One of the sharper ironies in the Book of Samuel, a work of profound and persistent irony, is the fact that the outrage against Tamar takes place during the reign of a supposedly righteous king. At the end of the Book of Judges, as we have already seen, the biblical author holds out the promise that a king on the throne of Israel will preclude the kind of sexual violence that befell the Levite traveler’s concubine in Gibeah. (see chapter thirteen.) Yet Tamar discovers that even the most glorious and powerful king in the history of Israel does nothing to prevent or punish the outrage to which she is subjected by her own brother. “Behold, the princes of Israel, every one according to his might, have been in thee to shed blood,” God will later instruct the prophet Ezekiel to say, itemizing the “abominations” that have been committed within “the bloody city” of the Chosen People. “[A]nd each in thee hath defiled his sister, his father’s daughter” (Ezek. 22:11).
“A CHARIOT AND HORSES AND FIFTY MEN”
Tamar disappears into her brother’s house after the rape, never to be seen or heard again in the streets of Jerusalem or the pages of the Bible. But Tamar does not disappear from history—her rape sets into motion a chain reaction of assassination, insurrection, and civil war that threatens to topple King David from the throne and continues to afflict the royal house until the very end of his days. The rape of Tamar, we come to understand, may have been an intimate personal ordeal for the woman herself, but it was a crime with very public and distinctly political implications for the rest of her family and the nation of Israel.
Tellingly, Amnon himself, firstborn son of the king and heir apparent to the throne, is unconcerned about the authority or even the anger of his father when he sets out to sexually exploit Tamar. His insouciance is an early signal that David is no longer taken quite seriously by his own sons. Tamar obliquely invokes the threat of royal punishment in the moments before the rape—“speak unto the king”—but Amnon ignores his sister’s subtle reminder that he will have to contend with their father if he does what he is threatening to do. Amnon simply does not care what his father will do, and he proceeds to commit a sexual outrage against the royal princess in a manner that seems calculated to bring the incident to the attention of the king, the royal court, and the public at large: not content with raping his sister, Amnon makes a spectacle of the ruined princess by ordering her to be thrown into the street.
If the rape of Tamar amounts to a test of the king’s authority, then David fails the test miserably when he fails to punish or even admonish his audacious son. The lesson that Amnon and the rest of the court learn from the whole sordid affair is that the crown prince can do anything that strikes his fancy, no matter how outrageous, because the king is too passive, too indecisive, and too indulgent of his heir to do anything about it. From the moment of Tamar’s rape, the once-mighty King David is marked as a monarch in sharp decline, and his apparent weakness excites the ambitions of his other sons.
King David’s passivity is carefully noted by Absalom, the king’s third-born son and Tamara full brother, who is shown to be as thoroughly ambitious and calculating as his father. Absalom seems to draw at least a couple of ominous conclusions from the rape of Tamar. First, if anyone is going to exact revenge on Amnon for raping Tamar, it must be Absalom himself. Second, by striking down Amnon, Absalom will put himself within striking distance of his father’s throne. Once Amnon is good and dead, all that stands between Absalom and absolute power is the impotent and indecisive David—and Absalom, embittered by the leniency of the king toward his sister’s rapist and covetous of the crown, is perfectly willing to take on his own father in open insurrection.
After the assassination of Amnon at the sheepshearing festival at Baal-hazor, Absalom puts himself beyond the reach of David by seeking refuge in the court of his maternal grandfather, the king of a neighboring country called Geshur. Three years pass before David, bereaved over the death of one son and the self-exile of another son, is persuaded to invite Absalom back to Jerusalem, and another two years go by before the king consents to see his errant son. At last, a poignant reunion is arranged. “[Absalom] bowed himself on his face to the ground before the king,” the biblical author tells us, “and the king kissed Absalom” (2 Sam. 14:33).
