Rape Culture in the House of David

A Company of Men

Barbara Thiede

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000614640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Rape Culture in the House of David: A Company of Men describes a biblical rape culture sustained and maintained by Yhwh and a host of men—from royal kings and princes to their relatives, counselors, generals, and servants.

This volume reveals that sexual violence in the house of David is not simply perpetrated by its most powerful men. Rather, in the pursuit of power, status, authority, and honor, men form alliances and networks that support the use and abuse of women's bodies and valorize sexualized violence against other men. The man who is most capable of sexual violence is Israel's ideal king.

Barbara Thiede deftly addresses the power and contemporary relevance of these narratives and argues that exposing and naming rape culture in biblical literature is essential—in social, economic, and political realms.

This is a meaningful feminist intervention in the field of biblical studies and is of great benefit to graduate students and scholars of religion, gender studies, and masculinity studies.

1Disposing of Daughters, Sisters, and WivesThe Rapes of Tamar and of David’s Pilagshim

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014911-2

Introduction: The Ideal Man, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Biblical Rape Culture

The ideal man of the Hebrew Bible is a warrior well-endowed in looks and strength. He is an effective and persuasive speaker, ready and willing to bond with the men who support him and ally with him. He is effectively “womanless,” even as he collects women and their bodies to attest to his prowess and produce offspring (Clines 2009, 216–27).¹

In the Books of Samuel, the ideal man is someone who often engages in sexual violence. He takes women and he rapes them. He symbolically rapes men too. Sexual violence is an essential instrument for sustaining his command over other men and for performing biblical standards of model masculinity. Lesser men may become partners, bystanders, or witnesses to the sexual violence practiced by men in charge. By colluding, cooperating, and acquiescing in sexual violence, they confirm that they, too, belong to and uphold the male homosocial order.

Male characters in the Hebrew Bible, regardless of rank, belong to a system of biblical hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity works to establish male domination and female subordination (Connell 2005, 77). It is maintained through zero-sum struggles for status and control. Even the men who lose in the battles over position, authority, and honor will not disavow the premises of the contest, but rather hope (and strive) to win the next time around. The competition is relentless; masculinity must be continually performed and repeatedly proven. As such, masculinity is inherently unstable. Still, male biblical authors describe failures for a purpose: the audience learns who fails at masculinity in order to understand what it takes to succeed.

Because hierarchies of dominance are often worked out through sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, the ideal king must, perforce, be capable of rape. Rape is a medium for challenges to his supremacy. Thus, though 2 Samuel 13 is so often called “The Rape of Tamar,” the sexual violence in this text is a tool, not the topic: a conduit for men to challenge one another’s honor and power.² The rape of David’s pilagshim (2 Sam. 16:22)³ is likewise not about the women themselves but is rather part of a battle for sovereignty and the throne.⁴ When sexual violence is the means by which power in the narrative is negotiated, rape becomes the inevitable language of the text.⁵

In these biblical books, when women are raped, murder will follow. Rape either establishes or escalates conflicts between men; it is an intermediary step that leads to the death of the enemy, one that is often itself sexualized and violent. David takes and rapes Bathsheba and has her husband Uriah murdered. Amnon rapes Tamar and is murdered by Absalom. Absalom rapes his father’s pilagshim and is in turn murdered by David’s right-hand man and nephew, Joab. The arc of the story is about men, not about women. What matters is which man wins and which man loses, who lives and who dies. Sexual violence against women is part of the author’s literary inventory, an established vehicle for showing how male rivalries unfold.

Rape in the Hebrew Bible does not typically feature multiple perpetrators. Multiple colluders, bystanders, and witnesses are another matter. In these narratives, men indulge in sharing women’s bodies, both in word and deed. Together they ogle women and partner in trapping women for their sexual use. They evoke the act of rape with other men, sharing mental images of the woman’s body made accessible to them well before the actual act is committed. Men actively plan rape with other men. They rape within earshot of other men and rape in front of other men. They rape their own sisters; and they rape the daughters, sisters, and wives of other men.

Voyeurism is integral to the experience. The Hebrew Bible’s rapists make it possible for other men not merely to imagine the violation of women, but to know it will occur, to listen in, and sometimes to watch. When men share sex talk, sex images, and sex acts, when they invite each other to participate in the use of a woman’s body, they bond.⁶ A lesser man may not be able to rape as the ideal man can, but he can vicariously experience the act, witness it as a bystander, or help bring it about. Someday, he might be the man to invite others to the party.

In a rape culture, no man rapes alone. He has an entire system behind him to support and applaud what he does, excuse what he does, or condone what he does. In the Hebrew Bible too, male alliances, friendships, and relationships underpin sexual assault. This chapter addresses the male networks that produce the rapes of David’s daughter Tamar and his pilagshim. These rapes are connected, part of a larger trajectory in which sexual violence regularly serves as a means for negotiating power among men. David and his sons all possess influence and authority. In the exercise of their authority, they will imagine rape, enable rape, and become rapists themselves.

