2 Samuel — themes & analysis

Chapter 11 opens with a sentence the reader needs to sit with. And it came to pass, in the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem. Everything that follows is contained in that pause. The verbs then accelerate: he sees, he sends, he inquires, he sends again, he takes, he lies with her, he sends her back. Bathsheba is the grammatical object throughout. When the news comes that she is pregnant, the king's first move is concealment.

He sends for Uriah the Hittite, her husband, from the front. He tries to manoeuvre him into sleeping with her so the child can be assigned to him. Uriah, whom the narrative goes out of its way to portray as honourable, refuses to sleep at home while the army is in the field. Shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing. David gets him drunk. Uriah still sleeps at the door of the king's house with the servants. The cover-up has failed, and the king moves to the next plan: the letter Uriah carries back to Joab, which contains the order that the bearer be placed in the front of the hardest fighting and abandoned.

The chapter ends with the report from the front. The king receives it without flinching and tells the messenger to encourage Joab — let not this thing displease thee, for the sword devoureth one as well as another. The narrator allows himself a single editorial sentence at the close: But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. The whole second half of the book is the unfolding of that displeasure.

What 2 Samuel commits itself to argue, from chapter 12 forward, is that the king is not above the moral order; that the consequences of a private sin in the royal household will run, with the patience of a slow tide, through the next ten years; and that the same God who has promised David an everlasting house has also bound the king, in the same breath, to the same law as everyone else. The book does not resolve the tension between the unconditional promise of chapter 7 and the conditional demands of the moral law. It holds both facts in the same hand and refuses to release either.

Where to follow it: 2 Samuel 11 (David and Bathsheba), 2 Samuel 12 (Nathan's confrontation), 2 Samuel 13 (Amnon and Tamar), 2 Samuel 18 (Absalom's death).

The prophet Nathan comes to David — sent, the narrative says plainly, by the Lord — and tells him a story. There were two men in one city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds. The poor man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up, and it grew up together with him and with his children, ate of his own meat and drank of his own cup and lay in his bosom and was unto him as a daughter. A traveller came to the rich man, and the rich man, unwilling to take from his own flock, took the poor man's lamb and dressed it for the man that was come to him.

David's anger, the text says, was greatly kindled, and he said: As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold. Nathan answers in three syllables: Thou art the man. The reversal is one of the cleanest in any literature. The king has condemned himself. The parable has worked because the king was free to deliver justice on someone else's case while remaining blind to his own; once the case was named as his, the verdict was already in his mouth.

Nathan delivers the divine sentence — the sword shall not depart from David's house, the trouble shall come up against him out of his own house, what he did in secret shall be done to him in public — and David, with what is either the most economical confession in religious literature or the great unresolved sentence of his life, says: I have sinned against the Lord. Nathan answers, just as economically, that the Lord has put away his sin and he shall not die. But the child will.

The chapter is a prose argument about how power is brought back under judgment. It does not work by external punishment. It works by getting the powerful man to pronounce sentence on himself before he knows what he is doing. The mechanism Nathan uses is the same one prophets use throughout the Hebrew Bible: a story, told carefully, that strips the listener of his defences before he can refuse them. The parable form is what this chapter gives to the literary tradition.

Where to follow it: 2 Samuel 12 (Nathan's parable), 2 Samuel 14 (the woman of Tekoa), 2 Samuel 7 (Nathan's oracle).

The first catastrophe is in chapter 13. David's son Amnon falls obsessively in love with his half-sister Tamar, lures her into his chamber, rapes her, and then — in the brutal phrase the narrative gives — hates her with great hatred so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. He throws her out. David, the text says simply, was very wroth, but does nothing. Two years later Absalom invites Amnon to a sheep-shearing feast and has his servants kill him at the table. Absalom flees. David mourns Amnon, then begins to long for Absalom, and Joab arranges his return — but not his full reconciliation.

Absalom uses the years of his rehabilitation to build a faction. He sits at the gate, intercepts anyone who has a suit before the king, and suggests that if only he were judge the matter would go better. So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel. In chapter 15 he has himself proclaimed king at Hebron, and David flees Jerusalem barefoot, his head covered, going up the Mount of Olives weeping. The civil war that follows is the lowest point of David's life. He refuses to fight against Absalom personally, gives orders that the young man be dealt with gently, and learns, while waiting in the gate at Mahanaim, that Absalom has been caught by his hair in the branches of a great oak and run through by Joab against orders.

