While his army is at war, David remains in Jerusalem, sees Bathsheba bathing, sends for her, and, when she becomes pregnant, arranges the death of her husband Uriah in battle to cover his own adultery.
Further context
2 min readIn the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sends Joab out with the army and stays in Jerusalem. That sentence is doing all the work, and everything after it follows from a man being idle in the wrong place.
One evening he gets up from his couch and walks around on the roof of the palace, and from there he sees a woman bathing. She is very beautiful, and he sends someone to find out about her. The answer he gets is a warning in the form of information: this is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite. She is named as somebody's daughter and somebody's wife, and Uriah is on the list of the king's thirty elite warriors, which means he is one of his own men and is at that moment at the front.
He sends messengers and takes her. Whether she had any capacity to refuse a summons from a king is a question worth putting plainly: she has no recorded speech in the entire episode except five words afterwards, and everything is done to her rather than by her. The word taken is used, and it is the same verb the prophet will use in the rebuke.
She sends the five words: I am pregnant.
What follows is a cover-up conducted with increasing desperation. Uriah is recalled from the front on a pretext and told to go home and wash his feet, so that the pregnancy can be attributed to him. He sleeps at the palace entrance with the servants instead. Asked why, he gives the answer that condemns the man questioning him: the ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my commander and my lord's men are camped in the open country. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and make love to my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing. A foreign mercenary is observing the discipline of a holy war more strictly than the king who called it.
He is kept another day and made drunk, and still will not go home.
So he is sent back carrying his own death warrant: a letter to Joab instructing that he be put in the front line where the fighting is fiercest, and then abandoned. Joab does it, and to make it look plausible he sends men too close to the wall and loses several, and coaches the messenger on how to break the news.
David's reply to the messenger is the worst sentence in the whole episode: do not let this upset you, for the sword devours one as well as another.
Bathsheba mourns her husband, and when the mourning is over he brings her to his house and she bears him a son. The last line is the only comment made: the thing David had done displeased the LORD.