All Saints’, Dorval
August 4, 2024
Jan Steen, “Bathsheba receiving David’s letter,” c. 1658.
Content warning for sexual assault and infant death.
Six years ago this weekend, I preached my first sermon at All Saints’ by the Lake (known then as PRAM). Since we use a three-year cycle of Bible readings, the lessons for that Sunday were the same as today’s.
In that sermon, I mostly talked about the reading from Ephesians, but I did say this about the reading from Samuel:
Although the prophet Nathan’s story convinces David that he has sinned and needs to repent, nobody in the passage – disturbingly enough – seems to accord Bathsheba or her child the status of full human beings, comparing Bathsheba instead with a lamb, and treating her child as a pawn whose life can be sacrificed to meet David’s need for restitution.
Last week, we read the first half of this story, in which David sees Bathsheba bathing from the roof of his palace, rapes her, and arranges to have her husband killed so that he can add her to his existing collection of wives. I promised then that we would talk about this this week, and now we have the full story.
It’s still shocking to me how, even while rebuking David for his sins, Nathan dehumanizes Bathsheba almost as thoroughly as David did in committing those sins. Nathan is mainly concerned about David’s infringement of another man’s property, and his greed in seizing Bathsheba when God had already “given Saul’s wives into his bosom”. And part of the threat God issues through Nathan is that David’s own wives will in turn be “given to [David’s] neighbour” – a threat that is later fulfilled when David’s own son Absalom lies with his father’s concubines as part of his bid to seize the throne.
This is nasty stuff, and our instinct is to think of it as more at home on an HBO drama than in the pages of Holy Scripture. But here it is, and faithful people have been wrestling with these events and their legacy for the three thousand years or so since David actually lived, so we continue that wrestling today.
In wrestling with Scripture, we can both learn from it and acknowledge where it falls short. We can agree with Nathan that David has done a profound wrong on many levels, and also see clearly the places that Nathan overlooked another whole level of wrongdoing that was in fact fundamental to the whole mess.
And the dehumanization – the part that Nathan doesn’t acknowledge – is indeed fundamental. To quote that great sage, Granny Weatherwax of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels:
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is. … People as things, that’s where it starts.”
That is indeed where it starts: with a man looking down from a rooftop at a woman fulfilling the ritual obligations of her faith, and seeing her not as a separate, autonomous human person with her own values and priorities and inner life, but as an object to be possessed. And because the man is a powerful man, he is able to act on that desire to possess her immediately.
Given the power differential at play, there is no scenario in which Bathsheba can freely consent to this relationship.
After forcing himself on her and making her pregnant, David then goes through a whole charade that would be hilarious if it weren’t so horrible, in which he summons Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, from the battlefront and desperately tries to induce him to go home and sleep with his wife, so that David can pass the baby off as Uriah’s.
It’s important, I think, to note that, even apart from the whole rape thing, this pretty conclusively undercuts any sentimental ideas of David and Bathsheba as a great love story. David isn’t trying to find a way for him and Bathsheba to be together. He’s happy to let Bathsheba live out her days as Uriah’s wife as long as nobody can ask inconvenient questions about who the father of her baby is. It’s only when Uriah, out of his own sense of integrity, refuses to do what David is trying to push him into doing, that David arranges with his general to have him put in the front line of an intense battle and then deliberately isolated by the rest of the troops so that he will be killed.
And that’s where this week’s passage picks up, with Nathan’s resounding and yet also totally inadequate condemnation of David.
Nathan does get one thing right, though: he identifies the reality that sin not only causes agony and strife in the moment in which it is committed, but sows seeds of horror and violence that will perpetuate themselves from generation to generation. “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house,” declares the prophet, “for you have despised me … Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house.”
And indeed, the subsequent chapters of the book depict a bloodbath within the formerly peaceful royal household, as David’s oldest son rapes his own sister and two of David’s subsequent sons attempt to seize the throne and are killed.
If we were paying attention, though, none of this is surprising even before Nathan prophesies it; it was already foreshadowed in the murder of Uriah, as David piles up lies, cowardice, and violence in the attempt to get rid of the man he has wronged. Sin begets sin, and the only way to change that is sincere repentance and genuine amendment of life: the resolve that no matter the cost, the cycle stops with us.
Bathsheba is innocent, the child she has conceived with David even more so, and yet in a particularly brutal and undeserved repercussion, part of David’s punishment is the death of that child. (This happens after the end of today’s passage.) Toward the end of the chapter, David is described as “consoling” his wife Bathsheba, and they conceive another son – who grows up to inherit the throne and become the King Solomon of legend.
One wonders whether Bathsheba was actually interested in such “consolation”. One wonders, honestly, what Bathsheba thought throughout all of it.
There are those who would argue that the whole story has a “happy ending” because eventually Bathsheba’s son Solomon became king. I would ask, at what cost that “happy ending”? Would one of David’s other sons eventually have made a perfectly good king if his father had been doing his job instead of assaulting his neighbour’s wife and plotting to murder the neighbour? (Solomon, after all, despite his legendary wisdom, went seriously off the rails toward the end of his reign and raised a son who was a complete disaster and lost five-sixths of the kingdom.) Would Bathsheba have traded being Queen Mother for a quiet life at home with her original husband, a man of whom we know nothing that does not indicate courage and integrity?
Of course there is no way to know. But if there’s only one thing we learn from this story, it’s that sin begets sin, and it all starts, as Granny Weatherwax has taught us, with treating people as things.
I sincerely trust that none of us have a home life that’s a nightmare of vengeance and bloodshed like that of the Davidic kings. But since we certainly don’t want to see this story as a good example, there’s always the alternative of taking it as a terrible warning. More than anything else, in every aspect of our lives, we should be on guard against the temptation to treat our fellow human beings, each and every one of them made in the image of God, as though they were objects to be manipulated instead of people to be in relationship with.
David was greedy, yes, and violent, yes, and cowardly, yes. But his principal sin – the one that gave rise to all the others – was treating Bathsheba as a thing. May we take heed from his story, and never do the same.
Amen.
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