perhaps more credible and convincing is a truism about human nature. “A number of poets and psychologists could be cited on the readiness with which love … turns to hatred,” observes P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “and the intensity of the hatred thus produced.”7 The Bible, without pausing to explain exactly why, merely confirms Amnon's change of heart. “The hatred wherewith he hated her,” the biblical author observes, “was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.” And so Amnon threw his sister out of the bed in which he had just raped her. (2 Sam. 13:15)
“Arise,” said Amnon, suddenly unable to stand the sight of the woman he had just raped. “Be gone.” (2 Sam. 13:15)
A WAR OF WORDS
At this ugly moment, among the most repugnant in all of the Bible, the biblical author allows us to see that Amnon and Tamar are truly the children of David, if only because Tamar shares some of his best traits and Amnon some of his worst. Amnon, like David, is a man driven by his sexual appetites and willing to use violence to get what he wants. And Tamar, again like David, is beautiful to behold and gifted with an eloquent tongue, which she has used here in a desperate effort to prevent her half brother from raping her.
Indeed, several of the pivotal women in David's life are shown to use sexual allure or artful speech—perhaps the only kind of armament available to a woman in biblical Israel—to protect and vindicate themselves and their loved ones. Even if feminist Bible scholarship bewails the victimhood of women in the Bible, and especially the women in David's life, the fact remains that more than a few heroic women refused to remain silent and compliant in the face of superior male strength and authority. And, significantly, words were their only weapons.
Abigail prevailed upon David to refrain from the slaughter of her husband, Nabal, and his household with an ornate speech. Bathsheba will change the course of history by persuading David to choose her son as his successor to the throne of Israel. And Tamar defended herself from rape as best she could by resort to words alone, appealing first to Amnon's higher nature—“You would sink as low as any beast”—and then to his self-interest— “Speak to the king. He will not refuse you leave to marry me.” (2 Sam. 13:13)
The notion that a woman might try to talk a rapist out of raping her is plausible enough to the modern reader, but the last argument that Tamar offered in defense of her virtue seems outlandish and incredible—would Amnon seriously consider marrying his own sister rather than raping her? After all, the Bible plainly and sternly prohibits all manner of incest. “None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness,” the God of Israel, using a standard biblical euphemism for sexual relations, decreed in the laws handed down to Moses. “The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or the daughter of thy mother, whether born at home, or born abroad, thou shalt not uncover.” (Lev. 18:6, 9)
The biblical law against incest, in fact, lists every variation and permutation of forbidden sexual conduct. Indeed, incest between a brother and his half sister—“the daughter of thy father” (Lev. 18:9)—is specifically ruled out by the set of laws known as the Holiness Code. (Lev. 17 ff.) And so Tamar and Amnon must have known, even in the hottest moments of his sexual assault on her, that a marriage between siblings was beyond the power of the king to approve because it was strictly forbidden by ancient taboo and the law of Moses, too.
Or was it?
SISTER AND WIFE
On the strength of Tamar's single urgent plea to Amnon, Bible scholarship has constructed the surprising argument that marriage and sexual relations among siblings were not forbidden during the supposed lifetime of King David, despite the laws against incest and other sexual misconduct that can be found throughout the Bible. Perhaps Tamar meant exactly what she said when she held out the tantalizing prospect that King David would consent to a marriage between his daughter and his son.
The ancients, as it turns out, were far less concerned about incest than the modern readers of the Bible. Contrary to what we have been taught by Sigmund Freud, the taboo against incest was not primal and universal, and the biblical world regarded incest with far less horror than we might suppose by reading the parade of sexual atrocities in the Book of Leviticus. Throughout the ancient Near East, and down through history, sex and marriage among close relations have been not merely tolerated but actually celebrated. And, it has been argued, the cosmopolitan court of King David was both familiar and comfortable with such practices.
The ancient Egyptians, for example, embraced the notion of incestuous marriage both in religious myth and common practice. Because property passed from a mother to her eldest daughter, rather than from father to son, an Egyptian father might marry his own daughter, or a son might marry his sister, in order to prevent the family wealth from falling under the control of a son-in-law or a brother-in-law.8 The reigning pharaohs cus
tomarily married their own sisters in pious imitation of the myth of Isis and Osiris, the sibling-lovers with whom the kings of Egypt identified. Although a prohibition against sexual intercourse between a father and his daughter is literally chiseled in stone in the Code of Hammurabi, the sacred myths of ancient Mesopotamia depicted gods and goddesses in sexual couplings with their own offspring and siblings. And the people of the land of Canaan, among whom the Israelites lived throughout their long history, told a tale in which the god called Baal engaged in sexual union with his sister, Anat.9
If the court of King David was “Egyptianized” and “Ca-naanized,” as scholars have surmised, then the notion of marriage between Amnon and Tamar might not have seemed so bizarre. Moreover, his court may have embraced the practices of neighboring kingdoms in an effort to distinguish the new monarchy in Jerusalem from its tribal origins. “These are the first Israelite brood,” writes Joel Rosenberg, referring to the adult children of King David, including Amnon and Tamar, “among whom the more complex and sophisticated aristocratic marriage patterns in Egypt and Mesopotamia are capable of being taken seriously.”10
In fact, at certain vivid moments, the Bible betrays an easygoing attitude toward incest in general and the marriage of brother and sister in particular. For example, the daughters of Lot, a nephew of the patriarch Abraham, ply their father with wine and then sleep with him in order to conceive, all without condemnation or punishment of any kind. (Gen. 19:1–38) Indeed, since Lot's daughters apparently believed that the rest of humankind had been destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah, they are praised in biblical tradition for acting courageously to preserve human life on earth by the expedient of sleeping with their father.
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