Because he had no pity
Nathan’s Confrontation of David
in 2 Samuel 12
David’s burned
with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives,
the man who did this must die! He must
pay for that lamb four times over because he did such a thing and had no pity." Then Nathan said to David, "You are the man!"
~ 2 Samuel 12:5-7
While scripture is
replete with stories of animals, we rarely focus on them, unless we consider
the animals as allegories or metaphors for some element of the human
relationship with God. Today I want to turn the tables just a bit and look at a
story of human interaction to see what it has to say about our interactions
with animals. The story of David,
Bathsheba, Uriah, and Nathan is a story of the use and abuse of power. It is a story well worth the church's attention. If you have read earlier posts, especially
this one, this one, and this one, you know that I believe that power is at the
heart of our relationship with animals, so scripture’s teachings on the use of
power go to the heart of how we rightly exercise dominion, and that it is
matter of urgency that the church speak up about our misuse of power over
animals.
While my focus is
on the confrontation between King David and the prophet Nathan, the story
really begins when David spies Bathsheba from a rooftop.
Briefly told, David orders
his servants to bring Bathsheba to him, although he knew she was married to his
faithful soldier Uriah, who was away fighting a war on David’s behalf. Later,
when Bathsheba surprises David by telling him she is pregnant, David first
tries to have Uriah come home so he will think the baby is his, and when that
fails, he arranges to have Uriah killed in battle. He marries Bathsheba to hide his adultery.
 |
| David and Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi |
This
is a turning point in David’s rule. As
D.M. Gunn puts it, here David turns “from gift to grasp.”[1] Until this time, David, while not perfect and
always pragmatic, has been a man after God’s own heart.[2] He has prayed regularly, ruled justly, and
enjoyed success after success against considerable odds. Yet in this setting of plenty, David took
what was not his.[3] With these actions, David behaved like the kings
of other nations - a king who takes what he likes, not because he needs
anything, but simply because he can. “But the thing that David had done was
evil in the sight of the Lord and the Lord sent Nathan to David.” (11:27-12:1).[4] Here is where the confrontation begins.
Nathan
comes to David and tells a story of injustice: a rich and powerful man with
many herds takes from a poor and defenseless man all that the poor man has -
economically and emotionally - his one little ewe lamb. The story is powerfully told so that our
focus and sympathy is drawn to the poor man and we are shocked when we hear
that the rich man took the poor man’s lamb - just as David took Bathsheba.[5] “This is a tale of cynicism, selfishness,
destruction, and greed.”[6] It is the rich man’s disregard for the
suffering he caused to one helpless before him that gives the injustice its
force.[7]
David
is rightly outraged at this abuse of power and declares that the rich man
deserves to die and should make four-fold restitution, because the rich man
“had no pity” on the poor man (12:6).
Nathan’s retorts, “You are the man!” (12:7). Then, using the prophet’s pronouncement,
“Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel,” Nathan recites the Lord’s extravagant
bounty toward David, adding, “if that had been too little, I would have added
as much more.” In disregarding the
Lord’s bounty, David has become “the exploiter, the perpetrator of injustice. .
. . David’s deeds are not just offenses against Bathsheba and Uriah; they are
offenses against God’s word.”[8] The Lord’s judgment follows: “the sword will
never depart from [David’s] house” and David’s wives will be given to another
(12:9-10).
+%5BPublic+domain%5D,+via+Wikimedia+Commons.jpg) |
| Nathan and David By Baron Henri de Triqueti |
David
is brought up short by the parable and the judgment. He sees in a new light the reality of what he
has done and turns back to God.
Forgiveness is granted, but the consequences of sin cannot be
undone. David, those he loves, and his
whole kingdom, will pay the price for his pitiless taking for the rest of
David’s days and beyond. Walter
Brueggemann explains, “The narrative is about the high price of receiving life
when we are seduced by our imagined moral and ethical autonomy.”[9] Birch points out that the story reminds us
that “[p]ower is always tempted to live in the illusion that it is autonomous
and self-sufficient . . . [but] there is a divine reality before which royal
reality is judged.”[10]
These
are lessons that never grow old. One of
the most prevalent areas where we as Christians, and indeed as humans, operate with the
greatest “imagined moral and ethical autonomy,” where surely we have given in
to the self-justification of power, is in the area of our dealings with
animals. We imagine they exist solely
for our use and that we owe them no moral obligation. We imagine we owe them no
pity. They are, however, sentient beings
who belong to God, given into our care, and our power over them is even greater
than the power of David over Bathsheba and Uriah or the power of the rich man over the poor
man. Just as God gave an abundance of
gifts to David, so God gives us the abundance of creation for our use. Just as David turned from receiving God’s
gifts to grasping what he didn’t need, so we have turned from receiving the abundant
fruits of creation to grasping what we do not need for fur, cosmetics, tasty
delicacies, throw-away pets, entertainment, and an overabundance of meat. Just as David, in his taking, bumped up
against the limits of his control, found his sin escalating in unanticipated
ways, and wound up paying a devastating price even after his repentance, so we
are encountering these same realities.
We
have overstepped our authority and “taken” living beings and turned them into
production units or mere means to human ends.
