{"id":60338,"date":"2019-07-31T09:31:29","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T06:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=60338"},"modified":"2023-02-22T10:58:25","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T08:58:25","slug":"you-are-the-man-and-not-in-a-good-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/you-are-the-man-and-not-in-a-good-way\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are The Man (And Not In A Good Way\u2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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12:1 \u201cAnd the Lord sent Nathan to David, and he came to him and said to him: \u2018Two men there were in a single town, one was rich and the other poor.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Commentary: Nathan\u2019s parables, from its very first syllables, makes clear its own status as a traditional tale and a poetic construction. The way one begins a storyteller\u2019s tale in the Bible is with the formula \u201cthere was a man\u201d — compare the beginning of Job, or the beginning of the story of Hannah and Elkanah in 1 Samuel 1. The Hebrew prose of the parable also is set off strongly from the language of the surrounding narrative by its emphatically rhythmic character, with a fondness for parallel pairs of terms — an effect this translation tries to reproduce. The vocabulary, moreover, includes several terms that are relatively rare in biblical prose narrative: <\/span>kivsah<\/span><\/em> (ewe), <\/span>ra\u2019sh<\/span><\/em> (poor), <\/span>helekh<\/span><\/em> (wayfarer), <\/span>`oreah<\/span><\/em> (wayfarer). Finally the two \u201cmen\u201d of the opening formula are at the end separated out into \u201crich man\u201d \u201cpoor man\u201d and \u201cthe man who had come\u201d (in each of these cases, Hebrew <\/span>`<\/span>ish<\/span><\/em> is used). This formal repetition prepares the way, almost musically, for Nathan\u2019s two-word accusatory explosion, <\/span>`atah ha`ish<\/span><\/em>, \u201cYou are the man!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Given the patently literary character of Nathan\u2019s tale, which would have been transparent to anyone native to ancient Hebrew culture, it is a little puzzling that David should so precipitously take the tale as a report of fact requiring judicial action. Nathan may be counting on the possibility that the obverse side of guilty conscience in a man like David is the anxious desire to do the right thing. As a king, his first obligation is to protect his subjects and to dispense justice, especially to the disadvantaged. In the affair of Bathsheba and Uriah, he has done precisely the opposite. Now, as he listens to Nathan\u2019s tale, David\u2019s compensatory zeal to be a champion of justice overrides any awareness he might have of the evident artifice of the story.<\/span><\/p>\n

From: Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible<\/em>, vol. 2: Prophets, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, ad loc. 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