King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Elsewhere in the Bible, the Patriarchs pass off their wives as their sisters—not once but three times! When Abraham and Sarah journey to Egypt in search of food during a famine in Canaan, Abraham masquerades as Sarah's brother out of fear that any lordly Egyptian who took a fancy to Sarah would be more likely to slay her spouse than her sibling in order to get his hands on her. In a rare biblical “triplet”—that is, the same story told in three different versions—Abraham resorts to the same ploy in an encounter with a Philistine king called Abimelech, and so does his son Isaac. Sarah is recruited for the harem of the pharaoh of Egypt in the first version and that of the king of the Philistines in the second. Rebekah, too, ends up in the bed of the same Philistine king in the third version (Gen. 12:10–20, 20:2–10, 26:1–10), and in all three versions it is only divine intervention that prevents these foreign kings from sleeping with the Matriarchs.

  The motive of Abraham and Isaac in passing off a wife as a sister is the same in each incident: “He feared to say: ‘My wife,’ ” the biblical author writes of Isaac, “ ‘lest the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah, because she is fair to look upon.’ ” (Gen. 26:7) Yet, intriguingly, Abraham is shown to insist that his claim to be Sarah's brother was not merely an act of deception: “She is the daughter of my father,” riddles Abraham, “but not the daughter of my mother.” (Gen. 20:12)11 Perhaps Abraham was merely engaging in yet another lie when he claimed that Sarah was both his wife and his half sister—or perhaps, as some scholars have speculated, he was telling the truth. If so, the Bible may preserve evidence that the ancient Israelites, like other peoples of the ancient world, did not object to marriage between siblings after all.

  In fact, the early Israelites may have been influenced by the folkways of an ancient people known as the Hurrians, who customarily identified their wives as their sisters in order to invoke “the safeguards and privileges” that were available to a man's sister but not his wife. By the time the oldest tales and traditions of ancient Israel were collected, the authors and editors who created what we know as the Bible simply did not remember or recognize the Hurrian practice of wife-as-sister.12 But David and his household, who are believed to have lived a thousand years before the final canonization of the Bible, may have remembered and honored these oldest of traditions.

  WHAT TAMAR KNEW AND WHEN SHE KNEW IT

  Of course, at the terrible moment when Tamar was facing forcible rape, she did not pause to parse out these legal and anthropological niceties. Whether or not sex between siblings was forbidden in Jerusalem of the tenth century B.C.E., Tamar may have held out the prospect of a consecrated marriage just to deter her half brother from assaulting her. But there is another and more surprising explanation for Tamar's bold proposal. She did not heed the stern commandments of Leviticus, some scholars argue, because she had never heard of them.

  According to the formal chronology of the Bible itself, the strict and wide-ranging legal codes that are found in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy were dictated by God to Moses during the years of wandering in the wilderness, long before the conquest of Canaan and long before David ascended the throne. By the time of David's supposed life and reign, the Bible insists, the so-called Five Books of Moses functioned as the constitution of ancient Israel. For that reason, the laws against incest in the Book of Leviticus would have been well known to David and his offspring and would have ruled out a marriage between Tamar and Amnon.

  The last century or so of modern Bible scholarship, however, suggests a very different chronology. The core of the life story of David, including the heartbreaking encounter between Amnon and Tamar, was probably composed long before the law codes of the Torah. Indeed, the Book of Samuel is thought to embody some of the oldest passages in all of the Hebrew Bible. By contrast, even the oldest codes of law probably did not find their way into the Bible until the priests and scribes of ancient Israel fixed the text of the Five Books of Moses in their final form as late as the fourth century B.C.E. Precisely for that reason, the Bible has been called “a veritable anthology of Israelite covenant law representing seven hundred years of development, yet all of it introduced by words such as ‘And the Lord said to Moses….’ ”13

  If so, the men and women of ancient Israel, including Tamar, would have been wholly ignorant of the laws of Leviticus, which would not be set down in writing for another two or three hundred years. In fact, the cosmopolitan princes and princesses of King David's court may have been far more familiar—and more comfortable, too—with the royal traditions of Egypt and Canaan than with the priestly law of the Israelites.

