STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 54

2 Samuel 13:1-39

January 13, 2002

Text Comment

Now continues the unraveling of David's happy prosperity as the Lord's judgment on his sin. His first son, his baby by Bathsheba, has died. But there is more to come, much more. The account we are about to read will explain why Amnon was later murdered by Absalom and, therefore, why Absalom was estranged from his father David, an estrangement that, in spite of a formal reconciliation, eventually led to civil war. The first tremors of that political earthquake occur here in chapter 13. These next seven chapters also explain why the apparent successors to David's throne, his older sons, were disqualified. [Gordon, Com, 261-262]

v.1 Now the NIV has rendered v. 1 into good English but, by doing so, has covered over the narrator's intention. The verse literally reads, "Now it was after this that Absalom the son of David had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar, and Amnon the son of David loved her." The narrator is indicating that it will be Absalom's part in this story that will prove most significant by mentioning Absalom first.

Notice the attention drawn to the fact that Tamar was beautiful. Remember, it was Bathsheba's beauty that had tempted David. We are going to find that the divine curse on David's house would begin to unfold in just the way in which David's sin had unfolded: a sexual transgression within the royal quarters resulting in a murder committed elsewhere. And it all began where it had begun in David's case, with the beauty of a woman. [Alter, Com., 265] In other words, the sins of the parents are being specifically visited upon the children. In this way, instrumentally speaking, the dirt from the past was not left behind but thrown into the future.

v.2 "Sexual tampering with a virgin had particularly stringent consequences in biblical law." Alter, 265. Notice, this crime will be pre-meditated. It is not a crime of passion in that sense; Amnon long hoped to do what he eventually did and then laid plans to do it. In this too his sin was like his father's.

v.4 The cousin knew David's children and what was going on in their lives better than their father did! This point will be made a second time, later in the account.

v.9 David, unwittingly, contributes to Amnon's plan.

v.12 "should not be done in Israel" indicates that there was, among the pious, a clear distinction between the behavior of pagans and the behavior of the people of God.

v.13 Tamar appeals first to Amnon's humanity - "What about me?" - and then to his self-interest - "What about you?" Whether she was really serious about the marriage option or just using it as a temporary expedient is hard to know. Marriage between a half-brother and half-sister was, in fact, forbidden in the Law of Moses (Lev. 18:9,11).

v.15 As one scholar points out, in Hebrew "Get up and get out" are exact antonyms, in reverse order, of the words Amnon had used in v. 11: "Come, lie with me."

v.16 Rape was a dire fate, but could be overcome by marriage. But to be a violated virgin, rejected and abandoned by the man who had violated her, likely meant that she would be unmarriageable and, in that sense, an outcast for the rest of her life. We learn in v. 20 that this was, in fact, to be her fate.

v.17 With brilliant psychological insight the narrator explains that Amnon's original longing for Tamar has been, in an instant, turned into revulsion. The fact that she resisted, that he had to take her by force, and the fact that now he must face the consequences, led him to blame her - blame the victim as we say - for all that has happened. He is utterly callous toward her, speaking of her to his servant as "this one."

One perceptive commentator goes deeper. "How are we to understand this radical turnabout in Amnon? I envisage it as follows. He who seeks intercourse pretends to be able to reciprocate tenderness, to make deep contact, and to taste the union of true love. Amnon's act of violence reveals him as someone incapable of contact and as an uncouth egoist. The worst for him is that there is a witness present, and Tamar is this very witness. From then on, he will no longer be able to see her, for such a meeting would be a repeated, extremely shameful unmasking and intolerable confrontation with his own shortcomings as a person." [Fokkelman, I, 107-108 cited in Waltke, Notes, 13]

To David's credit, his sexual sin led to marriage. Amnon's led to hateful estrangement. Sin grows worse by the generation.

It is important to observe that the word "love" is an ordinary word for "love" in the OT and is often used of true love, love for another human being and even love for God. How easily a storm of emotion or desire is mistaken for love! You couldn't have told Amnon that in v. 1! He thought he loved Tamar. I've tried to tell that to young people and sometimes they will not listen, so sure they are that they are in love. Only painful events will demonstrate how little love there really was.

v.18 The term for her robe is that used of Joseph's robe in Genesis 37:3.

v.20 "been with you" is a euphemism for sex and, given Tamar's state, obviously for rape. Absalom does not give away his intentions, but he is seething. "Do not take this matter to heart" probably means that Absalom is intending to do something about it; she needn't worry about that.

v.21 The narrator gives us a very short sentence describing David's wholly inadequate response to the evil his son had done or to the desolation of his daughter. Perhaps he thought to himself that he was unable to act given what he himself had done. How could he punish his son for doing nothing more than he had himself done? An addition the text of Samuel in the copy found at Qumran and in the LXX reads "but [David] would not hurt Amnon because he was his eldest son and he loved him." Whatever the reason, had David acted properly and decisively he might well have prevented the estrangement between himself and Absalom that was to cause so much heartache later. [Gordon, Com, 264]

v.22 An ominous foreshadowing of what was to come.

