40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 2 Samuel 13:1-20 (Episode 274)

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Chad and Daniel discuss one of the most disturbing stories in the Old Testament. David's house is starting to fall apart as his eldest son's obsession with his half-sister leads to dark and terrible events. And Absalom begins to see his father as weak and foolish. 1517 Podcast Network Regional Event in Las Vegas 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. and while you're over there, go to the events page and register for that Here We Still Stand regional event in Las Vegas, Nevada. That's October 15th and 16th. You want to come hang out with Chad and me and a whole bunch of other people. A whole bunch of other people. It's going to be a good time. It's only $65 for you to come, and that includes your lunch on Saturday at Scott

Keith's favorite restaurant. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but Scott Keith's favorite restaurant is catering to lunch. You get that included. So, I mean, if you want to come eat lunch with Scott Keith, you got to register. So go over there, get that done. Chad, we are in a passage that I would say is not a passage that you look forward to reading. And it's probably definitely not a passage that you look forward to having to break down. I mean, if you're reading through 2 Samuel, this is one of those passages that you read it and then you try to, you know, you go take a bath or something afterwards and then try to get on with the rest of your day. Like, I don't know that I've ever had to break this passage down in detail,

and it's not one of the ones that you're like, oh, I can't wait for this one. You know, there's some passages that you see coming down the pipe, and you're like, okay, I'm excited about that one. I've got a lot to say about that. This is not one of those passages, but it is one of those passages that is in the Scriptures. So the Scriptures did not—God did not whitewash this one out, nor did he just sort of allude to something happening. He gives you kind of more details than you're comfortable with.

It almost feels like we're back in the book of Judges when I read this chapter. It has all the markings of something that was lifted right from Judges 15 or Judges 20. And, you know, we kind of have forewarned people, right? We told them, I believe, in the last episode that, look, we're not trying to drive away any listeners, but I just want to give you a heads up. We're entering into a very dark tunnel. Yeah. So, you know, Nathan was not joking or God was not joking through Nathan when he told David that some bad things were going to happen as a result of what David had what David had done. And as we'll see, beginning in 2 Samuel chapter 13 and continuing with 14 and 15 and 16, that many of these bad things are not only on the horizon, they've actually they've actually arrived.

So, yeah, we finished up 2 Samuel 12 last time, and that wrapped up with the story of the conclusion to all these wars that we'd been reading about the last couple chapters, interspersed by, of course, the story of David with Bathsheba and Uriah. Now we're entering into a different narrative, for sure. In fact, you can tell the way this starts out. In Hebrew, it's a little bit more obvious, we might say, than in English translations. For instance, ESV starts out this chapter with, Now Absalom, David's son, had a beautiful sister. But in Hebrew, it's something like, And it came to pass after this.

So it's setting the structure here for a new episode. Now, what I want to do, I think, is kind of preface this by trying to give kind of a broader perspective on where the story fits within really the framework of the entire Old Testament, which is too big an undertaking to spend a whole lot of time on. But I want to kind of give you a feel for the way this particular story fits into the past, as well as it is looking forward to the future. So if you're not familiar with what we're talking about, this is going to be the story of Tamar, who is David's daughter, the full sister of Absalom. and she is going to be tricked into entering the room of her half-brother Amnon who is faking an illness and he is going to rape her and then basically just cast her out of the house and

then we'll see kind of the fallout from all of that as we go on so that's the story now what what I did find interesting Dan in studying this and kind of looking at all the connections that it has is how many stories preceding this it's connected with. So in kind of a retrojective sort of way, a looking backwards sort of way, it connects with at least three episodes from earlier parts of the Old Testament, in particular the book of Genesis. But also in a way this is looking forward. So it's sort of setting a template that's going to be followed or an outline of events that's going to be followed later in Israel's history as well. I'll point out more of this as we go through the story,

but just to kind of give you an idea of what I'm talking about, let me give some examples here. So first of all, you think of the name Tamar, David's daughter, who's going to be the central figure in this particular story. We've heard about a Tamar before. If you go all the way back to the book of Genesis, you have Tamar. And one of the things we learned about her right away is that two brothers ended up dead as a result of Tamar.

