The Seductress Edit
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
July 25, 2021—Proper 12B
2 Samuel 11:1-15; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21
The Bible is dangerous stuff. Powerful, with enough God in it for us to recognize it as the Word of God, but with enough humanity mixed in to make that a very risky thing indeed.
Because the presence of God in scripture is like the presence of God in Jesus: it is divinity that has been united with frail flesh. It is the Spirit of God, breathing through a very particular time and place and people. It is not just divine, but it is not just human either.
Which makes it wondrous. And precious. And, as I said when I began: it makes it dangerous.
Today’s story from 2 Samuel is an excellent example of the way things can get tricky. On its face, it is familiar enough: King David catches a glimpse of Bathsheba while she is bathing. Intrigued, he sends for her and takes her to his bed. She then turns up pregnant, and to cover up his crime, David attempts to get her soldier husband to come home and have marital relations with her. Failing that, he deliberately sends Uriah to his death in battle.
The Bible recognizes this as grave sin, one that causes great suffering for David in his life. But a closer look at the description of the sin he committed reveals that this is one of those biblical stories that is deeply rooted in the values and perspectives of its time.
David’s first sin is understood to be adultery. But in biblical times, adultery wasn’t so much a sexual sin as it was a property crime. By definition, it was only adultery if the woman involved was married to another man, because the sin was taking another man’s property. Not only had an adulterer taken that man’s wife, but he might also have impregnated her, causing his child to inherit that man’s estate!
It’s the attempt to avoid being caught in this terrible transgression of property laws that pushes David to send Uriah to his death. He then tries to neaten it all up by marrying Bathsheba, but the family dynamic spins out into chapters and chapters of tragedy and betrayal, suggesting that the poison of that sinful beginning takes a very long time to work its way out of the system. His children are torn apart, as they are caught in a recurring narrative marked by theft, murder, and sexual assault.
It’s that last effect that suggests to me that those who passed this story down might have recognized in their gut (even if they did not put it in the text) that the story of David and Bathsheba’s meeting was not simply a story of adultery, but in all probability, it was also one of rape: the story of a woman who had no power whatsoever to resist the king’s desire to take her.
The text itself doesn’t say, perhaps because the culture of the time cared much less about that question than the simple fact that she was another man’s wife. Which is just an example of why those of us who love the Bible need to interrogate the text; why we are called to explore the worldly values that shaped (and sometimes warped) the biblical story, and to do our best to let the divine part shine through.
Bathsheba doesn’t get to speak. The text leaves her silent; which is bad enough, but I have to say that Christian tradition has done her far worse damage. The artistic renderings alone would prove my point, and I thought about showing you some, but none of it is “suitable for work,” as they say. In painting after painting, she is depicted as though she was deliberately showing her nakedness to David: coyly, flirtatiously, brazenly.
Like so many women in the bible, she got the seductress rewrite. Like Salome, who danced for Herod and he enjoyed it so much that he offered her whatever she might ask. The text says nothing about what kind of dance she did. But churchy folks over the centuries have decided it must have been sexual, even creating the legend that it was the dance of the seven veils. I could show you paintings of that, too.
Or like Eve, who ate the fruit that brought the knowledge of good and evil, and then gave some to Adam. And the tradition transformed that into a sexual thing too, implying somehow that she tempted him with sex. Even if the fruit itself wasn’t sex, if you look at the art, she clearly used her sexual wiles to tempt him to take it.
But none of that is in the text! It’s just an attitude about female sexuality, a fear of female sexuality and the male response to it that has been layered onto the biblical story and then used as the reason we need to control female sexuality. And so all these millennia later, we still have things like dress codes for girls in school, whose express purpose is to protect the boys from the “distraction.”
It’s dangerous stuff, I tell you, when people want to look at the Bible and declare that what they see there is “the Word of God.” Because even the original text is rooted in its own culture and the worldly values of its time. And all the years of interpretation after that have been too, including the words I am speaking now. So we have to be willing to ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, to hear the words of God that are threaded through all of those things. To see the themes from the Dream of God that carry the story along. To hear the ways the story challenges us, and to challenge the story in return. So that the Word of God might become more visible in the midst of the very human stories and laws of the Bible.
Bathsheba doesn’t get a voice in today’s story, beyond sending a message to David that she is pregnant. She has no agency either, though this does not protect her from suffering the same punishment as David: the death of their child.
But the story does not forget her. She goes on to survive all the strife between David’s older children, and bear him many children of her own. Then, when David nears death, Bathsheba finally claims her voice.[1] At the urging of the prophet Nathan, she goes to David. On the one hand, she informs him that his oldest son Adonijah has gone behind his back and already set himself up as the new king. And on the other, she reminds him of his promise that their son Solomon would be king after his death. Persuaded by both these arguments, David summons the priest Zadok and the prophet Nathan to anoint Solomon king (1 Kings 1). We then even get a story of Solomon giving his mother a seat at his right hand, from which she asks him to show mercy to his older brother Adonijah (1 Kings 2). She has found her voice, and uses it to pick up the biblical thread of forgiveness and reconciliation. And even the fact that Solomon refuses, instead having Adonijah and all his co-conspirators killed, cannot obscure that glimpse of God in the midst of the carnage of this family’s story.
It is the Word of the Lord. It is the messy, complicated story of God’s people. It is time-bound and yet full of the promise of eternity. May God give us the wisdom to understand it to be so. Amen.
[1] Sermon Brainwave Podcast: 794. (9th Sunday after Pentecost (Ord. 17B) – July 25, 2021)