Through Nathan, God declares he will 'take David's wives... and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in broad daylight' as punishment for David's sin (2 Sam 12:11-12), and this is narrated as fulfilled when Absalom rapes David's concubines on the palace roof in the sight of all Israel (2 Sam 16:20-23) — i.e., God causes women to be raped as a punitive tool against a third party (David).

The objection trades on an equivocation between two senses of 'cause': (1) causing in the sense of directly compelling or mechanically producing an act by overriding another agent's will, and (2) causing in the sense of a prophetic judgment-oracle truthfully announcing, in advance, the real and foreseeable consequence that a covenant-breaking course of action has already set in motion through the free choices of other human agents. The text supports only the second sense. **This is a judgment-oracle, the standard prophetic genre of announcing consequences, not a divine stage-direction compelling Absalom's will.** Nathan's oracle in 2 Sam 12 follows the same pattern as Hosea's, Isaiah's, and Jeremiah's judgment-oracles throughout the prophetic corpus: the prophet announces what covenant infidelity WILL bring about — the natural, foreseeable unraveling of a king's household through the power-politics his own sin has destabilized — not a mechanical divine compulsion of every subsequent human choice. In the ANE, a king's harem was a recognized public symbol of royal legitimacy and succession claim (a point developed in ANE royal-ideology scholarship); a rival's seizure of the harem was accordingly a predictable political power-move in any succession crisis, which is exactly the crisis David's own adultery-and-murder had triggered by fracturing the royal house and legitimizing rebellion. **The fulfillment text itself names the actual efficient causes.** 2 Sam 16:20-23 is explicit that the act comes about through Ahithophel's political counsel ('Ahithophel said to Absalom, Go in to your father's concubines...') and Absalom's own free decision to act on it ('Absalom went in to his father's concubines in the sight of all Israel'). The narrator does not depict God, or Nathan, physically compelling Absalom's body or will; he depicts a court advisor's strategic counsel and a usurper's own choice to follow it. That is precisely the mechanism a judgment-oracle predicts, not one it manufactures by force. **Classical theology has a developed distinction that blocks the inference the objection needs.** The Thomistic distinction between God's primary causality (sustaining all being and secondary causes in existence) and creaturely secondary causality (through which free agents genuinely and culpably act) — see Edward Feser's expositions of Aquinas on providence and concurrence — is precisely designed to prevent collapsing 'God foreknows/foretells/providentially permits X' into 'God is the moral agent who commits X.' Divine foreknowledge of, and judicial pronouncement about, a consequence that human free agents will bring about is categorically different from divine efficient causation of that consequence. The objection needs these to be the same thing to work, and the text does not support that identification.

The oracle exhibits exactly the kind of moral seriousness a genuinely good God should exhibit toward sin at the highest levels of power: it does not let David's adultery and the murder of Uriah go unaddressed, it names the real historical mechanism (a fractured, sin-compromised royal house inviting exactly the kind of usurpation ANE kingship made predictable), and it holds David accountable in a public, verifiable way rather than a merely private one. Read this way, the text is a case study in a coherent doctrine of providence: God can righteously judge and truly foretell the trajectory sin sets in motion through human freedom, without being either powerless over history (a deist's remote God) or the direct author of every evil act within it (which would make God morally responsible for evil in a way classical theism explicitly and carefully avoids).