Today’s reading: 2 Samuel 11; 2 Corinthians 13
Today’s post is mostly just another book recommendation for a book I’ve talked about a handful of times on here already called Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. The book is all about, as the title suggests, the way that our modern Western worldview causes us to misunderstand what is happening in the Scriptures. Some of it is the individualistic way we think and process events, some of it is context and understanding that we just don’t have anymore, etc. I highly suggest the book. It’s a relatively quick read, and it’s written for the average person, not the scholar, so it’s easy to consume as well, but it had a huge impact for me on how I thought about Scripture.
Why bring up this book again today? They have a whole chapter about 2 Samuel 11 that is really interesting and was honestly really challenging when I first read it. It wasn’t challenging in terms of personal conviction or anything, but some of what they point out just flew so much in the face of how I had always read and understood the story of David and Bathsheba that it took an actual effort on my part to stop and say, “Okay, yes, that is in fact what it says… I guess I have just been wrong here…”
Now, to be completely clear, there is some push-back against part of what they put forth in their book. I’ve done some reading on both sides and the case does seem to be a little stronger for how they understand the events, but what I wanted to point out today is just obvious from the text and isn’t really disputed among scholars.
When I heard and read this story in the past I always assumed this was all done secretly. I assumed this was a hidden affair that David was trying to cover up, and I always felt like it was a bit dumb because clearly they knew how long it took to have a baby, and if she realizes she’s pregnant, tells David, and David sends for Uriah and Uriah travels back to Jerusalem, even if he sleeps with his wife at that point, she will have that baby way less than 9 months later. Even more so then, if you add on the time it took Uriah to go back and get killed in the battle, then for a messenger to come report it, then for Bathsheba to mourn, and then for David to marry her, nobody is thinking she conceived that baby after they got married. It always just seemed like the most ill-conceived cover up in history…
But one of the things they pointed out was that there was nothing secret about any of this. David doesn’t see Bathsheba and sneak off to go meet up with her, he sees her, asks around about her, and then sends people to go get her and bring her back to the palace. Everyone in the palace would have known what was going on, and there isn’t even any indication that David was trying to keep this quiet. And in one sense, as they point out in the book, as king, David wouldn’t really need to cover anything up. He would have the authority to take any woman he wanted in his kingdom (not that God would condone such authority, but this was how kings operated at the time).
This also means that when Uriah comes back, he probably knows exactly what is going on as well. If this is well known among David’s servants, and Uriah is hanging out with those servants, as the text tells us he was, then certainly he would have known as well. So his righteous indignation at the thought of going to his home and sleeping with his wife probably has much less to do with his actual feelings about it and is more a refusal to play these games and act as though nothing untoward had happened. David was trying to give him the chance to play along and act like nothing shameful had happened, but Uriah wasn’t willing, and so David had him killed.
There are more implications to this that they get into in the book, but honestly it just really changed the way I think about this story to realize that this wasn’t some secret affair David was trying to cover up, but brazen, open, public adultery that David was looking to sweep under the rug until Uriah wasn’t willing to play ball, and he had him killed for it…
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