This chapter is the culmination of the tragic story of Amnon and Tamar. It’s been three years since the death of Amnon at Absolom’s hands and David’s heart is still heavy. Joab convinces a wise woman to tell an elaborate story to tug at David’s heart to convince him to allow his son Absolom to return to Jerusalem.
Tag: messianic prophecy
The importance of linking the last Adam to the “first Adam” is emphasized through the two genealogies of Yeshua (Luke 3:23–38). Some skeptics try to use the “telescoping” nature of Matthew’s genealogy for Yeshua, which skips generations to emphasize three groups of 14 generations, as the basis for saying that the genealogies of the first people in Genesis 5 and 11 also are telescoped, thus allowing for many, many more generations and vast amounts of time in history. However, unlike the genealogies in Genesis, these do not have specific ages when one generation “begat,” or “fathered,” the next, with Luke linking each name with just the Greek equivalent for “of.” And the three groups of generations in Matthew seem to represent four periods in God’s working in history to correct the sin of the first Adam with the obedience, sacrifice and deliverance of the last Adam.
Many passages in the Bible were written with a chiastic structure, which is like rhyming patterns in poetry but pairing similar information or concepts instead. That’s one reason why some passages seem to be highly repetitive. The point of chiastic structures is to point the reader to a key concept. Daniel explains that the Book of Esther is one large chiastic structure, focusing on a messianic prophecy in the middle.
We will compare three tragic “couples”: Adam and Eve, David and Bathsheba, and Ammon and Tamar. God repeats a story three times to help teach us a lesson about sin and transgression.
He’s also introducing Absolom as a Messianic figure. From here, we will be following his life closely for messianic clues.
The births of Yokhanan ben Zakharyah (John the Baptist) and Messiah Yeshua are amazing in that they illustrate how God planned throughout time to “pitch His tent” among mankind in a physical way and hadn’t abandoned the work He started in Israel. God foretold of the coming of a herald for the Messiah via the prophet Malachi announced the arrive of that messenger to Yokhanan’s father, a righteous priest in a priesthood led by wicked men. The coming of the herald and the Messiah followed a specific plan. The seven “oracles” in Luke 1-2 show that the same plan God put in place at the beginning of time still was active even at a dark point in Israel’s history.
Chiastic structures for the Messiah in the Prophets are not pictures of the Messiah, but rather “Shadows” of the Messiah. The TaNaK (Torah, Prophets and Writings) frequently uses thematic equivalents to indicate who and what the Messiah will be. The chiastic structure we will be looking at today focuses on love and adoption. There are multiple chiastic structures in this chapter alone.
When we look in the Tanak to find examples of the Messiah, we ususally look to the “good” men in the TaNaK (Torah, Prophets and Writings), men such as Moses, David and Solomon. However, there is an “evil” son of King David whose final hours gives us clues about the life, death and resurrection of the Messiah. The clues of the final hours of Absalom were so important that the Apostles allude to them when teaching and writing about the Gospel to their communities.