2 Samuel13chapter 13

2 Samuel 13:1-3

The chapter names the two brothers on either side of Tamar in one breath: Absalom, her full brother, and Amnon, David's firstborn by Ahinoam and her half brother only. Amnon's love curdles at once into vexation, a want that cannot be filled without breaking the law of Israel. Jonadab, David's own nephew through his brother Shimeah, enters as a very subtil man, the same word Scripture uses elsewhere for shrewdness bent toward evil.

2 Samuel 13:4-6

Jonadab reads Amnon's sickness at a glance and supplies the whole plan: feign illness, ask for Tamar by name, get her alone in the inner chamber. A counselor's gift used for evil is worse than none, since it hands sin the cunning it lacked on its own. David comes in person to see his sick son, the first unwitting hinge of a plot he does not yet know exists.

2 Samuel 13:7-11

David sends his own daughter into Amnon's house at his son's request, never asking why a grown man needs his sister alone to bake for him. Amnon puts every other man out before he acts, leaving Tamar without a witness in the room, the circumstance later law treats as decisive at Deuteronomy 22:25. The king who wept over Bathsheba's dying child now sends Tamar in unknowing, and the sword promised at 12:10 finds its first opening inside his own house.

2 Samuel 13:12-14

Tamar's plea moves past emotion into law: she calls what he intends folly, warns it will leave him as one of the fools in Israel, then offers marriage to the king as her last hope of escape. Albert Barnes reads that offer as a bid to get free of the room rather than proof such marriages were lawful, since the law already forbade them. Amnon will not hear her. He simply overpowers her, and the narrator states the fact without ornament: forced her, and lay with her.

2 Samuel 13:15-17

The hatred that follows is stranger than the crime, greater than the love had been, and now it is Amnon who wants distance. Tamar answers that sending her away is a wrong worse than what he did to her, since it denies her even the standing of a wife taken by force and casts her out with nothing. Amnon calls a servant rather than face her again, and the order to bolt the door behind her is his last word in the scene.

2 Samuel 13:18-19

Tamar's garment of divers colours marks her as a king's daughter still a virgin, and the phrase occurs in only one other place in Scripture, the coat Jacob made for Joseph at Genesis 37:3. She tears it herself, the garment meant to mark her standing now torn to mark her ruin, and puts ashes on her head, the plain sign of mourning used throughout Israel's story. The narrator lingers on the robe long enough that its tearing reads as testimony spoken in cloth, where her own household refuses to speak.

2 Samuel 13:20

Absalom already knows or guesses what happened, and his counsel is silence rather than justice: hold thy peace, he is thy brother, regard not this thing. The advice keeps the household's surface calm while doing nothing for Tamar, who is left desolate in her brother's house rather than restored or avenged. Two years of that silence will pass before Absalom acts, and this verse is where his plan begins, not where it ends.

2 Samuel 13:21

David's anger is real, and it is also all he offers. The Hebrew text names no punishment and no rebuke, though the Greek translation used by the early church adds a reason: he did not vex Amnon's spirit, because he loved him as his firstborn. The positions differ on whether that clause belongs to the original text or simply explains what the Hebrew leaves silent, but either reading leaves a king angry without being just, and Absalom's own justice at the sheepshearing feast fills the gap his father left.

2 Samuel 13:22

Absalom says nothing to Amnon at all, neither rebuke nor forgiveness, and the silence proves worse than either would have been. The law of Leviticus 19:17 ties open rebuke to loving one's neighbor and hidden hatred to withholding it, and this verse names the hatred outright: Absalom hated Amnon. What David failed to punish, Absalom now determines to avenge himself, and the two years of quiet that follow are preparation, not peace.

2 Samuel 13:23-27

Two full years is the narrator's own measure of Absalom's patience, long enough that both Amnon and David let their guard down completely. Absalom invites the king first, knowing he will decline a costly outing for his whole court, then asks specifically for Amnon once the king has already refused to come himself, so the one request that matters looks like an afterthought. David presses him no further and lets his firstborn go, never suspecting a plot two years in the making.

2 Samuel 13:28-29

heart is merry with wine: Absalom gives the order in a setting that echoes Amnon's own trap, waiting for the same kind of unguarded moment, wine in place of appetite. This is the sword promised at 12:10 opening its first wound, a son of David killed by a son of David, and the older writers count Amnon among the fourfold loss David pronounced on himself unknowing at 12:6, alongside the child already dead and Absalom and Adonijah still to come. David did nothing to stop what he already knew of, and the other sons flee on their mules not yet knowing whether the killing will end with Amnon.

2 Samuel 13:30

The report that reaches David before the facts do is worse than the truth, all the king's sons rather than one, and grief comes to the palace on a rumor before the real news arrives. Adam Clarke notes that a report always grows larger than the event it carries, and this verse is the first place in the chapter where that pattern costs David dearly. He will tear his garments for sons who are alive before he learns which one is dead.

2 Samuel 13:31-33

David's grief is total and, for the moment, wrongly aimed, mourning a household wiped out that is not actually gone. Jonadab, the same cunning cousin who designed Amnon's trap at verse 5, is also the only man in the room who already knows the truth, and he corrects the king's grief with the same shrewdness he once gave Amnon's lust. His calm certainty, Amnon only is dead, tells the reader that Jonadab had read Absalom's plan from the day Tamar was forced, and said nothing to stop it either.

2 Samuel 13:34-36

A watchman posted to look down the road, the same kind of office that will one day spot Absalom's own end at chapter 18, sees the king's sons coming while Jonadab is still speaking. The false report of verse 30 dissolves the moment the company comes into view, and grief turns from all the sons to the one who will not walk through the gate again. David and his servants weep sore, not from the worst they feared, but from a lesser and still real loss.

2 Samuel 13:37-39

Absalom flees to his mother's father Talmai, king of Geshur, a foreign court beyond David's reach and beyond any city of refuge, since this killing was planned rather than accidental. Three years pass there while David mourns Amnon daily, and by the chapter's last verse the mourning has turned into something else: a father's longing for the son who murdered his brother. That longing, left unresolved here, is the seam the next two chapters open, when Joab and a wise woman will have to talk David into calling Absalom home.