2 Samuel 11:1–15

***Content Warning: This article makes reference to rape and sexual violence***

This, in my view, is one of the most tragic stories in the bible; not least because there are few other stories in which the victim is so consistently portrayed as the villain by later interpreters.  But before we even get to her, David has two earlier failures we must address first.

The text tells us these events happen during the spring-time lull in labor between planting and harvesting.  Most societies throughout history prior to WWII did not maintain standing armies in the way that they typically do now.  Instead, they’d typically have a few hundred specially trained troops serving in the king’s guard or a similar outfit, and a few dozen trained commanders who would organize and train militias when fighting was necessary.  The rest of the fighting aged men would spend most of the year working, typically in agriculture, but would then join the army or work on civil construction projects for a couple months in the spring or sometimes winter when their crops needed the least attention.  In the Ancient Near East, especially among Semitic cultures like those in the Levant and Mesopotamia, kings served as avatars of both their people, and their gods’ favor for that people.  For that reason, they were expected to be out on the battlefield with their troops when they were at war.  Even elderly and sick kings frequently have chariots prepared to carry them out to war in order to keep up appearances.

Israel’s beliefs were a bit different from those of their neighbors, but not necessarily in this regard.  From the time of Moses on through the Judges and even the reign of Saul, Israel had always followed the leader of their people or said leader’s son or apprentice into battle.  Sending the armies out under the command of Joab not only called David’s abilities and right to rule into question, but elevated Joab’s political position to that of a potential successor.

Which brings us to the second mistake, Joab.  If you haven’t studied the reign of David you might be unfamiliar with how central a figure Joab is.  He is David’s oldest nephew, born to one of his sisters.  From the moment David first became king over Judah, while they were still at war with the remnant of the house of Saul to their north, Joab has served as David’s chief commander, spy master, and military adviser.  Many of David’s troops have served under Joab for years, and are at least as loyal to him as they are to David if not more so.

That’s a very precarious position for a king to be in; popular generals make excellent coup leaders.  And Joab in particular is extra dangerous, because by this point in the story he’s already demonstrated a willingness to flaunt David’s commands, and undermine his authority.  While structurally it makes sense that his long-time chief commander would lead the troops in his absence, politically this only solidified Joab’s power independent of David’s reign.

So even before we get to the meat of the story, David’s already showing some massive lapses in judgment; and had he shown more discernment in those matters, he never would have been in a position to commit the atrocity he’s about to commit.  Instead, while all the other fighting aged men have gone off to war, he finds himself on the roof of the palace watching the wives and daughters of his soldiers arriving at the tabernacle to pray for their loved ones’ safe return at evening prayer.  As they perform the ritual cleansings (fully clothed I might add), one of those women in particular catches his eye; and he asks his servants who she is.  They tell him that she’s Bathshebah Bet-Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite; a faithful soldier in David’s army.

That’s right, those images you may have been fed as a child by purity culture of a sultry adulteress bathing naked on a rooftop hoping to catch the king’s eye?  Those have absolutely no biblical basis; they come from an intentional misrepresentation of the story by much later, aggressively misogynistic interpreters who would rather invent unsupported details to pin the failure on the woman than accept that David is the villain of this story.  An unbiased reading makes exceedingly clear that David raped Bathsheba; we are never given a reason to believe she’s a consenting party, nor that she in any way, shape, or form “asked for it’.  David saw her, desired her, and took her as if she was just a play thing made for his own gratification.  Then when he was done with her, he sent her home.

A few weeks later though, Bathsheba knew something was off.  Whether she missed her period, or suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of her favorite foods, or just felt it; she knew.  So she sent word to the palace; what had been one traumatizing night had turned into a life or death situation for her.  In matters of adultery, when a woman was found pregnant in that society by a man other than her husband, guilt was frequently assumed.  She might be able to survive if she claimed it had happened somewhere that no one could hear her, or if she survived an ordeal prescribed in Leviticus which involved a mild toxin which might terminate her pregnancy or even kill her.  But her best chance of survival, considering her rapist was the king, was for David to come clean.  No one would be able to put him to death for this crime; he would just be expected to pay her husband and father a double dowry, the price for raping a virgin in the Torah, and to take the child into his house.

