In the Hebrew Bible, II Samuel, chapter 11-12, King David sees the beautiful Bathsheba bathing and desires her for himself. He arranges for her husband, Uriah, to be sent into the fiercest lines of battle, where he is killed, enabling David to take Bathsheba as his wife. The moral and dramatic climax comes when God sends the prophet Nathan to confront the king:
God sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said, “There were two men in the same city, one rich and one poor.
The rich one had very large flocks and herds, but the poor one had only one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He tended it and it grew up together with him and his children: it used to share his morsel of bread, drink from his cup, and nestle in his bosom; it was like a daughter to him.
One day, a traveler came to the rich man, but he was loath to take anything from his own flocks or herds to prepare a meal for the guest who had come to him; so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”
The scene begins with startling abruptness: no ceremonial introduction or courtly greeting. Commissioned by God, Nathan dispenses with formality and goes directly to the parable, taking for granted that David will listen. He opens with elemental simplicity: two men living in the same city, one rich and one poor. The rich man owns flocks and herds that are “very large”—an image of surplus, abundance, more than enough. The poor man, by contrast, has only one ewe lamb that he “bought,” acquired carefully and cherished deeply. The lamb’s littleness makes it more precious. It embodies love concentrated into a single fragile object.
Nathan lingers over the poor man’s care for the lamb. The description is tender: the lamb grows up with the family, shares the man’s bread and “drink from his cup,” nestles against him, and is “like a daughter to him.” This is a warm domestic world shaped by intimate acts of nurture.
At the same time, the text’s language underscores the family’s precarious condition. Their emotional world is rich, but materially they have only the bare minimum. The man who is rich in possessions, meanwhile, is “loath” to take from his own abundance to feed the traveler. He’s stingy, greedy, unable to part with even the smallest portion of the excess he has hoarded for himself.
The violence arrives with shocking suddenness: the rich man seizes the poor man’s lamb and slaughters it. There’s no negotiation or compensation. The killing is sacrilegious, a violation of fellowship and the sanctity of life.
David instantly condemns the rich man, as though the figure in Nathan’s story were an actual criminal standing before him:
David flew into a rage against the man, and said to Nathan, “As God lives, the man who did this deserves to die!
He must pay for the lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and showed no pity.”
Nathan’s reply, just four words, each a single syllable, is fervent and forthright:
And Nathan said to David, “That man is you!”
Notice the exclamation point. Ancient Hebrew manuscripts do not include punctuation marks in the modern sense. But the context might appear to indicate a heightening of Nathan’s voice, so I understand why nearly all modern Jewish and Christian translations insert an exclamation here.
Older translations, however, use a period. That’s the case in the Tyndale Bible, Geneva Bible, and King James Version, and I find their restraint more effective. Nathan has entered the king’s private chamber, challenging David face to face. The tense scene is almost terrifying: the prophet looking into the eyes of the all-powerful king, the accusation striking home with perfect precision. No amplification is necessary: the words carry their own authority and force.
Nathan isn’t saying that David resembles the rich man or that their actions are analogous. He’s saying that David is that man: the two of them are one. Rationally, of course, this is impossible: one person cannot literally breathe as another, the same beating heart and movement of mind. So, we interpret Nathan’s words to mean, “what you did is like what the rich man did.” But to me the judgment resonates because it resists reduction to mere resemblance or analogy. Through Nathan, God declares that the distance David imagines between himself and the rich man has collapsed completely: the evildoer is himself.
The line separating each person from another is less secure than we think. No one is wholly separate from us. The sufferings we inflict, the humiliations we permit, the acts of greed or indifference we chastise in others—all return as revelations of who we are.
This isn’t the way we speak today. We’re more Emersonian than ever. We maintain that everyone is unique, that the primary task of life is to discover and give expression to the singular self each of us is meant to become. But can we define and understand ourselves in isolation, illuminated as though we existed alone? We’re social from the beginning, in networks of relationships, dependencies, affections, and obligations.
Beneath the differences we assert and argue about is the inexorable truth that we’re a collective, passing through mortality together. Death is democracy with a scythe. It cuts down the illusions of separateness, its reality an omnipresent reminder that my life, your life, is shared flesh and blood, vulnerability, and need. This is the purpose of self-reflection: not the cultivation of uniqueness, but the embrace of kinship, recognizing ourselves in others.
Martin Luther King Jr. observed about this story that all of us have “David moments” when we rebuke and punish the sins in others that we ourselves are guilty of. He said that the ultimate lesson it teaches is that we should honor “the sacredness of all human life, the sacredness of human personality.” We must imagine our way into an acknowledgment of sameness, of identification with each person we encounter. That’s a mandate for radical love, the surrender of self-regard. I call it hard empathy. That man is you.
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
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