Hilton Head Island, SC
The Chapel Without Walls – January 22, 2023
11 Samuel 11:2-11; 11:22-27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And when the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son. But this thing that David had done displeased the Lord. - II Sam. 11:27
This episode about David and Bathsheba is horrendous. David has done some morally dubious things before, but this is repulsive. It is the worst of his misdeeds, the lowest point of the many low points of David's life. Anybody who has power is always tempted to abuse it, but this is terrible.
You may recall from the last David sermon that the king already has three wives, one of whom, Michal, he treats as a virtual slave, and with whom he refuses to have relations of any kind. He won't free her, but he won't have anything to do with her either.
And now he looks out the palace window and sees a beautiful woman taking a bath. Instantly he is smitten with her, and he, the king, the royal personage, the monarch, the most beloved and admired man in the entire land of Israel, concludes that he must have her. He sends one of his retainers to find out who she is, and he is told that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. In Hebrew her name means "Daughter Seven." Back then most fathers wanted sons, not daughters, and her father apparently had at least seven daughters. (Tevye had only five.) In despair he finally quit coming up with normal names for them, and by the time he got to Bathsheba he just called her "Seven."
When David finds out more about Bathsheba, he has two problems: first, she is married, and second, she is married to a goy, a foreigner. Jews are not supposed to marry foreigners, but that applies more to men than to women, and maybe by the time Bathsheba’s father got to Daughter-Number-Seven, he was glad to pawn her off on anyone willing to take her, even a Hittite.
Nevertheless, even though Bathsheba is married, and even though to a foreigner, David has her brought to the palace, and, the narrative says, "he lay with her," (a linguistically delicate way of putting it. The Bible is delicate in many places, and highly indelicate in others.) A couple of months later, after not again being allowed to see his royal highness, Bathsheba sends word to the palace, telling the king in a quaint biblical euphemism, "I am with child." Now David has a bigger problem. He has gotten one of his married subjects pregnant. It would have been bad enough if she were single, but this really complicates things, despite David being the king.
During this time, Bathsheba’s husband Uriah has been off fighting in David’s army. So the king orders his commanding general, Joab, to send Uriah back to Jerusalem. Then David urges Uriah to go home and spend some time with his wife. That way everyone will think that the baby, when it is born, will be Uriah’s. However, Uriah is a gung-ho special-forces kind of soldier, and he refuses to do anything his comrades in arms were not allowed to do. “Oy veh,” says David, “I’m getting in deeper and deeper. Now what shall I do?”
David is a very intelligent man, but in this case, also a very corrupt one. He orders Joab to put Uriah into the most dangerous part of the battlefield in the next battle. Then, says David, tell everyone quickly to withdraw, leaving Uriah to fight the whole Philistine army all by himself. David knows that he is bound to be killed. Therefore, no one knowing that the Green Beret would not go home to sleep with his wife, when Bathsheba delivers her baby, everyone will think he did go home.
This isn’t all of David’s unacceptable behavior, though. Before Uriah’s relatives, friends, and neighbors have barely finished their Shiva for him, the seven days of mourning they spent with Bathsheba in her now-husband-less home, David marries Bathsheba. Incidentally, “Bathsheba” and “Shiva” both mean “seven,” but somehow the middle vowel in one of the words got changed over time. (Fortunately for you, that won’t be on the Final Exam.)
There are six sermons in this series that I have called The Chronicles of a Great King. So far, and we’re now in the third sermon, David has displayed no immediately discernible greatness. How can I possibly suggest that David is a great man?
The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is not so insistent on painting its main characters in golden hues. The Greek Bible, the New Testament, does that; almost everyone in its pages of whom the writers approved is portrayed in glowing colors. Almost none of the stars in the Christian narrative of the Bible do anything dishonorable or disreputable. They never have a terrible, gob-smacking, negative thing said about them, but the Jewish writers of the Jewish Bible like to tell it like it is. They write Portnoy’s Complaint, as compared to The Robe or Ben Hur.
It is tough to be a major leader of any major organization. Leaders have to make hard choices that followers never have to make. For example, a president could rail for months about a former president taking fifteen hundred or two thousand classified documents with him when he lost his re-election. President Biden repeated frequently that he couldn’t see how anybody could do that, but when it became public knowledge that he himself had a few classified papers in one place, and then a few days later a few more in another place, and then a few more elsewhere, both presidents may appear equally guilty, especially to the followers and fans of the former president.
Big shots have their dirty linen publicly laundered regularly, but most of the rest of us manage to keep our soiled actions relatively secret. Furthermore, David has more dirty linen than anyone else in the Bible because he has more exposed actions to cover up than anyone else in the Bible. We know far more about David than anyone else in holy writ, including Moses and Jesus. Jesus comes off much better than either David or Moses because the Gospel writers wanted Jesus always to be depicted in unassailable grandeur. In like manner, most Christians believe that Jesus was sinless, and not only sinless, but the genetic messianic descendant of David, and not only the Messiah but the Son of God, and not only the Son of God, but in some mystic and inexplicable manner, the Second Person of the Trinity, and thus, also in some mystic and inexplicable way, God Himself.