Well, now in this particular story, we're going to have two brothers who over time end up dead as well. One of them is Amnon and one of them is Absalom. There's also a series of connections, and this is probably the closest series of connections to an earlier event, between what happens in 2 Samuel 13

and what happens with Jacob and his daughter Dinah and Dinah's brothers. You'll remember back in Genesis that Dinah goes out to visit the daughters of the land. She is seized by the prince, whose name is Shechem, and he rapes her. Jacob does nothing about this, and Dinah's brothers end up tricking the whole city into having the men circumcised, and then they go in later and they massacre the entire city. So there's a number of parallels there, both with the actions and with the language of things that happened back in Genesis. and then one more one more past perspective here there's also a number of connections between

joseph and potiphar's wife for instance the the cloak that tamar is wearing in second samuel 13 is the same cloak same hebrew name for the kind of cloak that joseph is wearing back in the book of genesis this one that's usually translated the code of many colors so why are all these connections there i mean why all of these obvious allusions to previous events well i think one of the one of the reasons is this is the biblical way of not just showing the history repeats itself but that but that to understand what's happening in second samuel 13 you also need to know what happened in genesis because all of this is the way that over and over and over, the biblical storytellers are reinforcing these truths upon us. And so all of this history

is organically connected in one way or another, so that what happens with one generation is most likely to be repeated by another generation, and that's most likely to be repeated by another generation. So you can see both positively in some cases and negatively in other cases how the actions of the fathers are going to set the precedent for the actions of the sons and the grandsons and the great-grandsons and so forth. We've seen this multiple times as we've worked our way through these biblical books, where history maybe not is repeating itself, but it's rhyming. It's got this predictable pattern to it. So that's one of the things we're going to point out in this chapter. And the other, just to kind of wrap up here with this preface,

also what happens here is going to, in some ways, point forward to what happens later. so for instance david is going to david has sinned sexually well that same thing is going to happen with solomon later on he's going to take all these forward wives that he shouldn't take david's kingdom is torn in two solomon's and is going to be torn in two david himself has to go in exile when absalom stages a coup and then later on jeroboam has to go into exile finally there is a civil war within the nation of Israel because of David and Absalom. Same thing is going to happen later in Israel's history, where you have the northern kingdom, you have the southern kingdom. David has to go in exile. Israel goes into exile. David returns, and then Israel eventually returns.

So there's a sense in which David's life is sort of a microcosm of the bigger history of Israel that's coming on down the line. That's kind of a lot to just kind of throw out there at you, But we'll be looking at some more of this as we go through here. The main point I want to make is that this story is embedded within this larger past and future perspective of the Scriptures. So we're going to be kind of jumping around as we work our way through the text. Yeah, as sort of shocking as this story is, there's nothing unique about the way that any of these people are sinning. And the Bible does a good job of showing you that there's nothing real special about any one sinner. They all sin in ways that are very similar.

By saying something like history repeats itself or history rhymes, we're not usually talking about good things. We're talking about bad things, right? And so sin usually repeats itself generation to generation. Sin looks similar from generation to generation. that has continued until our current day. You would think that maybe we could look back and say, okay, well, these are all the sins that we've learned about, so those are the sins we won't commit, but that's not how it works.

We commit all the same sins that everyone else committed before us. Yeah, while you were talking, I was thinking of a recent conversation I was involved in that was about somebody else's family drama and just the upheaval of the family. And while I was in the middle of this conversation, I was thinking, man, this is just sounds like it's something right out of the scriptures, you know, and we've all either been in situations like that, or maybe we're currently in a situation like that, or we have a friend or a loved one who is in these kinds of family of people situations. And most of the time, if you take away some of the very specific details, you can see how the broader contours of whatever's going on with this family is just basically the same thing that we've seen from Genesis onward. So all these aspects of human nature haven't changed. So what's going on inside us, same thing going on inside David,