  HER GARMENT OF MANY COLORS

  Once Amnon had satisfied himself, Tamar was reduced to begging her brother for mercy of a very strained kind—she did not want to be thrust out of Amnon's house, where she might at least conceal her shame, into the street, where all would know by her appearance that she had been sexually abused by her own brother.

  “No! It is wicked to send me away,” Tamar protested. “This is harder to bear than all you have done to me.” (2 Sam. 13:16) (NEB)

  Amnon, his sexual appetite sated to the point of disgust, found no such mercy in his heart. “Put out this woman from me,” he ordered one of his servants, who had apparently been within earshot throughout the sexual assault, “and bolt the door after her.” (2 Sam. 13:17)14

  “Put out this woman” is how Amnon's words are rendered in standard English translations, but the original Hebrew text reveals that Amnon no longer regarded his half sister as a human being: “Put out this thing” is the literal translation of his words.15 And the servant did as he was told: Tamar suddenly found herself in the street, and we may suppose that she attracted the stares of all who passed Amnon's house as she was pushed out the door.

  Her hair was disheveled, or so we may imagine. Her clothing was in disarray and her face, perhaps, was battered. And the Bible confirms that Tamar, at the moment of her public humiliation, was readily recognizable as the daughter of King David. “Now she had a garment of many colors upon her,” the biblical author pauses to point out, “for with such robes were the king's daughters that were virgins apparelled.”

  The Hebrew phrase that is used to describe Tamar's “garment of many colors” is the same one used for Joseph's famous “coat of many colors.” (Gen. 37:3) But the familiar wording of the King James Version, which is derived from the Septuagint, is nowadays regarded as purely fanciful. “A long-sleeved robe” is how the same garment is described in the New English Bible, and the term may have been borrowed by the Israelites from an Akkadian phrase that referred to “a ceremonial robe which could be draped about statues of goddesses.”16 Even without such pagan symbolism, the garment would have identified Tamar as someone “associated with the highest social or political status.”17

  Thus, as Tamar rose to her feet and stumbled off, anyone who saw the bruised young woman would readily know that she was not only a victim of rape but, shockingly, a daughter of the king.

  A DAMAGED WOMAN

  Tamar understood from the very moment that Amnon commenced his assault—“Come lie with me, my sister!”—that her life would be changed forever if he succeeded in having his way with her. No longer a virgin, Tamar was now unacceptable as a wife even if she was the daughter of the king. According to tradition in ancient Israel, as in so many other times and places, no man would marry a woman who had been deflowered by another man, whether with or without her consent.

  Indeed, the tragic fate of Tamar helps to explain why the penalty for rape under biblical law was the marriage of the rapist to the woman he had raped, at least if the victim so desired. (Deut. 22:28–29) As shocking as it may seem to the modern reader, the compulsory marriage of the rapist and his victim was understood as a form of reparation—since the rapist had rendered his victim unmarriageable, the only way to repair the damage was to marry her.

  And yet if we share the assumption of the biblical author that the law against the marriage of siblings was fully in ef
fect, Tamar understood that a marriage to Amnon was out of the question. So as she fled from her brother's house, Tamar regarded herself as a woman damaged beyond repair. She solemnly performed the ancient rituals of mourning as if in grief for something within herself that had died.

  And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment of many colors that was on her, and she laid her hand on her head, and went her way, crying aloud as she went.

  (2 Sam. 13:19)

  Significantly, Tamar did not seek refuge in the house of her father, nor did she tell the king what her half brother had dared to do to her. Instead she stumbled through the streets of the City of David toward the house of her brother, Absalom. Only there, sheltered by a young man with whom she shared both a mother and a father, did Tamar expect to find shelter.

