The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The achievement and courage of the biblical author who composed the portions of Samuel known among scholars as the Court History of David (or the Succession Narrative) are all the more extraordinary when we compare the stories of David in Samuel and Kings to what passed for history elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Instead of the customary assortment of king lists and battle lists, the inventories of enemies ruined and spoils taken, and the glorification of reigning monarchs by their scribes, all the standard stuff of the servile propaganda that passed for official history in distant antiquity, the Court Historian writes boldly of the flaws and weaknesses of the monarch, the challenges to royal authority, the scandals of the royal court, and the least glorious moments in the lives of the monarch and his many wives and children.

  “It is real history,” wrote Sigmund Freud, “five hundred years before Herodotus, the ‘Father of History.’”2

  David comes across in the Bible as an extravagant monarch who does not hesitate to use his kingly power to indulge his appetites, sexual and otherwise—and the author of Samuel does not hesitate to tell us so. The Court Historian, for example, reveals exactly what happens when King David celebrates his conquest of Jerusalem by bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest relic in the faith of ancient Israel, to the capital of the newly united monarchy of Judah and Israel.* King David leads the procession of thirty thousand soldiers, priests, musicians, and dancers who accompany the Ark on its slow and solemn journey to Jerusalem, and the king himself puts on an ecstatic display of “leaping and dancing before the Lord” (2 Sam. 6:16). In fact, the king is so ecstatic—and the priestly apron (or ephod) he wears is so brief—that David ends up flashing his genitals to the crowds that have gathered to watch the sacred spectacle. When the king finally reaches his palace, he is rebuked by his wife Michal, daughter of the former king, who has watched the festivities from the palace window and now scolds him for his bawdy and provocative display.

  “Didn’t the king of Israel do himself honor today,” complains the sarcastic Michal, “exposing himself … in the sight of the slavegirls of his subjects, as one of the riffraff might expose himself!”

  “It was before the Lord who chose me instead of your father …!” taunts an unrepentant David. “I will dance before the Lord and dishonor myself even more, and be low in my own esteem, but among the slavegirls you speak of I will be honored” (2 Sam. 6:20–22 New JPS).

  These tabloidesque details tend to distract us from the real purpose of the biblical author in telling the story in the first place. To be sure, we are meant to understand that David is a lusty and rambunctious king who refuses to restrain his sexual impulses even when they lurch toward exhibitionism and casual sex with slavegirls. But we are also meant to understand the political repercussions of the spat between the king and his wife: David, angry and embittered, apparently declines to sleep with Michal, and she dies childless. No descendant of Saul, the man whom David replaced as king of Israel, will contend for the throne. But David sires plenty of sons by his various other wives, and several of these ambitious young men will soon reveal themselves to be contentious indeed. “I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house,” God later vows to David when his sexual excesses cost the life of an innocent man, and his sons fulfill the Almighty’s vow (2 Sam. 12:11).

  The use of the intimacies and passions of private life to illuminate the destiny of the nation is a technique of history-writing that strikes us as very modern indeed: “[R]eal historical facts,” as one scholar describes the Court History, “in strongly stylized dress.”3 And so the ordeal of the royal princess named Tamar, so beautiful and yet so ill-used by her own father and brother, can be understood as an early augury of the decline and fall of the greatest king who ever sat on the throne of ancient Israel. Tamar is condemned to a life of suffering, humiliation, and despair by the brutal act of Amnon—and, as the Court Historian allows us to understand, so is David.

  DAVIDISM

  The name of David* is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Bible,4 and David figures so prominently in the history and destiny of Israel that one scholar has proposed the term “Davidism”5 to describe the worshipful attitude of certain biblical authors toward the celebrated king. Against the background of Samuel and Kings, where the stirring saga of David’s life is first told, the rape of Tamar is only a brief and often-overlooked incident, even if her ordeal serves as the fateful first blow to David’s kingship and the first act of defiance of kingly authority by one of his ambitious sons.

  The formal biography of David is told in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, but the eminent Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad insisted that his story is also the “undersong” of the whole biblical narrative attributed to the source called the Yahwist. “[T]he figure of David, far more than Moses, is the hero of the Hebrew Bible,” argues Harold Bloom.6 And David has figured prominently in Western art and literature, both sacred and secular, for a couple of thousand years. From Donatello and Michelangelo to D. H. Lawrence and William Faulkner, the figure of David has been celebrated, sometimes reverentially and sometimes in burlesque. For example, the seventeenth-century British author John Dryden invoked the dubious moral example of King David when lampooning the libertinage of King Charles II.

