1. a beautiful sister. The catastrophic turn in David’s fortune began when he saw a beautiful woman and lusted after her. Now, the curse pronounced by Nathan on the house of David begins to unfold through the very same mechanism: a sexual transgression within the royal quarters resulting in an act of murder elsewhere. Several important terms and gestures here reinforce this link with the story of David and Bathsheba.

Amnon . . . loved her. The love in question will be revealed by the ensuing events as an erotic obsession—what the early rabbis aptly characterized as “love dependent upon a [material] thing.”

2. she was a virgin and it seemed beyond Amnon to do anything to her. The last phrase here has a definite negative connotation (rather like the British “to interfere with her”) and makes clear the narrow carnal nature of Amnon’s “love” for Tamar. Sexual tampering with a virgin had particularly stringent consequences in biblical law.

3. companion. The Hebrew reaʾ could simply indicate a friend, though in royal contexts it is also the title of someone who played an official role as the king’s, or the prince’s, companion and councillor. The emphasis on Jonadab’s “wisdom”—in biblical usage, often a morally neutral term suggesting mastery of know-how in a particular activity—makes the technical sense of councillor more likely, though one role does not exclude the other.

4. And he said to him. Shimon Bar-Efrat has aptly observed that the whole story of the rape of Tamar is constructed out of seven interlocking scenes with two characters in each, one of whom appears in the next scene. (The story of the stealing of Isaac’s blessing in Genesis 27 has the same structure.) The sequence is: (1) Jonadab–Amnon, (2) Amnon–David, (3) David–Tamar, (4) Tamar–Amnon, (5) Amnon–attendant, (6) attendant–Tamar, (7) Tamar–Absalom. J. P. Fokkelman adds to this observation that the spatial and structural center of this design is the bed in Amnon’s inner chamber (4), where the rape is perpetrated.

Tamar the sister of Absalom my brother. Kyle McCarter Jr. vividly notes that Amnon’s speech with its alliterated initial aspirants in the Hebrew “is a series of gasping sighs” (ʾet-tamarʾ aḥot ʾavshalom ʾaḥi ʾani ʾohev).

5. Lie in your bed and play sick. David at the beginning of the Bathsheba story was first seen lying in bed, and then he arranged to have the desired woman brought to his chamber. Jonadab on his part observes that Amnon already looks ill (verse 2) and so suggests that he play up this condition by pretending to be dangerously ill and in need of special ministrations.

nourish me. The Hebrew verbal root b-r-h and the cognate noun biryah (“nourishment”) denote not eating in general but the kind of eating that is sustaining or restoring to a person who is weak or fasting. When you eat a biryah you become barʾi, healthy or fat, the opposite of “poorly,” dal. The distinction is crucial to this story.

so that I may see and eat from her hand. Perhaps Amnon is encouraged to say this because, as a person supposed to be gravely ill, he would want to see with his own eyes that the vital nourishment is prepared exactly as it should be. The writer is clearly playing with the equivalence between eating and sex, but it remains ambiguous whether Jonadab has in mind the facilitating of a rape, or merely creating the possibility of an intimate meeting between Amnon and Tamar.

6. the king came to see him. As the events work out, David, who sinned through lust, inadvertently acts as Amnon’s pimp for his own daughter.

shape a couple of heart-shaped dumplings. The verb and its object are both transparently cognate with lev (or levav), “heart.” The term could refer to the shape of the dumplings, or to their function of “strengthening the heart” (idiomatic in biblical Hebrew for sustaining or encouraging). In the Song of Songs, this same verb is associated with the idea of sexual arousal.

9. Clear out everyone around me. The identical words are pronounced by another princelike figure, Joseph, just before he reveals his true identity to his brothers (Genesis 45:1). In Genesis, these words preface the great moment of reconciliation between long-estranged brothers. Here they are a prelude to a tale of fraternal rape that leads to fratricide. The story of the rape of Tamar continues to allude to the Joseph story, in reverse chronological order and with pointed thematic reversal. The moment before the rape echoes the encounter between Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39) in the middle of the Joseph story, and the attention drawn to the ornamented tunic that the violated Tamar tears takes us back to Joseph’s ornamented tunic at the beginning of his story (Genesis 37). From such purposeful deployment of allusion, the inference is inevitable that the author of the David story was familiar at least with the J strand of the Joseph story in a textual version very like the one that has come down to us.

11. Come lie with me, my sister. The core of this abrupt command is a citation of the words of Potiphar’s wife to Joseph, “Lie with me.” Perhaps, as some have suggested, “Come” has a slight softening effect. The addition of “my sister” of course highlights the fact that this sexual assault is also incestuous.