  WHAT DID DAVID KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?

  Exactly what was David's role in the rape of Tamar, his daughter, by Amnon, his son? King David, a man who was governed by his sexual impulses and was an expert at guile and deception, may have understood without being told that Amnon wanted more than tender loving care from his half sister when he asked that she come to his sickbed and feed him. Indeed, David may have been tipped off to Amnon's real intention by the very word used by the crown prince to describe the food that he wanted his sister to prepare.

  The Hebrew word that Amnon used, lebibot, is usually translated into English as “bread” (JPS) or “cakes” (KJV) or “dumplings” (AB). But these mundane words fail to capture the sensual overtones of the Hebrew word that fell from Amnon's lips. Feminist Bible scholar Phyllis Trible, for example, calls lebibot an “erotic pun” that derives from the Hebrew word for “heart” and suggests arousal and pleasure.18 “Libido cakes” is how another Bible commentator renders the word in order to convey the sexual demand that Ammon intended to make on Tamar,19 and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., concedes that “[Amnon] is privately anticipating more than the restoration of his health.”20

  So the question must be asked: Did David understand Am-non's intentions when he sent his daughter into Amnon's bedchamber? One scholar suggests that David was not only tacitly approving Amnon's sexual claim on his sister but actually “delivering her into the hands of … her rapist.”21 Another finds it “difficult to believe that David, himself the author of much subtler intrigues, would have been completely taken in by such transparent designs as this one.”22 The charge laid against David in contemporary Bible scholarship, where he is regarded as an unindicted coconspirator in the rape of his own daughter by his son, is so disturbing that even the conspiracy to murder Uriah seems rather ordinary by comparison.

  Still, the Bible has already allowed us to see an aspect of David's personality that is perfectly consistent with the charge of conspiracy in the rape of Tamar. At certain unsettling moments, David is presented as a shadowy figure, a manipulator, a conspirator. The “kingly style of David,” according to Joel Rosenberg, has always been characterized by “his movement within a cloud of agents, henchmen, and informers.” By the time his children are fully grown, David seems “tired, vague, jaded, long used to (and dependent on) the ten thousand small acts of evasion and self-forgiveness, the royal loopholes and exculpations, that the king, as arbiter of the sacred and the profane, is empowered to wield.”23

  What's more, the aging King David showed himself to be a softhearted and sentimental father, sometimes dangerously so, when it came to a favorite son. Clearly, David doted on Amnon, his eldest son and his designated heir, and he complied with Am-non's demand for the services of his half sister without a moment of inquiry or reflection. So David may have allowed himself to be co-opted into Amnon's transparent plot out of his own conspiratorial habits and reflexes, his inability to say no to his firstborn son, and his ability to blind himself to something that he did not wish to see.

  A DESOLATE WOMAN

  Once she has passed into the house of her brother, the second Tamar disappears from the pages of the Bible. “So Tamar remained desolate in her brother Absalom's house,” the Bible discloses (2 Sam. 13:20), and that is the last we hear of her. Given the limited roles available to a woman in biblical times—a virgin daughter in the house of her father, a consecrated wife in the house of her husband, or a widow in the house of her son—we may gather that Tamar remained hidden away in the house of her brother, a desolate woman until the day of her death.

  “Keep this to yourself,” counseled Absalom, who seemed to understand the treacherous family politics behind the rape. “He is your brother—do not take it to heart.” (2 Sam. 13:20) (NEB)

  But Absalom did not forget the insult that Tamar had suffered. He may have spoken soothing words to Tamar, but his own heart was afire with hatred for Amnon, and he burned for revenge against his sister's rapist. Still, Absalom checked his own impulse toward blood-vengeance and waited to see what King David would do about the crime that the crown prince had committed against his daughter.