Geese have tubes pushed down their throats so they can be overfed by
force to produce for us unnaturally enlarged livers for some tasty pâté. Sharks are caught by the tens of millions
every year, have their fins cut off, and are tossed back into the sea to drown
or bleed to death so we can enjoy shark fin soup. Baby seals are clubbed on the head before
their mothers’ helpless eyes and skinned - often while still alive - so we can
have a little fur trim on our jackets.
Foxes and minks are electrocuted anally so that their fur is undamaged
for our elegant coats. All kinds of
animals are used in painful and sometimes lethal experiments when other methods
of testing are available. Puppy mills
house dogs by the hundreds in wire cages - often stacked one on top of the
other - in conditions of squalor and filth without socialization or often
medical care. Females are kept
constantly pregnant or nursing, churning out millions of puppies a year while
shelters euthanize millions of animals a year for lack a home. Factory farming warehouses animals in
horrific conditions of constant suffering and does not allow them to engage in
such basic behaviors as eliminating in a place where they do not sleep - or in
many cases, even the simple the ability to turn around, so we can eat more meat
than our bodies can healthfully process.
In
addition, just as David faced consequences far beyond his imagining, so we are
facing significant consequences for our taking of God’s creatures. Animal agriculture dominated by factory
farming is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases worldwide. Waste lagoons from factory farming threaten
our waterways. New diseases like bird
flu and swine flu threaten human populations.
Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals to counter the unsanitary
conditions in which they are forced to live threaten our treatment of human
disease. Diets heavy in meat consumption
are linked with several kinds of cancer and heart disease. The divine reality of the inter-connectedness
of all God’s creatures confronts our imagined autonomy and limitless power.
Beyond
these lessons of the consequences of the misuse of power, Parks and Birch
address the implications of the story of David’s encounters with Bathsheba and
Nathan for leadership in the church.[11] They argue that the church is uncomfortable
with this story and so attempts to rationalize David’s actions or by romanticize
the story. This will not do,
however: “We need to preach this bleak
side of David’s story, not simply to address the sins of the powerful, but to
acknowledge how often we excuse and emulate them. . . . If we are forced to
hear and face our own complicity in self-interested abuses of power through the
confrontations of Nathan, then also we, like David, may be able to confess,
repent, and take new direction away from such abuses.”[12]
The
community of faith has been complicit in the self-interested abuse of human
power against animals. In the face of
the abuses listed above and many others, the church remains almost entirely
silent - and in some cases is even a champion of such abuse. The church relies on humans’ place at the “top”
of creation and our God-given dominion over animals as justification,
forgetting Nathan’s word to David that when we use even God-given power to take
from the powerless - when we have no pity - we reject the word of the
Lord.
Many times those
who seek to raise the issue of concern for animals in their churches wind up
feeling more like Uriah than Nathan - pushed aside, belittled, or scorned. Many have experienced a kind of spiritual
death and left the church - or at least the hostile congregation. In our interactions with animals, the human
story has become “a tale of cynicism, selfishness, destruction, and greed.”[13] We need to at least be able speak about, and
maybe even have the courage to preach about, “this bleak side” of our human
story.
The
story of David and Nathan is the story of coming to terms with our misuse of
power. Isaac Bashevis Singer was a man
who knew something about the misuse of power.
A Noble prize winning author, he immigrated to the United States from
Poland shortly before World War II due to the growing Nazi threat. Animals
often appear in his stories. In a short story entitled The Letter Writer, he wrote this about the helplessness of animals
in the face of unlimited human power:
In his thoughts, Herman spoke a
eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who,
because of him, had left this earth.
‘What do they know -- all these scholars, all these philosophers, all
the leaders of the world -- about such as you?
They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all
the species, is the crown of creation.
All other creatures were created merely to provide them with food,
pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In
relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal
Treblinka.[14]
[1] Gunn, D.
M. The Story of King David: Genre and
Interpretation (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement
Series 6). Sheffield: JSOT, 1978, p. 97.
[2] 1 Sam.
13:14.
[3] I use
the verb “took” here deliberately, referencing 1 Sam. 8:10-18., in which Samuel warns Israel
that a king will “take” what is not his.
[4] Birch,
Bruce C. “The First and Second Books of Samuel: Introduction, Commentary, and
Reflections,” in The New Interpreters’
Bible, Volume II. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998, p. 1287.
[5] Brueggemann, Walter. First and Second Samuel.
Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990, p. 280.
[6]
Brueggemann, p. 280.
[7] This is
also a significant recognition of the potential for the human-animal bond and
the importance of companion animals in our lives. Nevertheless, the pity that is spoken of here
is pity for the man who lost a companion he loved, not for the lamb who lost
her life.
[8] Birch,
pp. 1292-93.
[9]
Brueggemann, pp. 282-83.
[10] Birch,
p. 1294.
[11] Parks,
Lewis A., and Birch, Bruce C. Ducking Spears, Dancing Madly: A Biblical
Model of Church Leadership.
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004, pp. 120-33.
[12] Parks
and Birch, pp. 124, 126.
[13]
Brueggemann, p. 280
[14] Singer,
Isaac Bashevis, “The Letter Writer” available in Collected Stories Vol. 1, Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer.
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