The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (42 page)

Jabesh-gilead is the town whose population is slaughtered and whose virgin daughters are kidnapped and given as brides to the survivors of the tribe of Benjamin—and an attack on Jabesh-gilead by the Ammonites is the first crisis of Saul’s reign as king of Israel. At the very end of his life, when Saul kills himself to avoid capture in battle, the townsfolk of Jabesh-gilead bring his body back from the battlefield and bury his remains under a tree (1 Sam. 31:12–13).

To convince the tribes of Israel to make war on the Benjaminites, the Levite traveler dismembers his slain concubine and sends a piece of her body to each tribe as a grisly call to arms. So, too, does Saul cut up a couple of oxen and dispatch the pieces to the tribes in order to compel them to join him in fighting the Ammonites: “Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen” (1 Sam. 11:7).

Finally, when the Israelites ask God to designate the tribe that will
lead them into battle against the Benjaminites, God says: “Judah first.” Saul, the first king of Israel, is a member of the tribe of Benjamin—and David, the man who will succeed him on the throne, is a member of the tribe of Judah.

The Book of Judges, then, can be understood as one long argument in favor of monarchy among a people who have been governed so far only by patriarchs, prophets, and judges. The Israelites have acted abominably, we are given to understand. They have strayed from the strict faith of the patriarchs; they have been preyed upon by their pagan neighbors; and, at the end, they have fallen upon each other with a degree of barbarism that exceeds the worst excesses of their enemies. Only a king will be able to save them from their enemies and them’ selves—but, as the Book of Judges seems to predict, the first man to sit on the throne of Israel will fail. And so the scene is set for the greatest king in the history of Israel and the
real
hero of the Bible.

A
mnon sat glumly at the far end of the long banquet table, chewing on a crust of bread and glaring now and then at his father, the king, who held forth with broad gestures and grand words at the head of the table.

Even though he was the king’s oldest son and heir apparent to the throne of Israel, Amnon was plainly a troubled young man. A scowl was fixed on his dark features, and his brown eyes glowed with a certain strange light, as if a fire burned inside him. Everyone in the court of King David saw Amnon’s unhappiness—his wives, his generals, his priests, even his servants, all of them except the king himself.

David had many sons, and seldom did he bother to look at any of them. More often than not he was surrounded by a small crowd of courtiers, all of whom noisily competed for his attention. Even when the king found himself at table with Amnon, which happened rarely, he had much else on his mind. The long war against the Ammonites had finally ended in a victory, to be sure, and David now wore the gold crown that had once crowned the head of the king of Ammon himself. But David could not forget the dire words of that dour old prophet,
Nathan, who afflicted him with unsettling messages from God even at his moments of greatest glory.

“‘The sword shall never depart from the House of David,’” Nathan had said, quoting the words of the Almighty as uttered to the prophet in yet another one of his dismal visions. “‘I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house.’”

These words of warning were never far from David’s thoughts, even as he held forth at the banquet table with yet another wry and slightly ribald tale about the days when he was but a humble shepherd and not yet a king. Distracted by his own tale, bloated with rich food and perhaps a bit drunk, the king surveyed the table without pausing to glance at Amnon.

Nor did Amnon watch his father with the keen interest displayed by the others around the table, who listened to the king’s familiar story as if hearing it for the first time and laughed admiringly at his old jokes. What held Amnon’s attention was the young woman sitting at the king’s right hand, where Amnon felt
he
ought to be seated. Tamar was the king’s daughter, Amnon’s half sister, and she smiled with obvious pleasure whenever the king inclined his head to whisper something into her ear. Now and then, the two of them laughed at a secret joke—and something burned in Amnon’s heart every time he saw their foreheads touch.

The king clearly took pleasure from the company of his daughter, whose sweet disposition and undemanding nature were such a contrast to the grasping and carping of his sons. David had so many sons, and all
of them needy and troubled in one way or another, but he had fathered only one daughter. Her name was Tamar, and everyone—even the king himself—remarked on how very beautiful she was.

The king did not know it, but the gloomy words of the prophet Nathan were being whispered all over Jerusalem as the latest bit of gossip about the king’s sordid affair with the woman named Bathsheba. Amnon had been among the first to hear of the incident, if only because more than one of the courtiers had already begun to cultivate Amnon in the confident belief that he would one day follow King David to the throne.