Kinship relations are critical to biblical systems of male dominance. In David’s house, fathers, sons, and brothers use the bodies of women to compete, contest, and challenge one another. Amnon seeks to use Tamar’s body in order to humiliate and challenge Absalom, his rival for the throne. Absalom rapes his father’s pilagshim to symbolically emasculate his father. And Adonijah makes an attempt to acquire David’s former servant, the beautiful virgin Abishag and, in so doing, seals his death warrant at Solomon’s hands. David and his sons establish their rank, status, and dominion through obtaining sexual access to women and through using sexual violence against them.

Family relationships do not exist isolated from the systems they inhabit. Male friendships and alliances in the Hebrew Bible depend on women’s bodies not merely for their expression, but for their very creation.⁷ In the Books of Samuel, friends and counselors will play critical roles in suggesting, planning, and colluding in rape; male alliances will be cemented, even forged, through sexual violence. There will be other men who are drawn into the planning and the witnessing. Attendants, courtiers, soldiers—all these will be present at the crime. There will be much display of sexual violence, and there will be consumption of the spectacle by both the male characters and the biblical audiences for each tale. Even the modern reader must assume the role of voyeur.

Biblical authors care about depicting sexual violence as a tool, not as a crime. The victims are unimportant. Tamar and the pilagshim may survive their rapes, but only as living ghosts who rapidly disappear from the pages of the Hebrew Bible. They can serve no future purpose because they are significant only as the conduits for male competition. Once they are sexually used, they are discarded by the men in the narrative, and by the biblical authors too.

2 Samuel 13: The Rape of Tamar

It takes just six verses to discover how many men in David’s family will play a role in the rape of Tamar. The princess is introduced as Absalom’s beautiful sister (2 Sam. 13:1).⁸ In the next verse, Tamar’s half-brother Amnon is brought on stage—sick “because of his sister” and tormented because it is impossible for him to “do anything to her” (לעשות לה מאומה). Tamar is not only Absalom’s sister, she is also a virgin (13:2).⁹ Next, the author introduces the man who will solve Amnon’s dilemma: Jonadab, son of David’s brother Shimah, nephew to the king and friend and cousin to the heir. Jonadab immediately provides Amnon with a plan that relies on drawing in yet another member of the family, the one presumably most responsible for protecting sexual access to Tamar: her father, King David.

The princess has no identity and no purpose outside of her relationship to each of these men. Instructed by Joab, Amnon asks the king, “Let my sister Tamar come” (2 Sam. 13:6). In turn, David sends a message that similarly defines his daughter: “Please go to the house of your brother Amnon” (13:7). Even Absalom, who strangely manages to turn up almost immediately after Tamar is raped (13:20), makes clear that his sister is only important in terms of the men she is related to. As she stands before him with ashes on her head and her garment rent, he asks: “has your brother been with you?” (האמינון אחיך היה עמך).¹⁰

Sexual access to a family’s women is guarded by men who use it to secure or advance their own interests.¹¹ One should presume that Tamar’s virginity would be protected by both her father, the king, and her brothers. Her movements are their charge (Matthews and Benjamin 1997, 344–45). But just as there are reasons to protect sexual access to the bodies of the women of the family for male purposes, we will see that there can also be reasons to grant their bodies to other men to further male agendas. The goal is to gain and maintain authority and to demonstrate who possesses power and control.

All of these men have official positions, whether as king, prince, or counselor. David’s nephew Jonadab is called Amnon’s “friend.” The term deployed here, re’a (ער), is used in royal contexts to refer to a kind of counselor, a “king’s friend,” whose role is to facilitate marriage alliances (van Selms 1957, 120–22; Bakon 2015, 105).¹² Jonadab is important at court, a counselor and advisor to the heir to David’s throne. His family bona fides are given, and his official position vis-à-vis the prince is identified (2 Sam. 13:3). He is, the biblical author also tells us, very shrewd (דאמ םכח), “an exceedingly worldly man,” as Saul Olyan puts it (2017, 82).

Certainly, Jonadab seems well prepared to deal with Amnon’s desires. He immediately provides his cousin with a script. First, Amnon should lie down and pretend to be ill. Then,

[w]hen your father comes to see you, say to him, “Let my sister Tamar come and give me something to eat. Let her prepare the food in front of me, so that I may look on, and let her serve it to me.”

(13:5)

Jonadab evokes what Amnon has already imagined. Tamar, sister of a formidable rival, in his rooms, serving him, on display for his enjoyment. The two men are sharing sex talk, experiencing a fantasy together. It is a bonding moment.

Amnon must, however, find a way to convince his father, the king, to dispatch Tamar to his rooms.¹³ Fortunately for the pri...