David had a highly regarded rule book in his possession. Like the woman he later was to take as his wife, it had a number, the number Seven, and it said, "You shall not commit adultery." He shouldn't have needed to be reminded of that, but he said to himself, "I am the king, and the king lives by different rules than his subjects." It is a common failure of judgment among people who possess great power, who more likely than not are people of the male persuasion; "I'm a big shot, and big shots play the game by big shot rules."
Britain’s Lord Acton famously said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” David didn’t have absolute power, but for his time and place, he had far more power than anyone around him. What fools we mortals be! How treacherous we may become, how utterly unscrupulous. David was the greatest of the kings of Israel, probably one of the greatest men who ever lived, and yet he did this terrible thing.
Years ago there was an editorial essay in The Wall Street Journal about what, by then, had come to be called the Sexual Revolution. It elicited several letters to the editor. One person wrote, "The Sexual Revolution has been the most destructive domestic event in American history since the Civil War." Another said, "Sex is one of our greatest powers, enabling us to express intimate love and procreate children. Unfortunately, the advent of The Pill and legal abortion convinced many of us that we could do one without the other.... As we degrade sex, we degrade ourselves."
That is what David did: he degraded sex. He probably did not love Bathsheba when he raped her, at least not initially. He was simply infatuated with her; he certainly did not intend to have a child by her. More than that degradation, however, David degraded himself, and most of all he degraded Bathsheba. She was a victim, an innocent victim, and almost certainly an unwilling victim.
It is often stated that rape is not about sex; it's about violence; it's about the raw exercise of male power over female powerlessness. In wartime, rape is often violence yoked with power. Soldiers are either ordered to rape females of the enemy, or they just naturally do it, because they are males, and they haven’t had sex in a long time, so they take advantage of women who tragically happen to be close to the fields of battle.
In any event, what David did to Bathsheba was definitely rape. He took advantage of a woman who had no possible way of thwarting him, or literally or figuratively putting him off. After all, he was the king, and kings are the most powerful men in their kingdoms.
Men and women ordinarily don't think about sex in the same way. Furthermore, biologically each gender is internally programmed to approach the whole matter differently. Far too many men think of sex, including with their wives, as a conquest. On the other hand, women want to think of sex as an act of love, which is a much more positive understanding of this peril-fraught matter.
And why, you may be asking, am I talking about Wall Street Journal editorials or about biological differences between women and men when I'm supposed to be talking about David and Bathsheba? This is why: the explanation for David's behavior is not so obvious or simple or straightforward as we might suppose. It is not only that he was the king and thus very powerful, or a man and thus influenced by male hormones. or a greedy so-and-so who wanted it all, or a man consumed by grief over his sins, or that he wasn't getting any younger and nothing seemed to be happening with any of his three wives and unreported concubines; it may have been all of those things, and much, much more. The more able some people are the more complex they are, and Dovid ben-Yesse was an exceedingly able man. Dostoevsky said something well worth remembering. "It is very easy to condemn someone who does wrong," he wrote; "it is very difficult to understand him." In his Address to the Unco Guid, Robert Burns wrote of unacceptable human misbehavior, "One point must still be greatly dark/ The moving why they do it/ And just as lamely can ye mark/ How far perhaps they rue it."
Those who demand that school boards ban books they find objectionable think that people and society can be purified. Nobody and no place is pure. Absolute purity is impossible for all of us. Everyone can always do better, but none of us can ever be the best.
Who, other than God, truly knows why anybody does anything? There is no excuse for blatant sin; not for a moment am I trying to say there is. But sometimes the motivations which prompt sin in the first place are so circuitously involved that they require more than a simple condemnation. Years ago, why did that South Carolina mother drive herself and her children into a lake so that they all drowned? Why did the Las Vegas mass murderer kill all those people at an outdoor concert from his carefully-chosen perch in a hotel room high above the site where it all took place? Why did Donald Trump take so many classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, and why did Joe Biden have a few similar documents stashed here and there? Historically, what was David thinking when he sent someone to fetch Bathsheba to his palace? Did he intend to find out her circumstances, and then if all were well, try to woo her, or did he mean merely to have her and then cast her aside? Why does any of us do the foolish, selfish, sinful things we do? What in hell gets into us?
Nonetheless, it was David who coalesced the two sections of Israel and Judah into a unified and strong nation, it was David who laid the foundations of Jerusalem as the City of Zion, it was David who bought the land on which the temple would be constructed, it was David who wrote many of the Psalms and took on the forces of pagan excess and valiantly attacked the enemies of Israel. From the Bible’s standpoint, supporting the nation of Israel and the God of Israel is the most important thing anyone can do. Yet it also was David who took another man's wife and committed adultery with her and had her husband killed and then married her to try to cover up his sin.
Next week the prophet Nathan is going to confront David with the evil things he did. Because of it, David shall instantly become a sadder but wiser man. Sometimes, wisdom can come only because of deep sorrow. Come back next Sunday, and see what happens.