King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (30 page)

“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.”
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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)

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?

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.
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The reigning pharaohs customarily 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.
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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.”
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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.

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)
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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.
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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.

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….’ ”
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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.

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)
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“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.
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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.”
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Even without such pagan symbolism, the garment would have identified Tamar as someone “associated with the highest social or political status.”
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