v.23 Two years: "The mills of God grind slowly,/Yet they grind exceeding small;/Though with patience he stands waiting,/With exactness grinds he all." Longfellow Absalom is going to show himself deliberate throughout this coming history. It will be eleven years between the rape and Absalom's revolt.

v.24 Absalom must have counted on the king declining his invitation. His refusal lays Amnon under a greater obligation to attend, as the king's eldest son.

v.26 David is suspicious but has lost his insight; he is unable to read the situation.

v.28 4Qsam and LXX begin this verse: "And Absalom made a feast like the feast of a king," which, if the true text, is a hint of his kingly pretensions.

v.30 For a time the Lord allowed David to believe that all his sons had been struck down and that his entire house had been annihilated.

v.33 Jonadab, with characteristic shrewdness, sizes up the situation. He realizes what has happened. Once again, he knows David's sons better than their father. In this narrative, Jonadab is a foil to David. [Waltke]

v.37 Talmai was Absalom's maternal grandfather.

Now, there are, of course, a variety of lessons we might consider from this text. I don't usually want to divide our attention by talking about several distinct meanings in the text, but I want to draw your attention to them here as each of them will be reinforced repeatedly in the account of the second half of David's reign as it unfolds over the remaining chapters of the book. So, in effect, we are introducing tonight some of the primary themes of the material that follows. So take note of what we have in this chapter.

I. It is a poignant example of the darkness and mystery of God's ways.

Nothing normative can be found in the experience of God's people, in God's ways with his people. So many Christians believe and speak otherwise, so this is an important lesson. Why does Elijah not die and Elisha die a sick old man? Why are some made martyrs while others die in their beds? James, Peter, and Paul die violently; John lives to a ripe old age. Such mystery, such variety. Uriah is a righteous man and dies a premature death at the hands of Christian man! David, who murdered Uriah, lives to a good old age. Tamar is desolated by the injustice of her half-brother and lives the remainder of her life unmarried in her brother's house. What a sad outcome and all the sadder because it was the result of what an evil man did to her, not the result of anything she herself had done. On the other hand, Bathsheba lived a long life as the wife of the king. So far as we can tell, she was a willing participant in the adultery and seems almost to prosper for her sin and that of her second husband. It would be her child eventually who would sit on Israel's throne in the place of David. Who can explain these things? And who could possibly derive instruction for life from the examination of these different fates?

Brethren, this is why the Bible and the authority of the Bible and our confidence in it as the Word of God is so important. You cannot derive your ethics from experience. You cannot tell what man God favors by whether or not he prospers in the world, you cannot tell what actions are good or bad by what comes of them in life.

The only thing, I mean the only thing we know for sure is what God has told us in his word. When we live according to that word we please him, whether or not that is obvious from our circumstances. And when we believe in the Lord we have his favor, whether or not that favor is evident from the circumstances of our lives.

II. But there is this lesson also: one great act of repentance is not sufficient to cleanse the life of all great sins.

This is the unhappy, the unwelcome, and, I think for most of us, the surprising thing about David's case. We expect, after his wonderful and thoroughgoing repentance, for him to live a devout and obedient life. But it is continuing sin on his part that bedevils his family and brings devastation on his people. We would expect, surely, for things to get better after David confessed his sin and God forgave him. Instead, they get worse, and get worse because David himself makes them worse! What is frightening about this narrative and its continuation in the following chapters is the way in which these two wicked sons are presented as "chips off the old block." David is a righteous man, but there was unrighteousness in his life as well and it was that, alas, that so terribly influenced his boys. David's first sin, no doubt, contributed directly to Amnon's sin, so similar as it was to that of his father. But it was David's continuing sins that effected Absalom so terribly.

Taking nothing away from his glorious repentance, and it was glorious - an honest acknowledgement of specific evil; the hardest kind of confession for us all - we now find him irresolute with his children, without understanding, ineffective. And his ineffectiveness makes everything worse. The original crime of Amnon should have been and could have been dealt with immediately and with full justice. Had it been, what other miseries might have been avoided. But David was irresolute.

This is the second time in Samuel we have seen a serious case of irresolution in parenting. The first was Eli with his sons and now David with his. In both cases the results were catastrophic. But it is clear in both cases that this parental failure was not momentary, but characteristic. David is revealed here as an irresolute parent, he will be shown to be so again in dealing with Absalom, and then still again, after all that has happened, with his son Adonijah. David will not confront the problem. He is very angry about what happened, but he doesn't do anything about it. It was his own daughter that was raped and he does not execute justice as was his sacred duty as a father and as a king. It will take Absalom to right the wrong, because the king did not right it as he should. And when Absalom acts he does the right thing in the worst way and makes matters still worse.