David's lament — O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! — is the book's emotional climax. Joab's response, when he comes in to the king and sees that the army has shrunk back into the city in shame at having beaten the enemy, is the realist counterweight: get up and speak comfortably to the men, or there will not tarry one with thee tonight. David rises, sits in the gate, and the political life of the kingdom resumes.

But the book has done something the reader cannot undo. It has shown what a sin in chapter 11 produces by chapter 18. It has insisted, with the patience of someone who has watched this happen in his own time, that the moral universe is structured in such a way that the consequences cannot be paid off in private and must, finally, be paid in public — and not by the perpetrator alone.

Where to follow it: 2 Samuel 13 (Amnon and Tamar), 2 Samuel 15 (Absalom's revolt), 2 Samuel 18 (the death in the oak), 2 Samuel 19 (Joab's rebuke).

David is settled in his cedar-panelled house in Jerusalem and observes to Nathan that he, the king, is dwelling in cedar while the ark of God dwells within curtains. He proposes to build a temple. Nathan tells him, on the evening of the same day, to do as he wishes — and that night the word of the Lord comes to Nathan and reverses the answer. You shall not build me a house; I will build you a house. The wordplay turns on the double meaning of the Hebrew bayit — house in the architectural sense, household and dynasty in the social sense.

The promise is unconditional in the prose of chapter 7. Solomon will build the temple. But David's house, his line, his dynasty, will be established by God himself. I will be his father, and he shall be my son. The throne of his kingdom will be established forever. This is the textual seed of every later messianic hope: the expectation, in the late prophetic books, of a restored Davidic king; the New Testament's careful insistence that Jesus is of the house and lineage of David; the rabbinic tradition of the Davidic messiah.

What 2 Samuel forces the reader to think about, by placing this promise in chapter 7 and the Bathsheba afternoon in chapter 11, is the relation between the promise and the man. The man fails. The promise does not fail. By the end of the book the dynasty is intact, the king is back in Jerusalem, and the line that will run forward into Solomon and the divided kingdom and exile and eventually into the messianic expectations of two religions has been established.

Whatever the book is doing theologically, it is at least committing itself to the proposition that what God promises is not contingent on the perfection of the one who receives the promise. This is the seed of grace as a theological concept and the seed of the long argument, in both Judaism and Christianity, about how a faithful God deals with an unfaithful people.

Where to follow it: 2 Samuel 7 (Nathan's oracle), 2 Samuel 12 (Nathan's confrontation), 2 Samuel 22 (David's psalm), 2 Samuel 23 (David's last words).

The Court History of David — the long narrative running from roughly chapter 9 of 2 Samuel through 1 Kings 2 — was almost certainly written within a generation or two of the events it describes, by someone with intimate access to the court. What is remarkable about it, by the standards of any ancient royal narrative, is its freedom from propaganda. The Egyptian and Mesopotamian royal inscriptions of the same period are concerned almost exclusively with the king's piety, military success, and divine favour. The Court History has its kings sin, scheme, weep, fail to discipline their sons, lose battles to their own children, and die in bed asking that their old enemies be eliminated as a final favour.

It contains observations no royal apologist would write — that David's army shrank back into Mahanaim ashamed of its victory because the king was weeping for the dead rebel, that Joab had to scold his sovereign into resuming the duties of office, that the old David at the end of his life had to be warmed with a young virgin from Shunem because the cold was killing him. The narrative never editorialises except in the briefest, almost throwaway sentences: But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.

The prose is also extraordinarily compressed. Verbs do most of the work. Interior life is rarely named directly, but is shown through the timing of an action — David tarried still at Jerusalem; David rose from his bed at evening tide. Speeches are short, exact, and revealing. Joab's dressing-down of David in chapter 19 takes about ten verses and has the entire shape of a political relationship in it.

For a 21st-century reader of fiction, the technique looks almost modern. Robert Alter has argued that the Court History invents resources of psychological realism that European prose did not really recover until the eighteenth century. Whether or not the genealogy is exactly that, what one can say without controversy is that no other portrait of a king from the ancient world is as honest about its subject as this one — and that the honesty is part of what has kept the book alive for two and a half thousand years.

Where to follow it: 2 Samuel 1 (the elegy), 2 Samuel 11 (David stays home), 2 Samuel 19 (Joab's rebuke), 2 Samuel 23 (David's last words).