Bathsheba

Israeli noblewoman

• Born: fl. tenth century b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Israel

Bathsheba wielded occasional power behind the thrones of Israel’s second and third monarchs. According to the New Testament, she was an ancestor of Jesus Christ.

Early Life

Few details are known of the life of Bathsheba (bath-SHEE-bah), yet her story, as narrated in passages from First Kings, Second Samuel, and First Chronicles of the Hebrew Bible, is dramatically tantalizing. Though rabbinical sages and church fathers make reference to her from time to time, only the salient facts of her career are known. According to their usual practice, biblical writers make no attempt to enter her mind or explore her emotions the way a modern biographer or novelist would. Her motivations may be discerned solely from her actions, and they lend themselves to different interpretations.

Bathsheba was the daughter of Eliam, a figure otherwise unidentified in the biblical record. Ancient Hebrew names generally had either literal or metaphoric descriptive significance. Hers probably meant “daughter of Sheba” or “daughter of abundance.” Ironically, her name has always reminded English speakers of the action for which she is best remembered; for the artists who would later paint her, she would be “the woman who bathes.”

Life’s Work

Bathsheba is first introduced in the Bible as the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Her husband, a man of foreign lineage, is a consistently noble warrior, unwaveringly loyal to David, king of Israel. Though it is the time of year when kings are expected to set forth in battle, King David is found shirking his duty on the fateful day he first glimpses Bathsheba. Lounging on the rooftop of his palace in Jerusalem, the king spies Uriah’s wife bathing on her own roof, evidently performing her mikveh, the ritual purification. Smitten by her beauty, David orders that she be brought to his palace. Her own wishes are never clear. Possibly she is an innocent prize claimed by a tyrant, while her husband is serving him. However, the suspicion lingers that she may have schemed all along to catch the lustful eye of the king. Without a hint of coercion, she quickly becomes David’s partner in adultery. Whatever his intentions may originally have been, David’s life becomes complicated when she sends him a message a short time later that she is with child. Though he will later come to cherish the ill-begotten son, his first impulse is to pass it off as the offspring of her lawful husband. Uriah is recalled from the battlefield and told to return to the comforts of his home. Uriah, however, upholds the soldier’s code; while his fellows endure the dangers of battle he will neither feast nor lie with his wife. David’s next plan succeeds; he arranges for Uriah to be isolated and slain in battle.

Again, Bathsheba’s possible complicity in these calculations remains obscure. She performs the proper mourning rites for her husband, probably for the duration of a week. Then David makes haste to take her as one of his wives, an especially privileged member of his harem. Their son is duly born but does not flourish. David is depicted as an agonized father, fasting and praying that his child may live. When the infant perishes, the king accepts God’s punishment for his crimes, remarking that while his son will never return to him, he too is mortal and will someday join the child in death.

Bathsheba’s maternal grief is never detailed. The Bible states simply that David consoled her and with her begat another child, Solomon. The narrator or narrators of their story do not place blame on Bathsheba; they make it clear that this is the king’s saga. David is fiercely reprimanded by the enraged prophet Nathan. He learns that his acts of adultery and murder have so angered God, who chose him for the throne, that the rest of his reign will be troubled: The sword will never depart from David’s house, and his children by other wives will betray him and scheme against one another. Nevertheless, out of his initially sinful relationship, God will bring forth good. Solomon will preside over Israel’s golden age.

For a number of years, Bathsheba largely vanishes from the history of King David’s reign. When she reappears, the king is old, and she is now a venerable lady of the royal harem. Her character and personality appear to have changed. Perhaps the years in a royal court have made her shrewd and bold, or perhaps her true nature is revealed when the artifices of youth are stripped away. No longer a passive object of the king’s pleasure, she emerges as a forceful participant in events, intent on gaining every advantage for her son. Furthermore, Nathan the prophet, who had earlier found David’s adultery with her so repellant, is now her confederate. She will secure the throne for Solomon, although he is neither the elder nor the most popular of David’s sons. According to ancient custom, the king is free to choose his successor among his family members. Along with Nathan and other partisans of Solomon, Bathsheba reminds the aging king of an earlier promise to bestow the throne on her son. Whether or not an earlier promise had indeed been made is never clear, but Bathsheba convincingly approaches the now exhausted old man as he lies shivering in bed beside Abishag, a virgin concubine who has been brought into the royal chamber merely to provide youthful warmth to the dying monarch. David, who can still be moved by Bathsheba, readily grants her request. Nathan, too, is satisfied because he sees God’s providence at work in these events. Later rabbinical and ecclesiastical teachers will concur, designating Bathsheba a repentant adulteress transformed into God’s instrument.