The failure we see here in David is a failure in lots of good people. I know some whose virtues - kindness, gentleness - become terrible vices at just this point. They know right from wrong very well, but out of natural gentleness or timidity or a failure to understand what love requires, out of fear of driving their children away, or whatever, they do not punish their children's sins, they do not demand proper behavior, and they do not follow up to see that they are obeyed. Again and again we are taught in the Bible that this is a deadly failure in parents. But, we see it all the time. Those of us who are parents know very well how difficult it is to be firm, to be resolute, to be consistent, to keep after the correction of our children as often as it may be required. But you cannot read this account without realizing the enormity of David's crime against God and his children. Amnon had lost his conscience because his father had not seen fit to cultivate it and instruct it with godly discipline.

As C.S. Lewis put it in one of his letters,

"You cannot begin training a child to command until it has reason and age enough to command someone or something without absurdity. You can at once begin training it to obey; that is teaching it the art of obedience as such - without prejudice to the views it will hold later on as to who should obey whom, or when, or how much… since it is perfectly obvious that every human being is going to spend a great deal of his life in obeying." [Letters, 179]

Well, David didn't do that work when it needed to be done and he didn't teach his children the importance of keeping God's commands or living in faithfulness to God's covenant. He may have taught his children the word of God, though you don't really get the impression that David did very much at all in the nurture of his children, but "To give children good instruction and a bad example, is but beckoning to them with the head to show them the way to heaven, while we take them by the hand and lead them in the way to hell." [Archbishop Tillotson] But, to add to a bad example, a failure to restrain, to punish, to discipline, to correct, to impress God's ways upon the conscience, is virtually to murder our children and that is what David did.

That failure to command and to restrain and to enforce God's law in the lives of their children is the first great parental sin. Interestingly, David was also guilty of the other great parental sin. In the next scene David will commit that sin against his children - he will exasperate his son, Absalom, by failing really to forgive him and by failing to reconcile him to himself. He was not firm when he should have been firm and he was harsh when he should not have been. David was a classic failure as a father.

When David kept covenant with God he was a blessing to others. When he failed to keep that covenant, he became a curse instead. And that covenant had a great deal to say about how children should be raised in it.

The ethics of parenting are presented very powerfully in this material though in a negative, not a positive form. We see a parent doing the wrong things and the terrible consequences that ensue. There is a summons here to all of us who are parents, a very solemn summons.

And it is made all the more solemn a summons by the fact that David's repentance after his sin did not, by itself - the fact that he was and had proved himself a faithful man, did not by itself - mean that he would not continue to fail badly in some very specific ways. The fact that you are a devout Christian man or woman does not mean - as Christian history has proved countless times, alas, -- that you will be a faithful father or mother. Only your obedience to God and your claiming of his promises by faith will make you such.

III. Then, finally, there is this lesson in our text:

The grace of God is an extraordinary thing: more extraordinary than any of us begins to realize. All of this ugliness, all of this failure, all of this unforgivable dereliction of duty, is in fact forgiven. We want to wring David's neck when we are finished with these chapters about Amnon and Absalom. He deserved to have someone wring his neck. We feel like shouting at him: "God forgave your great sin and now you can do no more for him than standby, seemingly helplessly, and watch your family disintegrate? Deal with it! It's your job you moron!"

And if we said that to David we would have spoken the truth. But, fact is, the same thing could be said to us about our behavior in so many different ways. God has done so much for you, he has given so much to you, you have in your heart and mind the knowledge of the truth and of right and wrong, and you can do no more for him than this…?

Of one thing you can be sure: the reason we are treated to long narratives of the dismal and disappointing living of the children of God is to teach us that it is an extraordinary thing that God should be gracious to us and that when we are taught that he forgives our sins we are being taught a most remarkable thing! For there is a great deal of sin for him to forgive, disgusting, inexcusable, sin perpetuated by us in defiance of God's grace and love and goodness to us.

As Alexander Whyte put it with his characteristic insight into such things:

"God did not sanctify you on the same day on which he justified you. … I will put it to yourself to say - if you had been both called and justified and adopted and sanctified wholly and all at once, you would never have known, you would never have believed, what an inveterate and hopeless and unparalleled sinner you are, nor what a glorious Saviour you have got in the Son of God. No; it is not your first pardon that gives God His great name in you. It is His every day and every hour pardon of your sins; sins that are past all name and past all belief." [Thomas Shepard, 99-100]

And David would second that from Alexander Whyte, but he would add this additional point. It is not his first pardon that gives God his great name in you; nor is it only some great pardon that he gives you along the way, such as I received after my terrible sins, but yet the pardon that must come even after that, hour after hour and day after day.