  Absalom himself said not a word to Amnon, the Bible reports, “neither good nor bad.” (2 Sam. 13:22) Instead, he waited and watched to see what King David would do to punish the rapist within his own household. But Absalom waited in vain: David did nothing at all. “When King David heard the whole story, he was very angry,” the Bible reports, “but he would not hurt Amnon because he was his eldest son and he loved him.” (2 Sam. 13:21) (NEB)24

  Time passed and King David seemed to behave as if the ugly incident had never happened. Tamar may have disappeared from the king's table, but Amnon still idled around the palace with all of his power and privilege fully intact. All the while, Absalom swallowed his anger and resentment until he could no longer stomach it. At last, Absalom vowed to do what David refused to do.

  The third and final blow to the house of David was about to fall.

  * See The Harlot by the Side of the Road, Chapter 7, “The Woman Who Willed Herself into History.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “BLOODSTAINED

  FIEND OF HELL!”

  My soul disclaims the kindred of her earth; And, made for empire, whispers me within, “Desire of greatness is a godlike sin.”

  —JOHN DRYDEN,

  “ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL”

  Two years had passed since the rape of the Tamar, but David had done nothing to punish Amnon, and Absalom still seethed with hatred for the man who had despoiled his sister. So Absalom resolved to take the matter into his own hands. To lure Amnon into his trap, Absalom invited King David and the royal household to a festival on his estate outside Jerusalem—“a feast fit for a king.” (2 Sam. 13:28) (NEB) It was early spring, the season when the sheep were gathered for shearing, and a traditional occasion for feasting and drinking and merry-making.

  “Let the king, I pray thee, and his servants go,” Absalom said to his father. (2 Sam. 13:24)1

  “No, my son, let us not all go,” demurred David, his suspicions aroused by Absalom's sudden amiability, “lest we be a burden to you.” (2 Sam. 13:25)2

  “If not, I pray thee,” Absalom persisted, “let my brother Am-non go with us.” (2 Sam. 13:26)

  “Why should he go with you?” David asked, abandoning all pretense of concern for overtaxing Absalom's hospitality. (2 Sam. 13:27)

  Absalom persisted. He implored the king to send all of his sons, including the crown prince, even if the king himself declined to go. Ever a sentimental father, David may have convinced himself that Absalom was finally ready to forgive Amnon for the rape of Tamar and resign himself to Amnon's eventual kingship. At last David consented to send all of his sons to Absalom's estate. And so the royal princes of Israel, the crown prince among them, mounted their mules and headed out of Jerusalem on the northerly road to Absalom's estate at Baal-hazor.

  “STRIKE!”

  Absalom arranged for an abundance of food and drink—the Hebrew word used in the biblical text (misteh) suggests that the banquet was to be “a drinking-bout”—because he counted on getting Amnon drunk.3 Just before the festivities were about to begin, he summoned a few of
his most trusted servants and issued one last instruction.

  “Bide your time, and when Amnon is merry with wine, I shall say to you, ‘Strike!’ ” said Absalom to his men. “Then kill Am-non.” (2 Sam. 13:28) (NEB)

  Absalom understood the political implications of assassinating the crown prince of Israel: David would surely regard the murder not only as fratricide but as treason. And so he sought to reassure the men he had charged with the task of killing his half brother.

  “Fear not,” he told them. “For I myself have given the command! Be courageous, and be valiant!” (2 Sam. 13:28)4

  Absalom, we can imagine, must have greeted Amnon warmly and watched him attentively during the banquet, perhaps smiling at the crown prince from across the room to reassure him that all had been forgiven. The lilting music, the sizzle of roasting lamb, and the sloshing of red wine as cups were raised and filled again and again must have lulled Amnon and the other princes into thinking that Absalom's bitter hatred was spent and peace would now be restored within the royal family.

  And then, suddenly, Absalom gave the signal—“Strike down Amnon!”—and his men fell on the unsuspecting prince, stabbing him with daggers and short swords, and leaving him dead where he sat. (2 Sam. 13:28)5