“But David remained at Jerusalem”

Sermon by Jamie Howison on 2 Samuel 11:1-15

I want you to notice how our reading this evening from 2nd Samuel opens:

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him… But David remained at Jerusalem.

The writer of this story has just skillfully alerted the reader to a deep problem, and one that will result in dire consequences. At “the time when kings go out to battle” David is at home in Jerusalem, having dispatched Joab to do his work for him. As Walter Brueggemann notes,

There is a powerful silence back in Jerusalem with this king, who now seems so settled and sure that his mind—and his body—can wander from the military action. David has ceased to be a chieftain and now relies on agents to do his work. He has ceased to be the king requested by Israel (in 1 Samuel 8:20) who would “go out before us and fight our battles.”

There is the scent of privilege in this, and a hint that David’s innate authority has begun to dissolve into little more than political and personal power. Though by no means a flawless character up to this point in the narrative, David has been shown as an incredibly attractive and compelling figure, and one prepared to lead from the front rather than orchestrate from the back. Here, however, he is delegating that lead role to others, choosing instead the comforts of his home. That is what is signalled in the description of how, “It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house...” And isn’t that just a world away from the boy who’d stepped up to face Goliath?

And David “saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.” She is taking a ritual bath, having just finished her menstrual cycle and so following the practices set out in the Law. But David doesn’t see that she is simply being faithful to the requirements of the Law, and perhaps even if he did it wouldn’t make any difference. He simply sees a physical beauty that he likes, and because he likes this beauty he determines he will have her. He sends someone to find out who she is, and the answer comes back: “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” And now because he has the power to do so, he sends for her. He wants her, and he can have her, and so he will.

In my New Revised Standard Version study bible this episode comes with the heading, “David Commits Adultery with Bathsheba,” and then in the notes at the bottom of the page it is described as, “David wrongs Uriah.” Well, surely David did wrong Uriah—he arranges to have him killed in battle—but he also seriously wrongs Bathsheba. To say he is committing adultery with her is simply wrong-headed on the part of the editors of my study bible. No, as the preaching scholar Gennifer Benjamin Brooks puts it, this is “sexual misconduct of the highest order and [an] egregious abuse of power.”

David is the king, and he has power that no one in his kingdom can match. In having his messengers “fetch” Bathsheba—and that’s the word in our translation: “fetch”—he is exercising a power that renders her powerless. This is an abuse of his power and an abuse of her, and if the word “adultery” has any application here it is in the root word, “adulterate.” As John Baderertscher points out in his book on the Ten Commandments, “One definition of that word reads: ‘adulterate: to debase or make impure by adding inferior, alien, or less desirable materials or elements.’” David is debasing Bathsheba, and turning her into a mere object, he is debasing the marriage she shares with Uriah, and he is debasing his own marriage. His own marriages, actually, because at this point he has had children with six different wives, and is also still married to Michel, Saul’s daughter, from whom he has become estranged. Whatever one might have to say about the practice of having multiple wives—and Wil Gafney rather sharply comments that “David is a collector of women”—in his exploitation of Bathsheba David is debasing those marriages, those women, as well.

And he’s debasing himself. He has received a promise that from him God would build a “house,” a lasting lineage to which God would be faithful. Yet here he’s not thinking about that lineage or God’s fidelity or the call that has been placed on him to shepherd Israel. No, here he shows himself to be as debased as any other king in a world that treated women’s bodies as objects to be consumed.

Soon the news comes from Bathsheba: “I am pregnant.” How to deal with this now? Attempt to hide it all. Twice David puts Uriah in a position where he could go home to sleep with his wife, and twice Uriah declines, choosing instead to remain with his fellow soldiers in this time of war. So now what? David’s solution is to arrange to have Joab place Uriah in the most vulnerable position in battle, and then draw back to let him be killed. In a gruesome twist, David even has Uriah carry the letter outlining this plan to Joab.

And yes, were you to read forward from where we ended tonight, you’d see this is precisely what happens, and it is capped off by one of the more chilling lines in the whole of the bible. Joab sends a messenger back to David to report on the battle and to inform him that Uriah has been killed, to which David replies,

“Thus you shall say to Joab, ‘Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another; press your attack on the city, and overthrow it.’ And encourage him.” (2 Sam. 11:25)

Do not let this matter trouble you, Joab. It is all part of war… but also part of what it means to serve the king that David has become. Notice, too, the various figures who collude with David in this story. The person who goes to find out who the beautiful bathing woman might be; the messengers who go to fetch her; the person who brings her message back to David, “I am pregnant”; Joab, who unquestioningly does what he is told, and sets up one of his own loyal soldiers to die. David is well aware that he can count on such collusion; that he has the power to command it and get whatever he damn well pleases. He can now take Bathsheba as yet one more wife and hide behind the story that this child was conceived in wedlock. If anyone counted the months, they would easily see differently. But who is going to count the months? Or who is going to say anything publicly after counting the months? More collusion.

But there is a limit, because as we will see in next week’s reading, God is not prepared to collude with David, nor is the prophet Nathan. The other notable voice unwilling to collude is the writer of these texts. That unnamed writer is unwilling to tell anything but the full story as he has received it, and that is a remarkable thing in that world and context. It is so tempting to only show the good things about your national heroes; to let the writing of history bend clearly toward victory and virtue. But no, these biblical authors aren’t prepared to do that, because they understand themselves to be holy scribes under the authority of God, and only the full story will do justice to that calling.

I am deeply grateful for that, because telling and retelling such stories can also illuminate our own times and call us to reflect on our own lives and decisions. How many powerful people in the entertainment industry and the world of politics have been confronted in the last five years by the reality of their own abuses? How many people colluded to keep things hushed up? How many lives were shattered by the victimization? Or turn back to the stories arising from the legacy of the Residential Schools. How much damage was done by people justifying their own actions, saying, like David, “Do not let this matter trouble you.” It is just the way things work, it is all part of progress, no one really cares about those kids anyway; but we can knock the Indian out of them and make them adapt to the world.

One of the first lines in next week’s readings is, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” When it comes to the abuse of power and the hurt done to people in the name of that power, that holds true today.