The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (46 page)

What is really happening at the moment before the assault is a cunning if desperate ploy by Tamar to talk her way out of being raped. The words she chooses are calculated to suggest that Amnon might get what he wants later on, and, at the same time, to caution him about the consequences of taking what he wants against her will. “Speak unto the king,” says Tamar to her brother, thus holding out the possibility that she
would
sleep with him under different circumstances, and yet reminding him that he will be defying the king’s authority and risking the king’s wrath by forcing her into his bed. Of course, the words that Tamar speaks to Amnon do not deter him from carrying out his elaborate plan to rape her. As it turns out, King David has
not
withheld Tamar from Amnon—it was the king who commanded Tamar into Amnon’s bedchamber in the first place!—and David does nothing to punish Amnon afterward.

Why is the king so passive in the face of an incestuous rape within the royal household? Perhaps it is because David is too guilt-ridden
over his own sexual misadventures to chastise his son for doing much the same thing, as one scholar suggests.
¹⁵
Perhaps it is because the king insists on pampering and indulging his firstborn son and heir apparent—the Dead Sea Scrolls and an early Greek version of the Bible known as the Septuagint explain that David “did not rebuke Amnon his son because he loved him, since his firstborn was he,” a line of text that simply does not appear at all in the Masoretic Text.
¹⁶
Or perhaps, as some Bible critics have boldly suggested, David does not think to single out Amnon for punishment because the king himself played such a dubious role in setting up the encounter in the first place. In fact, some Bible critics go so far as to accuse David of complicity and even conspiracy in the rape of Tamar, something that Tamar herself may suspect when she seeks refuge with her brother rather than her father after the deed is done.

According to one ingenious reading of the biblical text, David is tipped off to his son’s real intentions toward Tamar when Amnon describes the kind of food he wants his sister to prepare for him. The specific word that Amnon uses in his plea to King David—
lebibot
—is usually translated into English as “bread” (JPS) or “cakes” (Scofield KJV) or “dumplings.”
¹⁷
But the translation does not capture the sensual overtones of the Hebrew word:
lebibot
is an “erotic pun”
¹⁸
that plays on the Hebrew word for “heart” and evokes images of arousal and excitement. In fact, the delicacy that Amnon desires to eat from his sister’s hand is rendered as “hearty dumplings” in the Anchor Bible and may have been literally heart-shaped.
¹⁹
To convey the erotic subtext of Amnon’s demand on his sister, one Bible critic bluntly renders the Hebrew word as “libido cakes.”
²⁰

“[B]y asking that Tamar prepare the dumplings,” cracks another Bible commentator, “[Amnon] is privately anticipating more than the restoration of his health.”
²¹

Does David know what Amnon
really
wants from Tamar? The case against King David turns on the very words used by Amnon to describe the food he asks his sister to prepare. By describing the “hearty dumplings” for which he hungers in such erotic language, it is argued, Amnon is subtly asking permission of David to have his way with his sister—and, by agreeing to send Tamar to Amnon’s house, the king is not only tacitly approving a sexual encounter of some kind between brother and sister but “delivering her into the hands of his son, her
rapist.”
²²
Indeed, one scholar 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.”
²³

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).

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.

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).