or same thing that went inside Jacob, human nature has not changed in that sort of way. We all have this propensity to evil that is in Genesis as well as it is in the modern day. Okay, so let's get into the end of the chapter itself. Now Absalom, David's son, had a beautiful sister. whose name was Tamar. And after a time, Amnon, David's son, loved her. Now we'll see as we go on that love is a pretty loose term to use here. So just kind of get your family here. So Absalom

and Amnon are both David's sons, but they're not full brothers. So from two different mothers. And then Absalom and Tamar are full brother and sister. Four characters so far. You got David, the father figure, you've got Absalom and Amnon, the brothers, and then you have Tamar, who's the full sister of Absalom. It says, Amnon was so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar, because she was a virgin and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her. So you're getting the overall point right away. You've got this guy named Amnon who has sort of an erotic infatuation, we might call it, with his half-sister. And what's he going to do about it?

Well, there's nothing he can do about it, so he's sort of making himself ill because I guess this has just completely taken control of his mind. It says that he's made himself ill because of her, so this is not lovesickness. this is different we've most of us anyway have been kind of lovesick when we were younger you know we fall in love and that's all we can think about is this girl or this guy well this is different this is this isn't love this is a sort of erotic fascination uh with his half sister yeah this isn't uh this is infatuation and obsession yeah yeah obsession maybe is the best best way to describe this um so it's a yeah it's a strange sort of psychology that's going to go on here too

we're going to see this play out as we work our way through the rest of the narrative and the reason you know that it's so obsession is usually irrational uh when you when you become obsessed with something uh you sort of check your uh your reason at the door and you're going to know that this is the case in this story as well because a plan is put forth that if you haven't if you haven't left reason behind in pursuit of your of the thing you're obsessed uh you do not think this is a good plan yeah yeah absolutely yeah and and needless to say even though it says that he he loved her uh this isn't love because you know as we as we all know love wills the good of another And the only will that is at play here is that of this obsession on the part of Amnon.

Amnon, by the way, I didn't mention this, but it's an important part of the story. Amnon is David's firstborn. So kind of keep this in mind, because this is going to be another connection with the earlier stories, in particular that of Jacob. So you remember that Jacob's firstborn, whose name was Reuben, he was the one who also lost his place as firstborn because of a sexual sin. He's the one who slept with his father's co-wife or concubine. And because of that, he was excluded from being the recipient of the blessing of the firstborn. So Amnon is also the firstborn of David. So what's going to happen?

Well, verse 3 says that Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimea, David's brother. So he's not just a friend, he's a cousin. Yeah, he needs better friends. He needs better friends, yeah. I mean, I know you can't choose your family, so it is his cousin, but he definitely needs a better friend and a much, much better counselor. And what kind of guy is Jonadab? We're told that he was a very crafty man.

Now, in Hebrew, that's just literally he was a ish hakam ma'od, that is, a man of great wisdom. This is a great point to bring out, actually, because even though the word translated here is wisdom, wisdom does not necessarily— wisdom is sort of a—can be a neutral term in Hebrew. Solomon was very wise, and if you want to look at somebody who completely wrecked his life and the life of Israel, just look at the life of Solomon. so wisdom does not necessarily imply piety or this desire to do the will of god yes positive wisdom godly wisdom we might say is like that but jonadab is a very wise guy who uses this and that's why it's translated as crafty here or some phrases have shrewd but it's just the general hebrew word for wisdom wise so i think it's an important point to bring out that just because

somebody's wise does not does not necessarily mean this is a positive wisdom they can use that wisdom to do some pretty horrific things i think probably most of the people that have done horrific things throughout history were probably uh not complete fools probably every dictator has been an extremely clever person oh yeah i mean that's that's the way they that's the way they are able to accomplish the uh sometimes catastrophically horrific things that they that they do like some dictators yeah so he's a crafty shrewd wise guy and how does he display this wisdom well he displays it uh through giving advice to his cousin here's here's the advice he says to him this is jonadab saying to amnon oh son of the king why are you so haggard morning