But, once again, we are observing an expert con artist at work. Absalom is only faking the role of remorseful son. Just as Amnon had feigned illness while plotting to rape his sister, Absalom feigns obeisance toward his father while plotting to dethrone him. The plot goes public when Absalom acquires “a chariot and horses and fifty men to run before him” (2 Sam. 15:1)—a showy entourage worthy of a king and an unmistakable act of defiance toward King David. Sure enough, Absalom arranges to be crowned as king in Hebron, the very place where David was first anointed king over Judah, and thus goes into open rebellion against his father. “As soon as ye hear the sound of the horn,” Absalom instructs the provocateurs that he scatters throughout Israel, “then ye shall say: ‘Absalom is king in Hebron’” (2 Sam. 15:10).
David abandons his palace in panic and terror—he is literally barefoot and weeping as he escapes over the Mount of Olives—and flees from Jerusalem into the wilderness with a few loyal courtiers and a band of foreign mercenaries to protect him from his own son and his own people. Meanwhile, the newly crowned Absalom makes a very public display of his kingship by engaging in sexual intercourse with ten of David’s concubines in a specially erected pavilion on the roof of the royal palace, “in the sight of all Israel” (2 Sam. 16:22). Thus comes to pass the very fate that the Almighty decreed for David to punish him for his infidelities with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah.
“I will take thy wives before thine eyes,” God has already vowed through the prophet Nathan. “For thou didst it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun” (2 Sam. 12:11–12).
David musters an army and goes to war against Absalom to reclaim his throne. At last, David seems to recapture the courage, charisma, and sheer good luck that once blessed his efforts in war and politics. His soldiers put the army of Absalom to rout and some twenty thousand men are slain in the forest of Ephraim, where David is able to put his youthful experience as a guerrilla fighter to good use in the rugged terrain.24 “[T]he forest devoured more people that day than the sword devoured,” the biblical author observes (2 Sam. 18:8). Even in victory, however, David is incapable of dealing harshly with a rebellious son. “Deal gently for my sake with the young man,” David instructs his commanders, “even with Absalom” (2 Sam. 18:5).
But Absalom, as it turns out, is doomed to die by reason of a freak accident on the way to the battlefield. The biblical author has already told us that Absalom, like his sister Tamar, is beautiful to behold—“Now in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty” (2 Sam. 14:25)—and his crowning glory, so to speak, is a long and luxuriant head of hair, so abundant that it weighs out at two hundred shekels (two or three pounds) when he gets his annual haircut. But it is Absalom’s hair that betrays him—his mule carries him under a large oak tree, and his head is caught in the low-hanging branches. “[H]e was taken up between the heaven and the earth,” writes the biblical author, rendering the faintly comical scene in grandiloquent language, “and the mule that was under him went on” (2 Sam. 18:9).
Absalom is found by Joab, the same general who had arranged for the murder of Uriah at David’s command. Absalom is still alive, but Joab defies the king’s order to spare him—Joab strikes Absalom in the heart with three darts and then sets ten of his armor-bearers upon the helpless and wounded young man, thus bringing Absalom’s life and brief reign to an ignoble end. Joab is apparently less sentimental than David on the subject of rebellious sons, and his “Machiavellian sense of public morality”25 prompts the general to make an example of Absalom, if only to deter would-be pretenders to the throne. Upon learning of Absalom’s death, King David does not rebuke Joab for disregarding his order to spare Absalom, but he famously proclaims his grief. “
O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!” the king wails. “Would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Sam. 19:1).
Absalom’s death seems even more poignant when we recall that his sister remains in his household back in Jerusalem, a desolate woman now utterly lacking a protector or a provider. But the Bible allows us one intriguing hint of Tamar’s destiny. Absalom, we are told, is the father of four children of his own, three sons and a daughter. His daughter, like his sister, is “a woman of fair countenance” (2 Sam. 14:27), and both women are named in honor of the first Tamar, a distant ancestress who so boldly and courageously wrote herself into history. (See chapter six.) The Bible does not tell us what becomes of these two Tamars, but we might imagine that they befriend one another and somehow manage to survive in spite of the sorry fate that has befallen them.
