Bathsheba's Blood

Midweek Worship

The Ninth Week after Pentecost

Semicontinous Reading: 2 Samuel 11: 1-15

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If David and Goliath is the most popular story of the most popular King of Israel, then surely David and Bathsheba is the most infamous. It seems there’s truth in what they say: that you either die the hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

It is the spring of the year, the time when all good kings should be out leading their armies to battle. There’s a reason we call it “March,” after all. But something’s different; something’s changed. David is at home, in his fortress, in his palace, in the elevated city that is loyal only to him.

He’s gotten older, I’d imagine. He’s gotten tired, maybe a little fat. He’s worked hard all his life, killing from sunup to sundown some days, and now that his throne is secure, why shouldn’t he kick back and relax a bit? Why shouldn’t he enjoy the spoils of war? Learn to delegate.

But then what should he spy with his little eye but a girl who is taking her bath. Oh, and a very pretty one, it would seem. David here plays the part of Peeping Tom, up on his roof, atop the tall palace atop the tall hill, which looks down upon the valley and upon the houses on the opposite slope.

Bathing, it should go without saying, is a private affair, all the more so 3000 years ago, in the midst of a Near Eastern culture of honor and of shame. Moreover, this woman, Bathsheba, is engaging in an act of piety, of religious observance. Hers is a bath of ritual purification, following her monthly cycle, in accordance with the Laws of Moses. She is no provocatrix here; she did not invite his male gaze. Bathsheba thinks she’s hidden. Only David knows she’s not.

So he goes and he sends for her—her husband off fighting in that same army David ought to be leading—and he has her brought to the palace. And as they used to say in Seinfeld, “yadda yadda yadda,” she’s pregnant. Oh, David. You’ve done some shady things on your road to the throne. But this? What, you didn’t have enough willing women in your harem? You had to go and take a girl who had not power to protest—the wife of a loyal warrior to boot?

You used to be a hero, man, and now look at you. Taking what you want because you can? Thinking you’re above the Law, because you’re the king, the son of God on earth? How very disappointing. How very, very human.

I wish we had Bathsheba’s side of the story. We know precious little about her. We’re not even sure if she’s an Israelite, one of the families who moved into Jerusalem after David’s conquest, or a Jebusite, the people who were here in the city to start. And if she were a Jebusite, we know next to nothing about them, whether they were Canaanites, Amorites, Hurrians, or Hittites. Those names might not mean much to us today but they were wildly differing peoples. And the evidence of Scripture is conflicting. Bathsheba’s husband Uriah is called “the Hittite,” not an Israelite.

Maybe he was here before David. Maybe he joined David’s band of mighty merry men somewhere along the way. Regardless, Uriah is a good and loyal soldier, loyal to his men, loyal to his king. And this makes for a rather awkward situation. Because if David cannot convince Uriah to leave the field of battle and return to Bathsheba’s bed, then David cannot pass her pregnancy off as Uriah’s child. It’s a classic government conspiracy: an old-fashioned scandal followed by an old-fashioned cover-up. Some things never change.

Uriah won’t leave his men. Uriah won’t go home to Bathsheba. So David issues orders that set him up to die. “Send our Uriah and his unit to where the fighting’s thickest,” he writes, “then pull back and leave them to their fate.” And when even David’s hatchet man seems uncomfortable with this, the king tells him, “Let this not trouble you, for the sword devours now one, and now another.” Premeditated rape gives birth to premeditated murder. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, such an ugly tawdry tale.

But what can I say? It’s good to be king.

This isn’t David’s only sin, but it is his fall from grace. Before this, his star was ever rising. After this, it all comes crashing down to earth. Because of this bloody plot, this narcissistic carnal indulgence, the sword will not depart from David’s house.

And what does it say of us that we always want to blame the girl? Bathsheba is portrayed as a temptress, a seductrix, a schemer, an adulterer. How dare she be so pretty! Doesn’t she know how hard that is on a poor, defenseless, lonely King of Israel? Some say she wanted power and he was powerless to resist. And what was wrong with Uriah anyway? What red-blooded military man doesn’t want to go bed his wife? He had it coming, surely. She—she did this to them, to both of them! The harlot!

There’s even an elaborate pseudo-scholarly theory called the Jebusite Hypothesis, whereby Bathsheba is actually the princess of Jerusalem’s previous dynasty, a royalty of matrilineal inheritance. And the prophet Nathan and the priest Zadok are Jebusites as well, all involved in some cabal to place Bathsheba’s blood back upon the throne. This might explain the Torah’s insistence that long ago, in the time of Abraham, the people of Salem worshipped the same God as Israel, only under a different name.

There could be something to all this: the idea that in Jerusalem the old and the new intertwined. But ultimately it all comes across as rather desperate, doesn’t it? A sort of smokescreen to disguise the fact that David is the villain now. He has all the power, all the freedom, all the opportunity, and he uses it—misuses it—to force himself on another man’s wife and kill that good man dead. After which Bathsheba is brought into his palace, and has to live the rest of her life with her husband’s murderer and her rapist. Not exactly a happy ending, is it?

There’s only one redeeming feature of this story, and that’s the fact that God will not let it stand. On the one hand, this is a tale of the banality of evil, of yet another Near Eastern monarch, one more god-king among dozens just like him, abusing his powers and lording it over the weak. It’s as boring as it’s bloody. But on the other hand, this one we wrote down. David is the greatest king of the Old Testament: the founder of the dynasty, slayer of giants, singer of songs, priest and king and man of might—but when he screws up, when he acts like any other jackass tyrant, the Bible doesn’t let him off the hook. And neither does God.

God sees Bathsheba. God is with Bathsheba. He is the defender of widows and orphans. He is the avenger of all the oppressed. He hears the voice of His children when they cry to Him. And, oh, has Yahweh heard. And, oh, will Yahweh act. The story of David’s comeuppance, the climax toward which all of this has built, we will hear next week as our semicontinuous readings of the Hebrew Bible progress. David was God’s chosen. David was His favored king.

But no king is above the Law. No king has the right to do what he has done. And for as much as God has loved King David, He will now rage against His chosen in His vengeance for Bathsheba. A reckoning is due to her and duly it is reaped. Let this be a terror to abusers, and especially to those who would hide behind their piety. And let it be a word of liberation for everyone who suffers at the hands of the cruel. For it is of Bathsheba’s blood that Jesus Christ is born.

Thanks be to the God who chooses the oppressed even over His champions.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.