This post is part of a Christmas series on the female ancestors of Jesus as given by the Gospel of Matthew.
Bathsheba is identified in Matthew's geneology of Jesus as "the wife of Uriah." In the King James Version it says, "David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias." Jane Schaberg in her Bible Review article suggests that the omission of Bathsheba's name is due to the fact that the Hebrew Bible presents her as "colorless, passive and pathetic." Schaberg has some intriguing things to say about the biblical story of Bathsheba. But I find myself much less in tune with her description of Bathsheba than with view of Tamar, Rahab and Ruth.
The her specifically as the wife of Uriah seems to emphasize that Bathsheba's marriage to David, the union which made her an ancestor of Mary, was originally an illegitimate one by the standards of the time.
Bathsheba became David's lover after the king saw her bathing on the roof of her house. David summoned her to his palace, and she became pregnant. Her huband, Uriah the Hittite, was off at war in David's army. To make it appear that the child is Uriah's, he is summoned back from the front. But he refuses to sleep with Bathsheba while his fellow soldiers are off at war. So David orders his righthand general Joab to arrange for Uriah to be killed in battle with the Ammonites, which he does. Then David takes Bathsheba as his own wife.
Joab was David's fixer, something like the role James Baker plays for the Bush dynasty (though Baker's tasks don't involve homicide).
The whole intrigue of David and Bathsheba is one of my favorite stories. Schaberg sees Bathsheba primarily as a victim:
Bathsheba's story ... is the story of a woman taken in adultery, pitied rather than scorned or blamed by the storyteller. She is presented without options, without recourse, without a personal history. She does not act but is acted upon, and then she barely reacts. Her wordless submission redners her a thing passed from man to man. She personifies tragic passivity, unlike Tamar, Rahab and Ruth, who stood up against the fates offered them by society, took matters into their own hands and bettered their positions withinthe patriarchal framework. The Bathsheba who survives as a queen - and as a name on a genalogical list - never emerges as a person.
But I would have to go with a different reading of Bathsheba's character. One big reason is the role she plays as (literally) kingmaker when she reappears in the biblical narratives years later at the end of David's life. The elderly, dying David is mostly concerned with staying warm by cuddling with Abishag the Shunamite. The prophet Nathan and Bathsheba meanwhile are hard at work on court intrigue to get the throne for her son Solomon. After David's death, Bathsheba tricks Solomon's main rival Adonijah, David's son by Haggith, into requesting of Solomon that he give Abishag to him to marry. This proves to be a fatal mistake on Adonijah's part. Because Abishag had been the king's bed companion, marrying her would be a claim on the the king's position. So Solomon's chose assassin Benaiah kills Adonijah in the Tent of the Lord, the most sacred spot in Israel at that time. (That story is in 1 Kings 1-2.)
In the Hebrew Bible, the first words a person speaks in the text are taken to be a key to her character. Bathsheba's first words (2 Samuel 11) are to David: "I am pregnant." In fact, these are her only words reported until the intrigue to put Solomon on the throne. I've never come up with a reading of this that satisfies me. It emphasizes her role as the mother of Solomon, the builder of the Temple, though the baby she is carrying at the time will die. It's also possible that Bathsheba's encounter with David and the resulting pregnancy were not entirely passive occurrences from her side.
It may be that her identification in Matthew as "the wife of Uriah" is meant to highlight the foreign origins of her first husband. Robert Alter observes that though Uriah is identified as a Hittite, his name means "the Lord is my light." He suggests that Uriah may be a member of David's corps of elite troops, which would also mean that David could well have seen Bathsheba well before her famous bath that day. Alter says, "In any case, there is obvious irony in the fact that the man of foreign origins is the perfect Good Soldier of Israel, whereas the Israelite king betrays and murders him."
It may also be of some significance that David came to power after making war against the previous king Saul, and Solomon's legitimacy as David's successor was undoubtedly open to some question. Having his half brother murdered in the Tent of the Lord would be reason enough for some to have questions in that regard.
Eugen Drewermann is certainly not inclined to see Bathsheba primarily as a passive figure. As he says, Bathsheba herself brought Solomon to the throne of Israel "over the bodies of all his possible competitors." He lays paprticular stress on the ambiguity of the motives of Bathsheba and Uriah. Was it really by accident that she was bathing in sight of the king at the time of her highest fertility of the month? Was Uriah only a victim, a cuckold, or were he and his wife playing more complicated games?
One thing that Joseph and Mary have in common with Uriah and Bathsheba is a preganancy that has to be kept secret. It's implicit in the story that Uriah knows about Bathsheba's affair with David. But he also knows that he must pretend not to know, as he sits with the king at a court banquet, David urging him to sleep with Bathsheba. Uriah's excuse for not sleeping with his wife as the king wishes is that the rules of Holy War of his time forbid it. So, in the name of duty and obedience, he defies the king. Drewermann calls it "disobedient obedience."
But Drewermann also sees an important lesson in what David and Bathsheba do after their first child dies and David, the story tells us, repented of his sin in having Uriah murdered. They continue with their lives, and their union produces Solomon, the builder of the Temple. They come to "the conviction that people should live despite all guilt and that there is no better means of making reparation and reconciliation than to live as intensely as possible."
Drewermann concludes his Matthew commentary on Bathsheba as Mary's ancestor as follows:
In the end, what were David and Bathsheba? Criminal rogues or people who genuinely repented? No one can know, no one can judge. Perhaps they were both at the same time? It is the geneology of Matthew which also and specifically lists David and Bathsheba in the path to holiness.
The East German dissident writer Stefan Heym, who waseventually selected to be the president of Parliament in unified Germany, used the story of David in a novel, Der König David Bericht (1972), published in English as The King David Report. He imagines the process by which the real history of those individuals became incorporated into the official history, drawing on the lessons of life in Communist East Germany. Part of the brialliance of the biblical account is that the many complexities of the story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah are compressed into a short tale.
Matthew's geneology tells us that there is something in this story that is especially important for understanding the story of Mary and Jesus and his birth rendered miraculous in the Gospel.
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The sources quoted in this post include:
Jane Schaberg, "Before Mary: the Ancestresses of Jesus" Bible Review Dec 2004
Eugen Drewermann, Das Matthäus-Evangelium: Bilder der Erfülling, Erster Teil (1992). The English translations are mine.
Robert Alter, The David Story (1999).
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