  Then, Israel’s Monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

  His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart

  To Wives and Slaves; And, wide as his Command,

  Scatter’d his Maker’s Image through the Land.7

  David is still impossible to ignore or overlook. “I’ve led a full, long life, haven’t I? You can look it up,” King David is imagined to say of himself in Joseph Heller’s darkly comic novel, God Knows. “And God certainly knows that I was always a vigorous, courageous, and enterprising soul, overflowing with all the lusty emotions and desires of life…. I’ve got wars and ecstatic religious experiences, obscene dances, ghosts, murders, hair-raising escapes, and exciting chase scenes.”8

  Indeed, the saga of David’s rise to power is among the most familiar texts in the Bible, even if the Sunday school version invariably accentuates the positive and leaves out the incidents of exhibitionism, voyeurism, adultery, mayhem, and murder. We all know David as the handsome young shepherd who plays the harp to soothe the troubled King Saul (1 Sam. 16:22–23) and the courageous boy warrior who slays Goliath with a slingshot and a single stone (1 Sam. 17:48–49), but not quite so many of us are aware that David sallies forth to separate two hundred Philistines from their foreskins as a bride-price for Michal (1 Sam. 18:26–27), or that David and his men put themselves in service to an enemy king as a bandit army, pillaging the countryside at will and slaying everyone in sight “[l]est they should tell on us” (1 Sam. 27:11).

  At the height of his power and glory, David conquers the city of Jerusalem and establishes his capital on the future site of the Temple, subdues the enemies of Israel on all sides, and extends the reach of his empire to the farthest boundaries once promised to Abraham by God himself: “from the river of Egypt unto the … Euphrates” (Gen. 15:18). The reign of David is the high-water mark of sovereignty in the long history of Israel—never before David did the Israelites enjoy such blessings, and never again will they enjoy them after his passing.

  David has come to be regarded as an exalted figure in both Jewish and Christian tradition, the prototype of the monarch who reigns by the grace of God. He is described by the prophet Samuel as someone chosen by God above all others, “a man after His own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14), and David describes himself as “the man raised on high, the anointed of the God of Jacob” (2 Sam. 23:1). Despite his flawed character, his weakness for women, and his bloodthirsty conduct toward his fellow men, David emerges from the biblical narrative as the bearer of God’s blessing, the model for all earthly kings, and the man from whose loins will spring the Messiah.

  “I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, that thou shouldest be prince over My people,” God tells David in what one scholar calls “t
he theological highlight” of the Book of Samuel.9 “And I have been with thee whithersoever thou didst go, and have cut off all thine enemies from before thee, and I will make thee a great name, like unto the name of the great ones that are in the earth” (2 Sam. 7:9).

  And yet the adoration of David in the Bible is counterbalanced by a frank and sometimes harsh account of his misdeeds. David’s dalliance with Bathsheba and his conspiracy to murder her husband are described in an open-eyed account that confronts us with the king’s appalling crime. Even David’s role in the rape of Tamar is recounted without the “spin” we might expect from a court historian: the king is shown to be an accomplice, perhaps an unwitting one but perhaps not, and he does nothing to punish the rapist or vindicate his victim after the crime has been exposed. In fact, the biblical author artfully echoes David’s affair with Bathsheba in his account of Amnon’s rape of Tamar: both stories begin with a lustful glance, escalate into a forbidden sexual encounter, and reach a climax of bloody murder that can be ignored but not erased from the pages of Holy Writ.