HEAT
King David’s decline begins with Bathsheba and the adulterous affair that leads to the birth of Solomon, but we do not encounter her again until the very end of the king’s reign, when he is old and feeble and no longer much interested in pleasures of the flesh. Bathsheba boldly enters the king’s bedchamber even as a luscious young concubine named Abishag is “ministering” to the king’s needs. We don’t know exactly what Abishag is doing, but the biblical author allows us to understand that her ministrations will not excite the sexual jealousy of Bathsheba because the old king is impotent.
“Let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat,” urge the solicitous courtiers who have recruited Abishag for service in the royal bedchamber. But David’s once-mighty sexual appetites have flagged, and we are told that “the king knew her not” (1 Kings 1:2, 4).
Bathsheba reenters the biblical narrative at a crucial point in the saga of King David—indeed, it is really the decisive moment of the Court History, which is also sometimes called the Succession Narrative because of what happens next. She implores David to anoint their son, Solomon, as his chosen successor to the throne of Israel. And she informs David that another one of his many sons, Adonijah, has already declared himself to be king and is running around Jerusalem even now with the same kind of entourage that Absalom once used to announce his kingship—a chariot and horses and fifty men.
“And now, behold, Adonijah reigneth,” says Bathsheba to the failing king, “and thou … knowest it not” (1 Kings 1:18).
While Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan are lobbying David in favor of Solomon, Adonijah is lining up his own allies, including the general who so often played the role of the royal hit man, the faithful Joab. But Bathsheba succeeds in extracting what she wants from David—“Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me,” says the weary old king, “and he shall sit upon my throne in my stead”—and Bathsheba bows to the floor in gratitude. “Let my lord king David live for ever,” she says.
Bathsheba’s words are to no avail. David lives only long enough to advise Solomon on whom he ought to trust and whom he ought to kill when David is gone. In a scene later artfully copied in The Godfather, David obliquely instructs Solomon to arrange for the murder of Joab, just as Joab once arranged for the murder of Uriah and Absalom. “[L]et not his hoar head go down to the grave in peace,” says David. Then, after a bloody reign of forty years, the remarkable life of the old king is finally over: “And David slept with his fathers,” the incomparable storyteller of Samuel and Kings concludes (1 Kings 2:6, 10).
But Solomon is not quite yet secure on the throne of David, and the Succession Narrative is not yet over. Adonijah renews his bid for the throne by audaciously asking Bathsheba to petition King Solomon for one little souvenir of their father—David’s tempting but untouched concubine, Abishag. Readily if rather disingenuously, Bathsheba agrees to carry Adonijah’s message to Solomon, knowing full well that her son will not mistake the real intent behind Adonijah’s request. Just as Absalom had once staked his claim on David’s throne by sleeping with the king’s ten concubines on the roof of the palace, Adonijah is now asserting his own right to reign as king of Israel by seeking to wed the last of the king’s wives. Solomon listens to the message that his mother brings to him, marks Adonijah as a deadly enemy, and resolves not to let his hoar head go down to the grave in peace. “God do so to me, and more also,” vows Solomon, “if Adonijah have not spoken this word against his own life” (1 Kings 2:23).
The Succession Narrative ends on the same note of sexual irony that was struck at the very beginning. What appears to be one man’s lust for a beautiful woman—first David’s seduction of Bathsheba, then Amnon’s rape of Tamar, and finally Adonijah’s bid for Abishag—is shown to be an act with unmistakable political meanings and catastrophic political consequences. Solomon himself goes on to indulge his own gargantuan passions—he accumulates some seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines—and he is seduced into worshipping their pagan gods and goddesses, with further disastrous consequences for the Royal House of David. Solomon builds the Temple at Jerusalem, thus crowning the achievements of his father, but the united monarchy of Judah and Israel is already beginning to crack—and the mighty empire of King David will begin to fall apart upon the death of Solomon.
