The Prophet Nathan's Story

2 Samuel 11 describes David, the ruler of Israel, commit adultery with Bathsheba and attempt to manipulate her husband Uriah into having sex with her to conceal his involvement in a potential pregnancy.  When Uriah refuses to go home and sleep with his wife after being temporarily recalled to Jerusalem from active warfare, even after David gets him drunk (though that would mean his wife would have exploited him if she was not drunk, not that most people are anything more than sexist hypocrites when it comes to the morality of sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol), David arranges to have him abandoned on the battlefield to be killed by the enemy, tossing aside a righteous man and a seemingly competent soldier to hide his lack of self-control.  Bathsheba mourns her husband, and David marries her--but the final verse of chapter 11 states that David had morally erred even though he made a solid attempt at hiding his sin.

At the very beginning of 2 Samuel 12, immediately after this, the prophet Nathan is said to have approached David with a story.  This story features a rich man and a poor man, the latter of which has a cherished lamb.  The poor man also has children, possibly a wife, food, and a cup, but the text says he had "nothing" else besides this lamb--hyperbole either way, but the point is that he and his family do not have numerous possessions.  In contrast, the rich man has many sheep and cattle, yet when a traveler comes to him, he takes the poor man's lamb and kills it to feed the visitor.  Upon hearing this, perhaps without even knowing if the story is supposed to have actually happened or not, David burns with anger (2 Samuel 12:5) and calls for contradictory things: he wants the death of the rich man, even though monetary punishments or restitution are prescribed for theft of animals by God instead of execution in Exodus 21, and for the rich man to repay the poor man four times over.  Thus far, there is no textual evidence that David was even thinking about how he had used Bathsheba and Uriah like pawns of his personal whims right then, though he was willing to show fury after a story about a far less severe sin.

It is here where Nathan tells David that he is in a sense the very man whom his anger is directed toward (12:7).  The point of Nathan's story is not to retell an identical version of what David had just committed, but to hold up a mirror and let David himself look into it.  The lengths a hypocrite might go to in order to believe they are not an irrational, inconsistent, selfish fool are so great that they genuinely might not think clearly and accurately enough to see that they are the very thing they condemn or hate in others.  Whatever its exact form, a trap often needs to be laid, or else the hypocrite will likely never confront their stupidity, much less admit that they were asinine and inconsistent.  One of the best ways to trap someone like this is by simply getting them to see or admit anything at all that sets up the "killing" strike: verbally pointing out their flaws in a way that is direct and perhaps even public, and then not allowing them to just dismiss the issue and change or misunderstand the charge.

In the case of Nathan's confrontation, David is subtly manipulated into calling for the death of someone for stealing and killing a poor man's lamb, something which is already an unjust reaction according to Exodus 21 and thus the product of emotionalism (when he literally erupts into calling for an unbiblical punishment despite being Yahweh's monarch, he would plainly be an emotionalist).  This kind of anger at the rich man over the loss of a cherished lamb and the need for Nathan to literally tell him "You are that man!" strongly suggest that David did not yet actually realize the folly of wishing death upon someone for a non-capital sin when he has committed two capital offenses.  He committed adultery, arranged for someone to be killed unjustly, and then took the deceased man's wife as his own as if she was a mere object to take and use and not a person with her own marriage and life.

Nathan cleverly changes the events of his story enough for David to lower his guard or seemingly not even suspect anything at all, only to pounce when David reacts out of subjective conscience in an unjust way to a sin that is in some ways trivial compared to his.  David condemns himself by reacting with outrage, only to have Nathan tell him that he is like the man who stole his neighbor's sheep.  In David's case, he has done worse than this fictional man whom he wanted to execute for exploiting the poor like this.  Though he might have struggled inwardly to even realize the enormity of his stupidity and hypocrisy, by verse 13 he openly acknowledges that he has sinned.  If only every hypocrite would come to forsake their double standards and irrationalism this easily!

As long as a person understands the actual commands of the Bible, they do not need any sort of prompting from other people to understand exactly how they have sinned according to Biblical standards in every case where they violate Yahweh's commands.  The way that intentionally relying on other people to point out such obvious, vital things is generally unecessary and irrational is one thing that always needs to be emphasized, but especially in the context of analyzing 2 Samuel 12 in light of how it takes a story crafted by a prophet to penetrate David's layers of self-imposed delusion.  David would never actually need Nathan's story to realize that he had committed major sins by the standards of the Mosaic Law he enforced as a monarch.  He simply avoided the truth until someone else forced him to acknowledge it by giving him the opportunity to condemn himself.