after morning. Will you not tell me? And Amnon says to him, I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister. Now, that's the way it's translated in the ESV, and it's probably the way it's translated in most versions. Now, in the Hebrew, the word order is set up in such a way that kind of this is reversed. It doesn't start out with I love. It starts out with Tamar. So I'll just translate it literally in uh in the hebrew so tamar the sister of absalom my brother i myself love so the one that he has this supposed love for is fronted at the beginning of the sentence so tamar the sister of absalom my brother i myself love so he admits to his cousin this infatuation of this obsession that that he has which you know we might be like okay well that's gross and sick and and all this

kind of stuff and it is but it probably doesn't hit the same way back then i mean you gotta remember you know uh rebecca is super irritated with esau because he won't marry someone in the family you know or this kind of thing so that part probably doesn't hit as uh icky as it would hit us still probably not something that is going to get sanctioned i mean he's not going to go to his dad and say hey can i marry my half sister it's probably something that david's not gonna allow i guess i guess what i'm saying is that initially hearing this him like him saying this probably like if somebody said that to you you would be like well dude yeah you'll get help uh like you know right yes it probably doesn't have that effect no it doesn't in fact we mean we have

i don't know if people uh are are aware of this detail about abraham and sarah but it is worth mentioning here abraham and sarah were half brother and sister right right so i mean that's a that's a detail that abraham brings out uh the second time that he gets caught telling a king that she's his sister he's like well you know actually she's my half sister that's what he tries to justify his justify his uh his lie so what to us as modern people often kind of kicks send this yuck factor like oh that's just as gross you know why why would you be in love with your with your half sister or half brother well back then it that yuck reflex probably is not going to kick in because you know it was a lot of intermarriage of of first cousins there were

marriages between uncles and nieces i mean this was this was not unheard of at all in fact it was very prominent in not just the ancient world, but up until relatively modern history. Okay, so that's what he says to Jonadab. What's Jonadab going to recommend? Well, here's what he says. He comes up with a very shrewd plan. He says, lie down on your bed and pretend to be ill. And when your father comes to see you, that is David, say to him, let my sister tamar come and give me bread to eat and prepare the food in my sight that i may eat it from her hand so that's the advice now notice that jonadab does not kind of he kind of leaves it hanging right he kind of gives he's the idea he's he's giving advice that sets the scenario

for what Amnon can then do. There's two things here. One, based on the stuff that we did mention, I mean, like, if he really, really, really loved her, he could go and try to convince David that this is the case and that he wanted to marry her or something like that. Now, of course, we would be horrified by such a thing,

but as we stated, like, something like that is not outside the realm of possibility. It's against the Mosaic law, but that doesn't mean that David wouldn't still say yes. right and so uh or at least you know you you could have attempted there's nothing he doesn't even bring it up so he's not even going to bring this up to david uh the second thing is this sort of advice feels like it's missing one thing to be pulled right out of the the book of judges and that's okay here's what you do here's the plan uh you're gonna pretend to be sick and then

you're gonna say i need my sister tamar to come in and you know cook me food in front of my in front of me and then i'm going to eat it from her hand the only thing missing from this is him then saying at the end i think this is sort of implied even though it's not stated is that is him saying and then do what is good in your own eyes yes precisely i mean this is this is like the unstated thing right like that here's the setup and then you do whatever you feel like you should do yeah i'm sure in kind of the tone of voice that he said this that would have been the the implication. Yeah. So that's the advice. Amnon evidently thinks that it's great advice because that's precisely what he does. He lays down and he pretends to be ill. And no doubt word gets back

to David. So the king comes to see him and Amnon says to him, he says, please let my sister Tamar come and make a couple of cakes in my sight that I may eat from her hand. Now in the Hebrew, the the word translated here as cakes could be translated this is i'm reading from robert alter's translation here a couple of he translates it to heart-shaped dumplings i don't know where he got the dumplings from but the hebrews definitely does have uh this heart language embedded within it so a couple of heart-shaped cakes a couple of heart-shaped pancakes a heart whatever heart-shaped food he wanted now why would he specifically say that well you know is there a hint here of some sort of sexual overtone uh is is it just kind of implied that

