King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (29 page)

“Go to David,” God would thereafter say to sinners, “and learn how to repent.”
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One rabbinical fairy tale told in the Talmud insists that Satan, rather than David or Bathsheba, was to blame for their adultery. Bathsheba took the precaution of bathing behind a wicker screen that blocked her from view, thus sparing David from temptation. But Satan, seeking to ruin them both, assumed the shape of a bird and alighted on the screen. David shot an arrow at the bird, just as Satan had intended, but the arrow missed the bird and knocked down the screen. Once Bathsheba's naked body and long hair were revealed, “the sight of her aroused passion in the king,” a passion so powerful that he could not have been expected to resist it—and didn't. For failing to avoid Satan's trap, David spent twenty-two years as a penitent, eating his bread mixed with ashes and weeping for a full hour each day.
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Yet, as earnest and imaginative as the Talmudic sages may have been, they tended to overlook one awkward but unavoidable fact: David himself and the other powerful men around him never seemed to court a woman or consult her about her wishes before “taking” her, as the Bible puts it. The Bible allows us to
imagine
that Bathsheba yearned for David with the same passion that he felt toward her, but the Bible never
says
she did. The plain text of the Bible—“And David sent messengers, and
took
her” (2 Sam. 11:4)—can be read to suggest that Bathsheba engaged in sexual intercourse with David under compulsion and perhaps even under the threat or use of physical force.

“This is no love story,” argues J. Cheryl Exum. “The scene is the biblical equivalent of ‘wham bam, thank you, m'am’: he sent, he took, she came, he lay, she returned.”
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Indeed, the most militant Bible critics resent the very intimacy of the scene that is presented in the Bible. “Raped by the pen” is how Exum describes Bathsheba at the hands of the biblical author. “By introducing Bathsheba to us through David's eyes, the narrator puts us in the position of voyeurs,” Exum argues. “Is not this gaze a violation, an invasion of her person as well as her privacy?” After carefully parsing out the biblical text, Exum draws a
pointed comparison between the depiction of Bathsheba in the Bible and one of the obligatory images in modern erotica. “Art, film, and pornography provide constant reminders that men are aroused by watching a woman touch herself,” she concludes. “And if Bathsheba is purifying herself after her menstrual period, we can guess where she is touching.”
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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.”
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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.

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)
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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.

T
wo 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.
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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.

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)
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“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)
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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)
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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.

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)
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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)
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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)
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But Amnon ignored her desperate plea.