The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (44 page)

“Come on, sister,” he growled. “Lie with me!”

Tamar stared at her brother and leaned away from him with the weight of her body, but he did not let go of her wrist. Her skin began to burn as he twisted her wrist to force her to come closer. She cast one more desperate glance at the door, and then cried out.

“Brother—don’t!” she ordered. “I will not lie with you!”

Amnon grinned crazily at Tamar’s words, as if he were encouraged in his attack by the sound of her voice speaking aloud his secret thoughts, and he pulled her toward him with new strength.

“A brother and sister together—such a thing isn’t done in Israel!” Tamar said. “Don’t commit such a sacrilege!”

Amnon relaxed his grip ever so slightly, then tugged sharply on her arm, and Tamar tumbled headfirst into his bed. He rolled on top of her, pinning her long legs with his own legs and pressing down on her hips with his own hips. Soon, only her head was free, and she whipped back and forth like a snake.

“What will become of me, brother!” she pleaded. “Where will I take myself after you have shamed me? And what about you, dear brother—you will make yourself an outcast in Israel, and you will have nowhere to hide from your deed.”

Amnon considered these words for one grave moment, and Tamar sensed an opportunity to persuade her mad brother to break off his assault.

“Perhaps there
is
a way, Amnon!” she whispered urgently but intimately into his ear, her voice now assured and commanding. “Speak to
the king! Ask him for my hand in marriage! The king won’t keep me from you, I promise!”

But Tamar’s words seemed to provoke Amnon rather than reassure him, and he jerked his head away at the very sound of her words:
The king won’t keep me from you
…. Abruptly, Amnon renewed his assault on Tamar. He tore away her maiden’s garb and pawed at her body with both hands, using his own body as a weapon to overpower her. Amnon had his way with his sister in a series of brutal thrusts that betrayed more anger than passion. A few moments later, it was over. Amnon released his sister from his grip, then rolled away and seemed to sleep. Tamar, bruised and bleeding, lay next to him as she pondered what she ought to do now. She surprised herself by not weeping, and she pondered the faint sensation of some warm fluid turning cold on her bare thighs. Was it blood, she thought to herself, or something else?

Amnon awoke a few minutes later and looked at the ravaged young woman who lay beside him, mostly naked and marked here and there with ugly bruises that were even now turning black-and-blue. Suddenly a wave of revulsion not unlike nausea welled up out of his belly and choked him. Whatever it was he had felt toward Tamar a few moments before—love or lust or some other unspeakable passion—now turned instantly and massively into its opposite. The very sight of Tamar sickened him, and so he planted a bare foot on her naked hip and kicked her out of the bed with one powerful thrust. Tamar tumbled to the floor, where she lay among the dumplings she had offered him a few moments earlier.

“Get up!” he said, fighting back the inexplicable rage that tasted like bile in the back of his throat. “Go away!”

Tamar struggled to her feet and stood unsteadily in front of him. The bodice of her gown was torn on both sides, exposing her breasts and her battered hips, and blood oozed from her nose and the corner of her mouth and between her legs.

“Don’t send me out like this, brother!” she said in a low voice that barely concealed her own dangerous rage. “To send me into the street like this is even worse than—”

Tamar fell suddenly silent, and Amnon started shouting for his servant.

“Get this
thing
away from me!” he bellowed. “Put her out! And bolt the door behind her!”

The servant of the future king of Israel obeyed his master, and Tamar found herself sprawled in the courtyard outside the door of Amnon’s house. She struggled once again to her feet, and she stood with the bearing that befitted the daughter of the king. She covered herself as best she could in the torn and tattered gown. But she did not set off in the direction of the palace. Instead, she headed toward Absalom’s house, weeping bitterly as she made her way through the curious crowd.

Absalom was summoned by the house servants to the entry where his sister had collapsed. He tried to sooth her in his own clumsy way as he led her to a bedchamber where she might find some privacy and some rest.

“Hush, sister, it could have been worse—at least it was your brother and not a stranger,” he said by way of consolation. “Don’t take it to heart.”

But his words only seemed to provoke her, and he decided to leave her alone with her grief for awhile. When he returned, to his amazement, he saw that Tamar had heaped ashes on her head and rent her garment like one in mourning.

Tamar put on the black garb of bereavement and never took it off again, and she spent the rest of her days in desolation under the roof of her brother’s house.

When David heard of the outrage that had been committed against his daughter by his eldest son, he thundered and cursed and generally made a proper show of kingly temper to all who were in attendance at that terrible moment—but he did nothing more than that. Absalom waited in vain for the day when the mighty King of Israel would chasten the man who had raped the king’s daughter. But the day never came, and soon it appeared that David had forgotten the whole unpleasant incident.

Absalom said nothing more of the matter to the king or anyone else, including the desolate Tamar. Except for the fact that he refused to speak a single word to Amnon, good or ill, it appeared that Absalom, too, had forgotten what had happened to Tamar. Then, fully two years later, Absalom arranged for a banquet to celebrate the sheepshearing in Baal-hazor. He invited King David and all of his sons, including
Amnon, to attend the festivities. Every one of the princes accepted Absalom’s invitation, even the unsuspecting Amnon, who regarded the banquet as a pitiable effort by Absalom to ingratiate himself with the future king after his long and insulting silence. Only King David declined to make the journey to Baal-hazor and join his sons at the banquet table.

A great disappointment it was to Absalom that his father was not there. Absalom would have preferred David to see with his own eyes how Absalom gave the command to his men-at-arms: “Strike down Amnon!” He would have preferred David to see how Amnon, silly with wine, struggled so comically to protect himself against the sword blows. He would have preferred David to see his firstborn son bleeding to death like a slaughtered calf. Then, Absalom thought to himself, David would have realized how a man should behave who is worthy to sit on the throne of Israel.

The Politics of Love and Hate
in the Court of King David

M
uch of the Book of Samuel is the work of an anonymous biblical author who seems to possess an intimate knowledge of the official history
and
the dirty little secrets of King David and his royal family. The Court Historian, as he is sometimes called, is not merely an archivist and chronicler in service to an ancient potentate—he has been called “the first true historian,”
¹
and the Book of Samuel is regarded as one of the earliest and most enduring works of literature and history in the Western tradition. The story of Tamar illustrates how the Court Historian uses an intimate scandal to illuminate the destiny of a nation: Amnon’s private crime against his sister sets into motion a chain reaction of very public crimes that shake the throne of King David and, in a real sense, continue to resonate down through history.

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.