Tamar and Amnon

More fish than Amnon sputter on the author’s grill. The rape of Tamar appears in the narrative immediately after Nathan’s double rebuke of David. David is condemned for adultery (perhaps also rape, although the text is silent about whether Bathsheba spared her own life by not resisting; 2 Samuel 11:4). And he is condemned for assassination (2 Samuel 11:15–17).

Some of David’s sons followed their father’s path. If the taking of Bathsheba reveals David’s moral illness and the rape of Tamar reveals Amnon’s moral illness, the assassination of Amnon is about Absalom’s moral turpitude.

After Amnon’s rape of Tamar, David refuses to punish his heir apparent. But Absalom, David’s third son and Tamar’s full brother, sees an opportunity. He begins to plot against Amnon (ostensibly in retaliation for the rape), and therefore also against David. He arranges a banquet where he has Amnon assassinated (2 Samuel 13:28–29). Slier and more ambitious than Amnon, he takes out his rival for the throne.

Bernardo Cavallino’s painting of this assassination is telling. The hit man, accoutred in medieval armour, has his face illuminated—by contrast with the host, the real assassin. The victim is seated at the head table across from the shady Absalom. It is Absalom’s long index finger, not his face, that catches the light as he points at his brother.

The mercenary surprises Amnon from behind, pulling him back by the hair (in what might be a wry anticipation of Absalom’s own future death, caught by his hair in the branches of a tree; 2 Samuel 18:9–15). He reaches for the weapon with which he will turn a convivial feast into the scene of a homicide. 

Thus the fratricidal Absalom (the name means ‘father of peace’!) uses his disgraced sister to advance his dynastic aspirations. Perhaps the various additional figures in attendance here include some of David’s other sons (we know of twenty-one by eighteen women, at least two of whom died in infancy). Their consternation is understandable.

Amnon is a manipulative liar and rapist. Absalom is an equally manipulative liar and murderer. Their father is a recognized adulterer and assassin. David’s monarchy cracks under its own weight.

Rape is a vile wrong in ancient Israel. In a society that lacked the rule of law, it prompts revenge killing through war in one instance and civil war in two other cases.

The rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) led to war against the Shechemites. The gang rape and slaughter of a wife of a Levite (Judges 19) ended in a protracted and vicious civil war. The duplicitous rape of Tamar by her half-brother Amnon, both children of King David (2 Samuel 13), also led to civil war. Sexual incontinence becomes an excuse for self-serving political ends. Women are both abused (by our standard) and instrumentalized.

Rape is about the instability of male sexuality unleashed by unbridled testosterone. It is about female vulnerability to male physical strength and sexual lust. Male sexual instability concerned the biblical authors. Yet, these rape stories are about more than male self-indulgence. In the case of Amnon, the instability of male sexual lust is shown to go far beyond the gross violation of a woman’s mind and body. It is pernicious socially, politically, and religiously.

Amnon’s rape of Tamar, abetted by David and secured by lying to his comely half-sister, discloses this instability. Having gratified himself momentarily he reveals himself further by turning on his victim. His hatred of Tamar is interpretable as self-hatred at his own weakness projected onto her. She begs him to marry her to restore her place in society when women were believed to be dishonoured by rape. He retorts, ‘Get out of here’ (2 Samuel 13:15 own translation). She continues to beseech him but he orders his servant: ‘Get this thing out of here and bolt the door behind her’ (2 Samuel 13:17 own translation).

The biblical author’s blatant moral point about Amnon seems lost on the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Steen. He insensitively depicts the servant as mocking the incident, distracting our attention from the unstable predator with a vaudeville comedy act. Sex is male amusement. Women are toys to Amnon and perhaps also to Steen.

Yet as bawdy as Steen’s painting is, there may be an element of truth here that women disregard at their peril.

Marc Chagall carries the story that began with Tamar’s rape in 2 Samuel 13 through to 2 Samuel 18, near the end of the David stories.

The lithograph elides more than one moment in David’s struggle with Absalom. In the lower right, we see Absalom begging for forgiveness from his father years after the murder of Amnon (2 Samuel 14:33); in the upper left, we see Absalom’s assassination by Joab, David’s general. While directing the campaign against Absalom, Joab disobeys David’s order to spare his son and murders him (2 Samuel 18:1–15); David then mourns the death of his rebellious and vicious son (2 Samuel 18:24–33). Absalom’s years of plotting to overthrow his father culminate in total defeat.

Perhaps Chagall chose red for David’s garment—the colour of blood—to call to mind God’s refusal of one of David’s cherished hopes: to build God’s house in Jerusalem in an act that would affirm his victory over the Jebusites. Once David settled in as king of Israel, and long before the confrontation between them, he sought the prophet Nathan’s advice about building God’s house in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 7). Nathan initially encouraged David but with dripping irony the biblical author adumbrates what is to transpire in later history. God tells Nathan to tell David that his son, not David, will have that honour. But he does not say why.

The later-dated text of 1 Chronicles fills in the information by putting the words in David’s own mouth: ‘God said to me, “You may not build a house for my name, for you are a warrior and have shed blood”’ (1 Chronicles 28:3).

One wonders whether Chagall’s opulent use of red recalls these biblical counsels. The honour is bestowed upon Solomon who uses foreign policy (through marriage) rather than military might to forward Israel’s empire (1 Kings 11:1). Solomon is stained by idolatry (1 Kings 11:5), but David’s whole body is blood-stained and it spills over onto his son. The blood spilled in war mingles with the blood of violated women like Tamar and the blood of family vendettas. All pass judgement on David and his house.

This is perhaps what Chagall notes (astutely if so) by bleeding David’s red onto Absalom’s beseeching hand and coat.