12. Don’t, my brother. Tamar’s response constitutes a structural allusion to Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, for he, when confronted by the sexual brusqueness of her terse “lie with me,” also responds, in contrastive dialogue, with a nervous volubility in a relatively lengthy series of breathless objections.

it should not be done thus in Israel . . . this scurrilous thing. The language here echoes that of another sexual episode in Genesis, the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34). Again, the divergence in the parallel is significant, for Dinah’s rapist comes to love her after violating her and wants to make things good by marriage, whereas Amnon despises Tamar after he possesses her, and drives her away. The rape in both stories leads to murderous fraternal vengeance. But our writer’s brilliant game of literary allusion does not end here, for, as Robert Polzin has pointed out, Tamar’s words are also a precise echo of the plea of the Ephraimite in Gibeah to the mob of rapists: “No, my brothers . . . do not do this scurrilous thing” (Judges 19:23). That story ended in the woman’s being gang-raped to death, an act that in turn led to bloody civil war—as Tamar’s rape will lead to fratricide and, eventually, rebellion and civil war.

13. speak, pray, to the king, for he will not withhold me from you. Marriage between a half brother and a half sister is explicitly banned by biblical law. Perhaps, it has been suggested, this prohibition was not yet held to be binding in the early tenth century, or in the royal circle in Jerusalem. But it is at least as plausible that the desperate Tamar is grasping at any possibility to buy time and deflect her sexual assailant: why do this vile thing and take me by force when you can enjoy me legitimately?

14. he overpowered her and abused her and bedded her. The three transitive verbs in quick sequence reflect the single-minded assertion of male physical force. In the analogous story of Joseph and the Egyptian woman, because the gender roles are reversed, the sexually assaulted male is strong enough to break free from the woman’s grasp and flee. Here, the assaulted woman cannot break her assailant’s grip (verse 11), and so she now succumbs to brute force. The verb represented as “bedded” (shakhav) is the same one used by Jonadab in verse 5 (“Lie in your bed,” shekhav ʿal-mishkavkha) and in Amnon’s “lie with me.” But when it has a direct feminine object (instead of “lie with”), it suggests sexual violation, and a transitive verb is called for in the English.

15. greater was the hatred with which he hated her than the love with which he had loved her. The psychological insight of this writer is remarkable throughout the story. Amnon has fulfilled his desire for this beautiful young woman—or, given the fact that she is a bitterly resistant virgin, perhaps it has hardly been the fulfillment he dreamed of. In any case, he now has to face the possibly dire consequences to himself from her brother Absalom, or from David. The result is an access of revulsion against Tamar, a blaming of the victim for luring him with her charms into all this trouble.

Get up, go! The brutality of these imperative verbs is evident. They are also, as Bar-Efrat neatly observes, exact antonyms, in reverse order, of the two imperative verbs of sexual invitation he used before, “Come, lie.”

16. Don’t!—this wrong is greater. There is a textual problem here in the Hebrew, which seems to say, “Don’t—about this wrong . . .” (ʿal-ʾodot haraʿah). Some versions of the Septuagint read here, “Don’t, my brother” (ʿal ʾaḥi), as in verse 12, but this could reflect an attempt to straighten out a difficult text rather than a better Hebrew version used by the ancient Greek translators.

to send me away now. “Now” is added in the translation in order to remove an ambiguity as to when the sending away is done. “Sending away” is an idiom that also has the sense of “divorce”—precisely what the rapist of a virgin is not allowed to do in biblical law. If some modern readers may wonder why being banished seems to Tamar worse than being raped, one must say that for biblical women the social consequence of pariah status, when the law offered the remedy of marriage to the rapist, might well seem even more horrible than the physical violation. Rape was a dire fate, but one that could be compensated for by marriage, whereas the violated virgin rejected and abandoned by her violator was an unmarriageable outcast, condemned to a lifetime of “desolation” (verse 20).

17. Send this creature, pray, away from me. “This creature” reflects the stingingly contemptuous monosyllabic feminine demonstrative pronoun, zoʾt (“this one”). Note that at the same time that Amnon speaks brutally to Tamar, he is polite to his servant, using the particle of entreaty naʾ (“pray”).

and bolt the door behind her. Having devised such an elaborate strategy for drawing Tamar into the inner chamber where he can have his way with her, he now has her thrust out into the open square, with the door bolted against her as though she were some insatiable, clinging thing against which he had to set up a barricade.

18. ornamented tunic. The translation for this term follows a suggestion of E. A. Speiser. (The famous King James Version rendering in Genesis is “coat of many colors.”) Others interpret this as a garment reaching the ankles. In any case, Tamar and Joseph are the only two figures in the Bible said to wear this particular garment. Joseph’s, too, will be torn, by his brothers, after they strip him of it and toss him into the pit, and they will then soak it in kid’s blood. Tamar’s ornamented tunic may well be bloodstained, too, if one considers what has just been done to her as a virgin.

19. put her hand on her head. This is a conventional gesture of mourning, like the rending of the garment and the sprinkling of ashes on the head.

20. Has Amnon your brother been with you? Absalom, addressing his screaming, tearstained, disheveled sister, exercises a kind of delicacy of feeling in using this oblique euphemism for rape.