When the letter reaches him though, that is not what David decides to do.  Instead, his first instinct is to cover it up.  He writes to his nephew, Joab, out on the campaign to send Uriah the Hittite back with the war report; David plans to make timelines match up for the child to plausibly be Uriah’s.  It would have been unusual for the king to name his preferred messenger, but Uriah not being natively Hebrew, and therefore unlikely to be able to read their writing, would make for a good candidate to deliver messages with sensitive information.  And since Uriah’s house was in Jerusalem anyway, David’s selection may not have aroused too much suspicion.  So Joab complies, sends the soldier home, and turns his attention back to the war.

When Uriah gets to the capital, he brings the report, but rather than listen to the report, David focuses on getting Uriah drunk.  At the end of the night, David tells Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife.  In an unintentional but searing indictment of David’s actions though, Uriah says in no uncertain terms that he will not sleep with his wife (whom David had slept with) while all of Israel (besides David) was out on the battlefield fighting (David’s) war.  David presses him further, but Uriah ultimately sleeps that night in the servants’ barracks at the entrance to the palace.  The next morning Uriah intends to return to the battlefield, but David detains him for one more night, promising to send him in the morning.  Again that night David gets Uriah drunk, again he presses the soldier to go home to his wife, and again Uriah refuses.  Still David promised to send Uriah back, and he’s bound to that promise, so he turns to plan ‘B’, murder.

In a move that becomes something of a trope in tragedies, myths and legends, David sends Uriah back with a sealed letter for Joab’s eyes only; a letter which contained instructions to kill the messenger.  Unhappily for Uriah, no fairy god-mother, talking animal companion, or divine being disguised as an elderly mentor shows up to modify the letter and save his life.  Instead, Joab opens the seal on the scroll, reads the message, looks up at the young messenger with his whole life ahead of him, and tells him that for his bravery and faithfulness in this mission to update the king, he was to be promoted to the vanguard, the front lines of the army.  Joab sends word to the commander of the vanguard (possibly in the form of a sealed message in the hands of Uriah as he went to report to his new post) that he is to test the defenses of the enemy’s walled city, but to pull back out of bowshot before they sustain too many casualties.  But the message also tells the commander that all of the vanguard is to know that they are only testing the walls, not assaulting them; all except the young man who just joined them.  He alone is not to receive instructions to pull back before the arrows reach them.

Joab is David’s spymaster on top of being the commander of the army; he knows how to carry out an assassination, and how to keep a secret.  But keeping all the secrets also means knowing where all the skeletons are buried.  To this point, as far as the reader is aware, the only leverage Joab had against David was his own personal popularity and entrenched power.  David has just given him a gift in the form of mutually assured destruction.  Now, should David ever make a move against Joab, Joab can make public the details of David’s sins against the house of Uriah.  David not only abandoned his troops on the battlefield; he raped the wife of one of those troops while they were away fighting his battles for him.  Then he conspired to have that faithful soldier put to death to cover up his own heinous sins.  While outside the scope of today’s reading, these choices will have knock on effects throughout the remainder of David’s reign including not one but two rebellions led by his own sons, one of which ends in Joab murdering the rebellious son against David’s orders.  But David has no recourse against Joab by that point, he’s grown too powerful, knows too much; David is left with no option but to spiral into boundless depression and despair for which Joab will publicly shame him (again free of consequences).

For all his sins against her, David promises to place one of Bathsheba’s sons on the throne after him, and to her credit she holds him to that promise, and ends a civil war and succession crisis before it has a chance to really start.  She is a victim, but her trauma doesn’t define her.  She is not lessened by the things that were done to her.  Her value was not diminished.  She persevered, and saved the kingdom from ruin.  David’s failures in this moment, and the myriad of consequences which flowed from them, leave him broken and tormented for the rest of his days.  That said, David’s brokenness saved him every bit as much as Bathshebah’s perseverance saved the kingdom.  Were he to remain unrepentant, were his heart not contrite when faced with the reality of the monster he had become, David’s dynasty would have failed just as Saul’s and Jeroboam I’s.  His repentance, and more importantly, his subsequent faithfulness to Bathsheba, making things as right as he could given the extremity of the brokenness he caused; they preserve what is left of his relationship with God, enabling his dynasty to continue on.