my heart is weak and these cakes uh almost in a sympathetic sort of way will strengthen my heart who knows but it is kind of hard to ignore the fact that they're heart-shaped now don't get kind of hallmark valentine things in your mind because that's not that's that's not here that's i don't think uh in israel they were drawing hearts the way that we do on valentine's day i think a heart-shaped is more like an actual shape of a heart here a lump yeah right yeah so anyway that's what's going on with the hebrew there these heart-shaped dumplings pancakes whatever that's what he asked uh so that i may from eat from her from her hand now i guess david upon hearing this suspected nothing there's really nothing that he could necessarily read into

this it might strike us as rather odd that he would specify his half sister to be the one who would come and do this why should he come make it in front of you that's weird and why would yeah why why should she i mean i'm i'm sure there were many other daughters of david not to mention all of the servants that could have done and kind of come and done this yeah if you want some cakes just ask for some cakes we'll have some brought in yeah why does it have to be why does it have to be her now i don't want to impute any kind of uh motives to david here because i don't think we have justification for that but it does seem odd that he didn't at least we have no evidence that he stop to wonder why this particular request which seems extremely odd to us would have been

made by amnon well i mean and you know this is not something you would what was about to happen is not something unless you had reason apparently david doesn't if you don't have reason to think that this is about to happen you i mean this is not something that you're thinking is about to happen yeah that's true that's true and amnon is david's uh firstborn probably because of that uh he shows him deference you know well i you know amnon wants his sister tamar to come and do a little baking in front of him because he's not feeling well and then i guess that's what i'll that's what i'll do yeah i mean this sounds a little similar to like uh uh you know when when Isaac wants, you know, a meal prepared, and he knows that his son prepares it, like, can prepare

it a certain way. You know, maybe David's just thinking, like, he must really love the way that she bakes those cakes. I guess, like, I guess she's got the recipe that he likes. Right, yeah. So he, David, goes to, sent home to Tamar and says to her, go to your brother Amnon's house and prepare food for him. It's a pretty straightforward message. So Tamar, and we're assuming at this point unsuspecting of any kind of sinister plot, she goes to her brother Amnon's house where he was lying down, and she prepares the meal. She took dough. She kneaded it. She made these cakes in his sight. She baked the cakes, and she took the pan and emptied it out before him, but he refused to eat at least at first and Amnon says send out everyone from me so everybody

goes out of the room and then Amnon goes on to say to Tamar bring the food into my chamber that I may eat from your hand now it's pretty hard for me at this point not to not to pick up on the fact that we've got from the narrator's perspective as he's telling this this kind of this overlap between eating and sex. This is sort of a metaphorical blending of these two particular things. So what he says to her, he says, hey, bring the food into my chamber. That is my bedroom that I may eat from your hand. So Tamar took the cakes that she had made, and she brought them into the chamber to Amnon, her brother. But when she brought them near him to eat he took hold of her he grabbed her and said to her come lie with me my sister

which is uh i mean apart from all the other kind of evil of this story and and weirdness of this narrative to address her as his sister yeah in the same breath in which he says well it's translate to come live with me we would in english we would come out more straightforward than straightforwardly and say hey have sex with me my sister yeah just uh there's so many weird things about this particular story yeah it's weird it's weird that he doesn't he's not trying to diminish that fact right yes that's that's the weird part right why call her that not why not call her by her name you know anything but the the very the very word which denotes this familial connection that they have. By the way, this come lie with me is the exact same Hebrew

expression that Potiphar's wife says to Joseph. So this is one of these intertextual connections that we have between this particular story and what happens with Joseph and Potiphar's wife. Now, of course, the connection between some of these stories is antithetical, that it's setting up a uh the opposite reaction because when potiphar's wife says this to joseph joseph says no and he's able to get away he's able to flee but of course we're about to see the opposite happens here so he says come lie with me have sex with me my sister she answers no my brother now i think in her mouth my brother is a perfect thing to say she's reminding him of who he is. Now, my brother, do not violate me, for such a thing is not done in Israel. Do not