He is your brother. This identification, which plays back against the heavily fraught, often ironic uses of “brother” and “sister” throughout the story, would hardly be a consolation. What Absalom may be suggesting is that, were it any other man, I would avenge your honor at once, but since he is your brother, and mine, I must bide my time (“For now, my sister, hold your peace.”)

Do not take this matter to heart. The idiom he uses echoes ironically against the making of heart-shaped dumplings to which Amnon enjoined her.

21. King David had heard all these things, and he was greatly incensed. The Qumran Samuel and the Septuagint add here: “but he did not vex the spirit of Amnon his son, for he loved him, since he was his firstborn.” But this looks suspiciously like an explanatory gloss, an effort to make sense of David’s silence. That imponderable silence is the key to the mounting avalanche of disaster in the house of David. Where we might expect some after-the-fact defense of his violated daughter, some rebuke or punishment of his rapist son, he hears, is angry, but says nothing and does nothing, leaving the field open for Absalom’s murder of his brother. In all this, the rape of Tamar plays exactly the same pivotal role in the story of David as does the rape of Dinah in the story of Jacob. Jacob, too, “hears” of the violation and does nothing, setting the stage for the bloody act of vengeance carried out by his sons Simeon and Levi. By the end of the episode, Jacob is seen at the mercy of his intransigent sons, and that is how this once powerful figure will appear through the rest of his story. An analogous fate, as we shall abundantly see, awaits David from this moment on.

23. a sheepshearing. The sheepshearing is a grand occasion for feasting and drinking (compare 1 Samuel 25:2–8), and so it is proper to speak of “having” a sheepshearing as one would have a celebration.

24. Let the king, pray, go. Given David’s increasingly sedentary habits, Absalom appears to count on the fact that his father will refuse the invitation, and this refusal will then give greater urgency to his invitation of Amnon. Had Absalom begun by asking David to help him persuade Amnon to go the festivities, David might have been suspicious about Absalom’s motives, since the grudge he bore his half brother would scarcely have been a secret. In any case, Absalom is making David his go-between to lure Amnon to his death, just as Amnon made David his go-between to lure Tamar to her violation.

27. with all the king’s sons. This phrase recurs like a refrain from this point on: David is haunted by the specter of the ultimate catastrophe, that “all the king’s sons” have perished, a specter that will cast a shadow over the subsequent events of the story as well. The man promised an everlasting house is threatened with the prospect (like his avatar, Faulkner’s Sutpen, in Absalom, Absalom!) of being cut off without surviving progeny.

28. when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine. The heart that lusted after Tamar and asked her to make heart-shaped dumplings will now be befuddled with wine to set up the murder.

29. each on his mule. In this period in ancient Israel, the mule was the customary mount for royal personages.

31. the king arose and tore his garments and lay on the ground. These acts of mourning are reminiscent of Tamar’s and of David’s own when his infant son by Bathsheba was deathly ill. Again there is a resemblance to Jacob, who flings himself into extravagant mourning over a son supposed to be dead who is actually alive (Genesis 37).

32. they have put to death. Jonadab, exercising his “wisdom,” is careful not to condemn Absalom immediately, but instead first uses a plural verb with an unspecified agent. Then he introduces Absalom as the source of the determination to kill Amnon, choosing a verb, “abused,” that concedes the crime of rape. Whether or not this was a possibility he had in mind when he offered counsel to Amnon, he now implicity distances himself from Amnon’s act.

33. let not my lord the king take the matter to heart. This is virtually the same idiom Absalom used to Tamar in consoling her after the rape.

34. going round the side of the mountain from the road behind it. The Hebrew has “the road behind it” before “the side of the mountain,” such proleptic use of pronominal reference sometimes occurring in biblical Hebrew. The Septuagint reads “from the Horonim road” (miderekh ḥoronim) instead of “from the road behind it” (miderekh aḥaraw).

36. wept very grievously. The literal Hebrew phrasing is “wept a very great weeping.”

37. Talmai son of Amihur king of Geshur. Absalom takes refuge in the court of his maternal grandfather in Geshur, to the north and east of the Jordan, outside David’s jurisdiction.

David mourned for his son all the while. As verse 39, which will mark the beginning of a new narrative episode, makes clear, the son he is mourning is the dead Amnon, not the absent Absalom.

39. David’s urge to sally forth against Absalom was spent. The received text is either defective or elliptical at this point. The verb watekhal is feminine, though there is no feminine noun in the clause. Many have construed it as the predicate of an omitted noun, nefesh, which coupled with this verb would yield idiomatically “David pined after Absalom.” Such paternal longings scarcely accord with David’s refusal to see his son once he has returned to Jerusalem, or with the very necessity of elaborate manipulation in order to get him to agree to rescind Absalom’s banishment. The Qumran Samuel scroll, though incomplete at this point, appears to have the feminine noun—ruaḥ—“spirit,” “impulse,” “urge”—as the subject of the verb. An abatement of hostility against Absalom rather than a longing for him makes much more sense in terms of what follows.