“WONDERFUL WAS THY LOVE TO ME”
The frank descriptions of human passion in extremis that are preserved in the Book of Samuel are mostly overlooked by pious Bible readers, who seem to prefer David’s psalms to his sexual adventures. Even some Bible scholars are uncomfortable with the candor of the biblical author about what one commentator delicately calls David’s “failures in the area of moral restraint.”26 For example, Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews, a vast anthology of rabbinical legend and lore that bulks up to seven fat volumes, spares only two dismissive sentences* for Tamar and her suffering at the hands of her half brother: “Tamar cannot be called one of the children of David, because she was born before her mother’s conversion to Judaism,” the rabbis argued. “Consequently, her relation to Amnon is not quite of the grave nature it would have been in the strict sense of the terms.”27
Then, too, the homoerotic overtones in David’s life story have been stubbornly ignored by Bible critics until very recently. Pious commentators have long celebrated the intimate friendship between David and Jonathan as “the ideal of male friendship,”28 for example, but they have refused to acknowledge the possibility that physical as well as spiritual intimacies passed between these two men. “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David,” the Bible tells us plainly enough, “and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Sam. 18:1). On the eve of battle, Jonathan strips off his own cloak and tunic, his armor and weaponry, and tenderly dresses David in his apparel as a pledge of friendship (1 Sam. 18:4). And when Jonathan is later slain, David’s oft-quoted and much-celebrated elegy speaks plainly enough of their bond. “Very pleasant hath thou been unto me,” sings David, the “sweet psalmist” of Israel. “Wonderful was thy love to me, passing the love of women” (2 Sam. 1:26).
Remarkably, a certain squeamishness is still displayed by some contemporary scholars toward the sexual excesses in the Bible and, especially, the story of David. For example, the Bible shows Bathsheba as a seductress who seeks to catch the king’s eye, and at least one scholar speculates that “more than one Bathsheba in the neighborhood of the royal residence … hopefully took a bath where she could be seen from the roof of the King’s house.” But feminist critic J. Cheryl Exum complains that she is put off by the story of David and Bathsheba and similar “pornographic elements” in the biblical accounts of the Gibeah Outrage and the rape of Tamar. According to Exum, Bathsheba—not unlike Tamar—is “raped by the pen” because Bible readers are invited to put themselves “in the position of voyeurs” and watch what happens to Bathsheba when she catches the eye of the king while bathing on the rooftop. “This is no love story,” Exum concludes. “[T]he scene is the biblical equivalent of ‘wham bam, thank you, ma’am’: he sent, he took, she came, he lay, she returned.”29
In fact, some of the biblical authors themselves were cl
early uncomfortable with the candor displayed in Samuel and Kings. So we are given a second version of the lives of David and Solomon in First and Second Chronicles, which appear as a kind of afterthought at the very end of the Hebrew Bible. David’s love for Jonathan, his adulterous and murderous affair with Bathsheba, the rape of Tamar, and the insurrection of Absalom are never mentioned by the author of Chronicles, and other incidents in the reign of King David are boldly revised and rewritten to serve the author’s theological agenda—the legitimacy and longevity of the Davidic line. For example, it is plainly reported in the Second Book of Samuel that David is ordered by God to conduct a census of the Israelites, something regarded as odious by ancient Israelites because a census was the first step toward taxation and conscription—and then, rather perversely, God turns around and punishes David and the Israelites when the king complies! (2 Sam. 24:1, 15). But the propagandist who composed Chronicles simply erases the name of God and writes in the name of Satan when retelling the very same story: “And Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel” (1 Chron. 21:1).
Of course, it is precisely because the forbidden tales of the Bible have always made so many people so uncomfortable that they have come to be censored or suppressed or simply ignored. But if we read the Bible—and especially the story of David—with open eyes, we can readily see that the biblical authors regard even a human being who is as deeply flawed as David to be worthy of the loftiest blessings of the Almighty. And so it turns out that David, a man of war, will be the fore’ bear of the Prince of Peace.
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 34