do this outrageous thing. As for me, where could I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the outrageous fools in Israel. And then she goes on, therefore, please speak to the king, for he will not withhold me from you so she says a lot trying to of course on the one hand dissuade him from doing what he's doing and whether she was right that the king wouldn't withhold from her from him or not is kind of beside the point i i suspect at this point she's grasping at anything that's going to help hopefully make him back off yeah i mean she's bringing up sort of what i had brought up earlier which is i mean if this is if you're if this is something you really want uh there's the better the better way to attempt to get it is to go talk to to david

now is that is that going to work we don't know uh if that would have worked or not but it's certainly the argument that she's making is that hey this is this is not the right way to do this because there are the repercussions of this are going to be terrible for both of us yeah by the Boy, this speech from Tamar echoes many of the same words that we read when we cover the story of Dinah back in Genesis and her rape. Because when it says, don't do this outrageous thing, or you'll be one of the outrageous fools, the Hebrew behind that is nabalah. That's used to describe what was done to Dinah when she was raped. So it's sometimes translated a scurrilous thing. And almost every time that it's used, it denotes something which is such, which is so horrendous and is often a sexually horrendous act that it must be addressed in some way.

So this is the same word that was used in reference to the rape of the concubine, the Levites concubine toward the end of the book of Judges. So this outrageous thing, this scurrilous thing, she says, don't do that. and then verse 14 says that he would not listen to her then we have a series of three hebrew verbs in a row which indicate the precipitous and violent nature of what he did he will listen to her so he overpowered her or he was stronger than she was so he overpowered her he violated her and he literally in the hebrew he lay her there's when hebrew talks about sex sometimes it will say that someone lay with someone the with here is not in the hebrew it's a direct object he lay her that's kind of the hebrews way of pointing to the the violent graphic nature of this so of course

we would translate that that he treated her violently or that he raped her and he and he lay her same language by the way that is used in the rape of dinah back in the book of genesis now at this point we have a to to kind of to piggyback off of what i just said with regard to to genesis If you remember after Shechem raped Dinah, it says that he loved her. Now, again, this was an infatuation, but after he seized her and violated her and lay her, then Shechem, we're told, loved Dinah and wanted to marry her. Now, here we have, which of course is psychotic, kind of craziness. Now, here we have the opposite.

it. We're told in verse 15 that Amnon, so after he does this to her, after he rapes her, Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. Yeah, so that is a wild way of saying that, isn't it? I mean, it's really trying to get across to you that this irrational obsession that he has has completely flipped, and now he absolutely disdains her. It makes you believe that Amnon is a fairly unhinged person. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, he's deranged. I mean, in some way that Shechem was, but—well, not the same way, but Shechem was deranged, too. but Shamanon is deranged just in a different sort of way.

Now, once he has acquired, well, he treats her like a thing, like an object. So once he has acquired this thing, this object, then he immediately has the opposite reaction. He's like, he's done with her. So what he thinks that he wants, once he has it, he then treats as garbage afterward and just kind of throws her away. This is a very, it's a different sort of biblical verse to read. We don't have a whole lot of verses like this where it's almost a psychological treatment of this reaction on the part of Amnon, where he flips completely from supposed love or infatuation to this hatred of the girl.

And so Amnon says to her, before he said, come lie with me, and now he says the exact opposite of this. He says, get up and go. So come lie with me, and now get up and go. she says to him, No, my brother, for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other that you did to me. It might be kind of hard for us to wrap our minds around that. So she's saying that to send me away, having done this to me,

would be worse than what you've already done to me. What it seems like is being said here is that it is uh sin on top of sin right so it's compounded and what's happening is that by sending her away he is sending her off to go and deal with this on her own this is not that big a deal to him at this point he doesn't believe that this is something that is some life-altering event he just wants to get rid of it but this is not the case for her and she knows it and so what he's what he's doing here is is sinning greatly against somebody and then telling them to go deal with that sin on their own yeah he's violated her as a virgin and now he's placed her

in the kind of social situation where she is basically not going to have the kind of life that any israelite woman would have expected at this time yeah she's gonna have to as you say she's gonna have to deal with this on her on her own yeah and not being a virgin at that point was a much bigger deal than obviously it is today yeah she would she uh would probably be this kind of a a social pariah as one commentator put it she would not be not be married and so she's gonna have to bear what was done to her as the victim for the rest of her life and amnon treats her as if that that doesn't matter at all all that matters is is that he got what he wanted and now he hates her and he's going to cast her out of the house.

