Remember that time when I was in awe of how different our world is from that of the Bible, in terms of the abundance and ubiquitousness of violence on an epic scale?
Yeah, I'm there again. These chapters open up with a hapless and, if we're honest, fairly sniveling/sycophantic pair of guys who sought out and murdered Saul's son Ishbosheth in his sleep, and then brought his head to David's camp, having either never heard, or completely ignored, the story of what happened to the hapless guy who brought the "good news" of Saul's death to David, expecting to be rewarded.
David himself is a little taken aback by the lack of memory or knowledge displayed by these two guys, and he promptly has them killed. And then he cuts off their hands and feet and strings them up by the pool like so many patio lanterns.
Yeah... guess whose voice you're going to be hearing in your head all night now... You're welcome.
Anyway, it was a sort of "wait...what?" moment for me, reading that bit. Then there's the entire chapter dedicated to David's slaughtering of his enemies, and their horses. Violence was cool back then.
On the flip side, David was quite cool to a certain Mephibosheth, Jonathan's son who happened to be crippled. He eventually sought Mephibosheth out, gave him all Saul's lands, and made sure he was definitely well taken care of.
In short, David is pretty much the best person alive.
Then he seek a naked neighbour having a shower, and completely loses his mind.
"THAT ONE! GET ME THAT!" He says to his servants, pointing to the lady in question (Bathsheba by name). He gets her brought to his palace, has sex with her and sends her on her way. This first bit tends, strangely enough, to get almost lost in the shuffle of the rest of the story (and considering he uses his power as commander in chief of the army to have her husband, Uriah, killed horrifically in battle, it's maybe not hugely surprising), but this is bad. It doesn't say that he raped her, but come on: she's fetched from her home by the king's guards in the middle of the night, brought to the palace, used, and sent home immediately. Not what you'd call classy and generally consensual.
So enter Nathan, a guy we've never met before now, but who needed no introduction for the author of Samuel, to lay the smack down on the idiot king. And he does so in style, telling David a generic morality tale and sob story, waiting for David's righteous indignation to boil over and then finally lowering the boom with a resounding "THAT GUY IS YOU, STUPID!"
It's... satisfying.
Although the text itself gets it wrong... or at least weird. For Nathan, according to this account, the order of David messing up was: 1) killing Uriah and 2) taking Bathsheba for his wife. Given the generally subordinate position of women in domestic situations in the Bible, it's again probably not too surprising that the original misdeed was overlooked in Nathan's summary, but I still sort of expected it to be there.
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