  THE CONSPIRACY OF THE “LIBIDO CAKES”

  To the contemporary reader, the rape of Tamar is all the more repugnant because she is the sister of her own rapist. But some Bible commentators, ancient and modern, have tried to cleanse Amnon’s ugly crime of the still uglier notion that it was an act of incest, too. Because Tamar is only Amnon’s half sister, we are asked to believe, the rape is not truly incestuous. And the fact that Tamar holds out the prospect of marriage supposedly reveals that the relationship between half siblings is not considered intimate enough to prohibit marriage. Thus, it is argued by some apologists, the sexual assault that follows could be regarded as rape but not incest.10

  The notion of a sanctified sexual union between Amnon and Tamar comes from the lips of Tamar herself: “I pray thee, speak unto the king,” she implores her brother in the terrible moments leading up to the rape, “for he will not withhold me from thee” (2 Sam. 13:13). But the most compelling meaning of her words—and the most heartrending, too—is that Tamar is simply trying to talk her brother out of raping her by holding out the faint hope of marriage. Whether she offers to marry Amnon with full knowledge that such a marriage would be contrary to divine law—or, as one scholar has suggested, she does so in “her naive belief that the king could dispense from the law”11—Tamar uses the only weapon available to her at that moment, the weapon of words.

  Still, some scholars try to pretty up Amnon’s crime of sexual violence against Tamar by entertaining the notion that marriage between brother and sister was somehow acceptable in ancient Israel. To do so, they have to explain away the fact that sexual intercourse with one’s sister is unequivocally and repeatedly forbidden by biblical law: “The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or the daughter of thy mother, thou shalt not uncover” says Leviticus 18:9, using the familiar biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse. The fact that Tamar is Amnon’s half sister makes no difference in Amnon’s culpability under biblical law, since Leviticus specifically extends the taboo to half siblings, too: “[Thou shalt not uncover] the nakedness of thy father’s wife’s daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy sister” (Lev. 18:11). Just in case anyone missed the point in Leviticus, the same rule is repeated even more fiercely in Deuteronomy: “Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother” (Deut. 27:22).

  Still, some apologists have argued that the plain language of these commandments and curses does not apply to Amnon and Tamar. According to strict biblical chronology, the law codes that are found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy were handed down long before the reign of King David and thus would have ruled out a marriage between brother and sister. Modern scholarship, however, suggests that the text of Leviticus and Deuteronomy was actually created by priestly authors and editors after the period described in the Book of Samuel, and so “a prohibition of marriage between brother and half sister was not recognized in the urban setting of Jerusalem in David’s time.”12

  Other commentators argue that Tamar’s proposition of marriage ought to be taken seriously on the strength of the bizarre episode in Genesis where Abraham passes off Sarah as his sister to the king of Gerar. As we have already seen, Sarah ends up in the king’s bed, and only the last-minute intervention of God himself prevents the king from sleeping with her. Later, when the king complains to Abraham about his deception, the patriarch insists that he told only half a lie: Sarah is his wife and his sister, says Abraham, although only a half sister, “the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother” (Gen. 20:12). On the strength of Abraham’s feeble protestations to the king of Gerar, we are asked to believe that, both in his era and as late as the reign of King David, a man might marry his own half sister without censure.

  The argument defies not only biblical law (“Cursed be he that lieth with his sister …”) but common sense, too. Abraham has already lied to the king of Gerar by telling him that Sarah is his sister when, as far as we know from the biblical text, she is his wife—and only his wife. When Abraham comes up with the remarkable news that she is also his half sister, it comes as a surprise to the king of Gerar—and the rest of us, since the fact is nowhere else mentioned in the Bible! The sensible reading of Genesis 20:12 is that Abraham is still lying when he comes up with the cock-and-bull story about Sarah being his half sister. After all, the whole charade “is fully in line with Abraham’s trickster character,” as one scholar points out, and both Abraham and Sarah profit richly by the deception when the king bestows upon them flocks and herds, servants of both sexes, and a thousand pieces of silver (Gen. 20:2, 16). “Abraham and Sara[h] act as a team—perhaps a team of con artists.”13

  So, too, does Tamar “con” her brother by bringing up the prospect of marriage—but her proposition is only a desperate ruse to put off the rapist. Nothing in the Bible suggests that she holds the slightest affection for Amnon; nor can we take Amnon at his word when he declares his “love” for Tamar while he is plotting the sexual ambush with his cousin. Clearly, Amnon lusts after his sister, but he certainly does not love her, before or after the rape. Amnon betrays his real feelings toward Tamar when the rape is over and he brusquely orders his servant to throw her out of the house. “Put this woman out from me” is the standard English translation of what Amnon says (2 Sam. 13:17), but a more accurate rendering of the biblical Hebrew reveals that he regards Tamar as nothing more than an object of perverse and momentary pleasure. “Put this thing out from me” is what Amnon actually says.14

  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 suggest
ed, 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