So Amnon says to her, get up and go. She begs him to not do this, but he wouldn't listen to her. So he calls the young man that is a servant who served him. And he says to her, ESV has put this woman out of my presence and bolted the door after her. It's even more kind of grotesque in the Hebrew. He says something like, put this thing or it's the woman is not in the Hebrew. So it's like, put this creature or put this thing out of my presence and bolt the door

after her, as if she was just kind of this dangerous thing that needed to be locked out of the house lest she come back in. She was wearing a long robe with sleeves. Now, this is the Hebrew expression that is translated in the King James in Genesis as the coat of many colors, the kenodit pasin. It only occurs here and in the story of Joseph. So Tamar and Joseph are the only two individuals in the entirety of scripture who are described as wearing a cotonet passing, a long robe with sleeves, or if you want to go the King

James route, the coat of many colors, which of course is an explicit tying together of these two particular stories, because just like Joseph was abused by his brothers, so now she has been abused, sexually abused, raped by her half-brother, and basically thrown away, just like the brothers of Joseph threw him away. And we're told that this was how the virgin daughters of the king dressed. So the servant put her out, bolts the door after her, Tamar puts ashes on her head, tore the long robe that she wore, laid her hand on her head and went away, crying, weeping aloud as she went let me kind of wrap this up here her brother absalom that is her full brother absalom said to her has amnon your brother been with you she doesn't answer we're

assuming that i mean there's no recorded answer we're assuming she nodded or said yes he tells tells her to hold her peace he is your brother absalom says do not take it to heart now unless you think absalom is just kind of trying to sweep this under the rug we're going to find out more about what he does later on i suspect at this point he's just telling her kind of to keep quiet about it that he's going to take he's going to take care of it and then to wrap up this particular section says tamar lived a desolate woman in her brother absalom's house and this is sort of the the why she says this this sin is greater because this is now the situation that she's in yes yes precisely so she's going to be this desolate woman in her brother's house presumably then for

for the rest of, uh, the rest of her life. No, there's a whole lot more to this story. We've, we've just kind of gotten started on this. Uh, we're going to hear next time about how David reacts, how Absalom after a period of time is going to seek his revenge. There's a whole lot more that we're, that we're going to, we're going to get to. And, you know, I, I know we told you this is a, this is a hard story. It's a dark story. It's a terrible story, but It is kind of the beginning of this snowball that we're going to see as time goes on where it's as if Davidson, Bathsheba and Uriah and everything else, it's as if these are exaggerated and repeated and compounded in the lives of his family as we go on. I mean, David sinned sexually, Amnon sinned sexually. David sinned with a beautiful woman.

Now Amnon has sinned with this beautiful woman who is his half-sister. And there's going to be a lot of other kind of repetitions and expansions of David's sin as we go on with the rest of the story. Yeah, it does seem that Absalom is going to—this is maybe the beginning of Absalom really not respecting David at all. we'll see that in the reaction uh next episode but just the fact that Absalom immediately asked his sister is this what happened lets you know that Absalom probably suspected something that David was not wise enough to catch on to it seems unlikely that Absalom would have sent his sister

in there Absalom seems like he knows that there was something going on here David was at the very least oblivious to it and this the first thing that sort of weakens david's standing in absalom's mind next episode we'll get to david's reaction which will not help that at all no no david david will be uh perhaps not a replica of jacob and his reaction to to deseret but will be will be will be pretty close yeah so i didn't want to get there in this this episode because there's so much more to talk about but hang with us uh we i mean we'll we'll come back to this and we'll see the rest of the stories as it unfolds. And as we go on, we'll also try and accept this

within the broader perspective. This is terrible, this is dark and sinful, but in a crazy, unexpected sort of way, God is going to kind of use all of this history to keep things advancing toward the ultimate goal. Yep. All right, Chad, I will see you next week. All right, see you then. We'll see you next time.