The Secret Chord

Content Warning: The book depicts multiple instances of rape including graphic accounts of nonconsensual sex and humiliation. The following section includes analysis of one or more of those instances.

Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord explores in painful detail the abuses of male power. The entire narrative can be reduced to a series of five rapes and their consequences: The rape of David’s mother causes David to grow up in an atmosphere of violent hate; Mikhal is twice ripped away from the man she loves as David uses her to rise to royal power; David’s rape of Batsheva marks his break with God’s plan; and Amnon’s rape of Tamar begins the bloody familial conflict of David’s later years, which continues with Avshalom’s rape of David’s concubines. These rapes are not aberrations. The male domination of women is part of the fabric of society. The events leading to the first attack on David’s mother begin with her husband using his power to separate from her and bring in a maid who is afraid to resist him. This continues under David’s rule. If Tamar had not been raped, she would have been “used, and very soon, in some important piece of statecraft” (227). As the word “used” implies, she is an object to be married off for political purposes. Natan claims women have greater ability to speak carefully and interpret unspoken communication. He says this is a survival strategy in the face of male power: “Women, whose very lives, sometimes, might depend upon concealing their true feelings, spoke a more artful language” (71). By the end of the book, there is ample evidence that worry for their “very lives” is not an exaggeration.

Politics and battles take a backseat to male-female relationships in the book, but Brooks links both to the male abuse of power. In Brooks’s first description of battle, Natan presses up against his enemy, sliding the shaft of his blade into the other person’s flesh until “I felt the warm wetness of his insides closing about my fist. It was intimate as a rape” (9). The sexualized language of battle gets reinforced when Shammah asserts, “Well, you know what it’s like, when you take your first man. You’re ready for sex” (62). David feels emasculated when his advisors tell him to stay home and avoid the danger of battle, and to assuage those feelings he rapes Batsheva. Amnon and Avshalom’s pride and lust for power expresses itself in lust to dominate women and other sexual partners. The horrors of war—in which women and children are also slaughtered—exist in a mutually reinforcing dialectic with the horror of rape. Brooks portrays the male abuse of power by husbands and kings as a defining aspect of ancient society (whether and how that relates to modern society is left up to the reader).

Brooks makes two narrative moves that temper this dark portrayal. First, she emphasizes the autonomy of survivors. When Mikhal is forced to leave her husband and children, she is the one to convince her husband to go home and care for her family. She has no ability to stop David from taking her, but she retains the ability to make provisions for her children and then to turn herself into a living rebuke to David’s thoughtlessness. Through Avshalom, Tamar takes violent revenge on her attacker. Batsheva finds new purpose in her son. These ambiguous, qualified victories underline the power of female survivors to forge new identities out of their trauma and to move ahead despite a hostile world.

Brooks’s second narrative move is to offer hope for a different kind of society. David initially relies on Avigail as an equal, and his sexual excesses only begin when he loses her. Palti repents of his violent taking of Mikhal, and the two of them manage to forge a loving partnership. Shlomo most obviously symbolizes the hope for a better kingship. His relationship to women is left undeveloped, but Brooks offers hope through his mentors that he will not abuse patriarchal power. His first mentor, Batsheva, is a rape survivor. The second, Natan, is a survivor of traumatic violence, too. He is also celibate. He attributes his celibacy to his calling as a prophet, but most prophets in the Jewish tradition marry and have children. Brooks’s unusual decision to make Natan celibate separates him from the normal cycle of male lust and abuse. He is willing to learn from women, especially Avigail, and becomes the ally to Batsheva and other women. Natan at least partially has overcome the temptation to abuse his male power. Taken together, these elements of hope suggest that the pervasive problem of patriarchal abuse of power need not be permanent.

In the Prologue, Natan wonders whether Shlomo’s temple, rising before him as he writes, could have been built without all of David’s bloody actions—even if that bloodshed caused God to bar David from building the temple. He suggests the answer is no: “Civilization is built upon the backs of men like him, whose blood and sweat make it possible. But comes the peace, and the civil world has scant place for such men” (2). The rest of the book unpacks this theme as it describes the horrifying things David had to do to claim the throne and prepare the way for his son. Brooks refuses to provide a simple resolution to this theme, though Natan notices how easily the “necessity” defense can be deployed to justify unjustifiable violence.

Natan tells us early that David’s practical motto is, “Whatever it takes. Whatever is necessary” (28). Initially, Natan emphasizes David’s restraint: “What was necessary, and no more” (28). He thinks David will avoid violence where possible. Yet the murder of Natan’s father for simply refusing to disobey the king forms the context for the motto’s introduction. As the deaths mount, accepting this logic becomes harder. Natan turns to alcohol. While he had accepted the logic as a child—after David killed his family—he questions it as he matures as a man:

I felt a stab of longing for the apricot-colored earth of those vineyards, for my father, rubbing it in his coarse hands, tasting it, assessing as it crumbled, not too sticky nor too fine, but just the correct tilth to support the roots and sustain the vines. All that skill, lost with the plunge of metal. His blood, soaking into the soil. Even in death, nourishing that earth he had loved and tended. Had his death really been necessary, as David had asserted, and I, a child, had so readily accepted? (121).

Natan’s lament over all the good things that ended with his father’s death partially answers his final question. Perhaps David really thought this death was necessary to preserve his men’s lives, but that “necessity” cost an equally valuable life. As Natan refers to the motto of “necessity” throughout the book, he does so with an increasingly bitter tone. He knows that some acts of violence, such as David’s murder of Mikhal’s nephews or of Uriah, come from spite and fear rather than true necessity. Natan writes, “These deaths had not been necessary to anything other than David’s own ungirt appetite. It was simply abuse of power” (192). Clearly David has twisted his own principles so that he is using violent means for a bad end and no longer a good end.

Yet the question remains whether, without this violence, David could have created a prosperous kingdom safe from invasion by aggressive neighbors. In the final chapter, Natan justifies lying to David as “necessary” to ensure Shlomo’s coronation, though even as he speaks, he “despised” those words and “the utilitarian willingness they signified, that anything may be done in the quest for power” (295). Power is not enough to justify brutal acts of “necessity”; but Natan is willing to do it for the sake of a peaceful kingdom.

The question of God’s plan complicates matters even more for Natan. He doesn’t understand God’s plan, as he admits when he describes God’s ban on David building the temple as “words whose reason no human heart could fathom” (2). In reflecting on the night when David first took Batsheva, Natan wonders why God did not send him a vision to prevent the crime. At the same time, he wonders what would have happened, or failed to happen, if he had stopped David: “what greatness might have remained unmade, a design unrealized, a future lost. Decades have passed now, and still I do not know how to fashion my thought on this matter” (67). As Natan says here, the question of whether Shlomo’s glorious era of peace could have happened without David’s military and sexual violence remains unanswered at the end of Natan’s life. It may be that God has simply adapted to the choices David made through his own free will. It may be that violent means are necessary to achieve good ends, and yet this necessity does not absolve the one who does the violence. When the ends are used to justify the means, Natan suggests, those imagined ends present an irresistible temptation to engage in ever greater and less justifiable violence. It may be that no good outcome, no matter how glorious, can justify murder or rape. Brooks leaves these disquieting speculations unresolved for each reader to ponder on their own.