ABSTRACT
On yet another level, the biblical story of the fortunes and misfortunes of King David's dynasty seems to have trouble keeping its agenda straight: if we thought it was preoccupied with the serious business of political and military history, the rise (or whatever that is) of monarchy (whatever it is), the narrative is interrupted by disturbing sex scenes like the story ofDavid taking Bathsheba when he spots her bathing from his roof, or his son Amnon, overcome with passion, raping his half-sister, Tamar. Do the struggles for Israel's national definition have anything to do with these sexual scenes? The way in which these scenes are so carefully interwoven with political events would indicate that they must: the David-Bathsheba narrative is surrounded, before and after, by accounts of war with the Ammonite enemy. Immediately after describing the Israelite victory over them, the narrative turns to the rape ofTamar, which is followed by Absalom's murder of the rapist (his elder brother and the heir to the throne) and soon Absalom will try to usurp the throne and civil war will rend the nation. Simply put, Israel is threatened from without and from within and in the very midst are acts of adultery, rape, and incest. This is no accident: Israel's war with the sons ofAmmon is a war of definition, the sexual violations are tests of definition, for in both, Israel's borders-who constitutes Israel and who does not-are at stake. Mieke Bal has already made it clear that the book of Judges, which is so explicitly about war and political intrigue, is also about sexual violence; she has even labeled that sexual violence a kind of counter-coherence. 10 These are not separate spheres, public and private, that have impact on one another-such a reading would say that the private acts of David have public consequences, that David is torn between private desires and public duties, that David's private affections get in the way ofhis public role (all of these arguments have been made)-instead, politics and sexuality are so deeply and complexly integrated as to be one, and it is anachronistic to even understand them as two different spheres of life (see Gunn, Gros Louis). The text itself claims their virtual synonymity when the prophet delivers the divine judgment on David's adultery with Bathsheba: "Thus says the Lord, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you out ofyour own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it in secret; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.'" That prediction is fulfilled when David's son Absalom sleeps with his father's concubines in a declaration ofcivil war; David's ostensibly private affair implicates the entire nation.
