The Condemnation of David's "Taking" in 2 Samuel 12:1-14

In the narrative of 2 Samuel 11-12, after David commits adultery with Bathsheba and attempts to cover up this crime by murdering her husband, Uriah, Nathan approaches him in 12:1-4 with a parable, the point of which would appear to be to have David pass judgment on himself for these sins and so to acknowledge the justice of the punishment that God and Nathan pronounce in 12:7b-12, 13b-14. The parable concerns a rich man who takes a poor man's beloved lamb, his only possession, in order to provide for a traveler, because the rich man does not want to kill one of the many animals that he owns. The prophet's parable does seem to accomplish the goal of auto-condemnation: David announces in 12:5-6 that the rich man in Nathan's story deserves to be punished, and when Nathan announces the divine penalty for David's actions, David admits culpability in 12:13a. This, says Uriel Simon, is the way a "juridical parable" is supposed to function—it is "a realistic story about a violation of law, related to someone who had committed a similar offence with the purpose of leading the unsuspecting hearer to pass judgment on himself."¹ I will show here that, although 12:1-4 does function as such a parable, its point is to have David convict himself not primarily of murder and adultery but simply of "taking" Bathsheba, a matter that God sees as an attempt by David to usurp God's role in their relationship. The key to seeing this as the point of the parable is through a comparison of it with God's announcement of David's punishment in the oracle of 12:7b-12 and Nathan's addendum to it in 12:13b-14, particularly the rationales that God and prophet supply there for this punishment. As we shall see, it is David's taking of Bathsheba that is central to the warrant that God provides for the punishment; the murder and adultery are not ignored in 12:7b-14, but they are tangential to the charge that David has taken when he should not have.

When scholars assume that Nathan's goal with the parable of 12:1-4 is to try to get David to convict himself on charges of murder and adultery, it is difficult to avoid noticing that there are striking differences between David's crimes in 2 Samuel 11 and that of the rich man in the parable, whose only actual criminal offense is to steal a poor man's lamb. Simon and others argue that the parallels between a juridical parable and the actual crimes that the hearer has committed cannot be too obvious, or else hearers will see through the ploy and so avoid making a harsh but fair judgment in regard to the parable, since they would realize that this would bind them to the same judgment in their own case.² There is certainly a point to this as rhetorical strategy, but the parable must be similar enough to the actual case for the hearer's condemnation of the fictional situation to apply to his or her real actions. If this close connection between parable and real crimes does not exist, then hearers will not see how their judgment in regard to the parable also applies to their own wrongdoings. And the fact of the matter is that there are some striking differences between Nathan's story of a rich man who takes a poor man's lamb and David's murder and adultery in 2 Samuel 11, most notable among them that 12:1-4 mentions no murder or adultery. Both of these are capital crimes in ancient Israel,³ while theft is not.⁴ As a result, argue some scholars, we really cannot refer to 12:1-4 as a juridical parable at all, for if Nathan tells the story to David in the hopes of getting the king to condemn a thief, what purpose would that serve? David...