There is a single remaining event in Bathsheba’s story that is recorded, her motivations as ambiguous as ever. Recognizing her as a power behind the throne of the new king, Adonijah, an older son of David, approaches her with a request. Though he has been passed over for kingship, Adonijah feels entitled to some consolation. He asks the queen mother to relay to Solomon his desire that Abishag, the last concubine of David, be given to him as a wife. Bathsheba easily approaches her son with the request of his half brother. Rightly or wrongly, Solomon interprets the message as a challenge to his throne and orders the execution of Adonijah. While a modern reader is likely to view the unfortunate Adonijah as a lovelorn young man with a possibly incestuous desire for a woman who had belonged to his late father, an ancient Israelite would probably have understood the request as did Solomon, who saw in it an attempt to claim the prerogatives of kingship.

Scholars question what her request reveals of Bathsheba herself. Was she simply a charitable petitioner on behalf of a family member, or did she also see Adonijah, who still had a strong following at court, as a threat to Solomon’s power? Did she thus knowingly set in motion Adonijah’s death sentence? It is even possible that her feelings were more complicated still, that even in these mature years she experienced pangs of jealousy. In her last recorded audience with David, she saw him lying beside Abishag, though he was exhausted beyond lust. Perhaps this scene painfully reminded her of the time she was so ardently coveted by the king.

Significance

Bathsheba provides a dominant note of pathos in the great epic of David, shepherd king and psalmist of Israel. On earlier occasions David had demonstrated his ability to rise above the violence that characterized his age in acts of courage, charity, and justice. Although his obsession with Bathsheba led him to defy the decrees of God, Bathsheba is remembered as no mere fallen woman but as the mother of Solomon. She is revered as a matriarch of Israel. The early Christian theologians sometimes marveled that with such soiled flesh as this the lineage of the promised messiah could be established. Curiously, and perhaps appropriately, even in the New Testament genealogy of Jesus, Bathsheba remains “the wife of Uriah the Hittite,” the one unlawfully seized.

Despite, and possibly because of, his very human failings, David remains the most beloved of Hebrew kings. There is a single instance in the Bible where a woman is said to be in love with a man. This woman is the princess Michal, an earlier wife given David by his predecessor, King Saul, in exchange for the curious bride price of the foreskins of one hundred Philistines. David is also called “a man after God’s own heart.” While both a king’s daughter and God Almighty openly proclaim their love for David, the nature and degree of Bathsheba’s feelings for him are never revealed.

Biblical narrators refrained from physical descriptions of people. The imaginations of later writers and artists have shown no such restraint. When later Europeans invented courtly love in fourteenth century Provence, the figures of David and Bathsheba intrigued them as they reinterpreted events from an ancient, alien milieu in the light of their own glorification of forbidden love. Still, Bathsheba played a relatively insignificant part in European literature, less evident than other biblical women such as Rachel, Ruth, or even Delilah. Her story continues to interest writers, though no universally acclaimed imaginative portrait, certainly none on the order of John Milton’s Delilah, has been called forth.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. A literary scholar thoroughly versed in Hebrew elucidates the conventions of biblical narrative, providing both historical and rabbinical frameworks for understanding the story.

Meyers, Carol, ed. Women in Scripture. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000. A comprehensive examination of the roles of all the women, both named and unnamed, in both the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Lively, informative reading.

Rogerson, John. Chronicle of the Old Testament Kings: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Ancient Israel. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. An enjoyable, lavishly illustrated examination of all the kings of Israel and Judah, putting into historical perspective the reigns of David and Solomon.

Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. A fine introduction to the literary features of biblical narrative.