As the rumors had it, King David had first spied Bathsheba from afar as she bathed on the roof of her house. No one blamed
him
for
that
—indeed, one sniggering priest suggested that Bathsheba had fully intended to catch the king’s eye by brazenly showing herself, naked and wet, within plain sight of the palace roof, where David was known to take the night air from time to time. Indeed, it was not unusual for some of the excitable young women of Jerusalem to lie in wait for David in the streets leading up to the palace and to shriek with excitement when the handsome king was spotted on the ramparts above their heads.

When it came to Bathsheba, however, it was the king himself who was smitten and lovesick. So he dispatched one of his more discreet attendants to invite Bathsheba into the royal bedchamber, and—like so many other women on so many other warm summer evenings—she did
not refuse. Still, apart from David’s wives and a few of the fussier priests, no one in the royal palace regarded the fling as much of a sin, even if Bathsheba’s husband, a soldier named Uriah, was serving in the king’s army in the war against Ammon while she reclined on the king’s bed.

But the whispers grew hotter when it was the time of the month for Bathsheba to purify herself at the ritual bath, and she declared herself to be with child. Now the king panicked, and he devised a devilish plan to blame the pregnancy on Uriah. The king summoned Uriah all the way back from the battlefield to the royal palace on the laughable pretense of asking him if the army was well and the war was going well. “Yes, well,” replied the puzzled but dutiful soldier. His curiosity satisfied, David urged Uriah to avail himself of his own bed and his own wife
as long as he was in Jerusalem. Uriah, still puzzled, refused the king’s suggestion.

“My comrades are camped on the battlefield,” said Uriah. “How, then, can I eat and drink in comfort and then sleep with my wife?”

So, night after night, the loyal soldier insisted on sleeping at the door of the royal bedchamber along with the servants, much to the consternation of the king himself. Not even an abundance of the king’s wine weakened his resolve: the stalwart soldier drank himself drunk but did not stray from the king’s door. Finally the king abandoned his goal of seduction and sent Uriah back to the battlefield in service of an even more sinister plan to solve the problem of the pregnant Bathsheba.

On the night before Uriah returned to the front, the king scribed a short letter to Joab, general of his army in Ammon. “Put Uriah into battle where the fighting is fiercest,” the king wrote, “and then order your men to fall back so Uriah is alone.” The message was unmistakable: Uriah was meant to die alone at the hands of the enemy. David sealed the letter himself, handed it to Uriah with complete confidence that he would not even try to pry it open and read it, and sent the obedient soldier back to the front with his own death sentence in his hand.

Later, when Joab sent word to King David that Uriah had been killed in the fighting under the walls of the Ammonite fortress, David painted an expression of sorrow on his handsome features.

“Don’t fret about Uriah—sometimes the sword devours one way, sometimes another,” the king instructed his messenger to tell the general back at the front. “Just strengthen your assault on the city and raze it to the ground!”

The general did as he was told, the Ammonite fortress fell at last, and the rich plunder was soon on its way back to Jerusalem. David crowned himself with a victor’s crown—and he took Bathsheba, now well along in her pregnancy, as his latest wife. Except for the gloomy predictions of the prophet Nathan, the future of David and his royal house seemed glorious indeed, just as glorious as God himself had promised.

Whenever Amnon pondered the vile way his father had secured Bathsheba as his latest wife, he experienced a palpable disgust that seemed to ball up in his stomach and rise into his throat. Here was yet another wife in the royal harem, yet another son in the noisy brood of royal mouths to feed. The man was an insatiable beast, Amnon told himself, a shameless philanderer who had no place sitting on the throne. When the king finally died—one way or another—and it was
his
turn to reign, Amnon told himself, the people of Israel would recognize and honor him as a righteous man and an upright king.

Such thoughts burned in Amnon’s head as he spent long hours at the window of the house allotted to him in the royal compound. Since the king gave him little else to do, Amnon watched the minions who scurried back and forth across the courtyard around which the royal houses were clustered—captains, priests, and scribes in abundance, sometimes the lord of some great estate on his way to the throne room with a petition in hand, now and then a convoy of concubines headed toward the palace under an escort of armed soldiers, and always a teeming crowd of random servants and servitors. Amnon watched as if in a trance, and he imagined the day when they would be serving him instead of his father.