Content Warning: Lots of discussion about rape & sexual abuse surrounding the biblical story of David & Bathsheba.

It may not make sense to you. Why am I adding my words to the stream of all the other words out there? Why do this at all? Haven’t all of the words already been said that can be said about what happens when a famous Christian preacher is revealed to be something other than what he portrayed himself to be?

That’s just the thing, though. There have been so many opinions out there — some of them rather arrogant and/or victim-blaming. And for the sake of those who see those responses as indicative of Christianity as a whole, I feel the need to raise my voice in opposition to one of those inappropriate responses. There are others who have addressed other responses, and I think they have done well.

The main response that has really bothered me is people dragging out the King David Defense. “Well, King David screwed up royally and God still considered him a man after His own heart.” Or something along these lines.

A bit of history

In case you aren’t familiar with who King David was, he was the 2nd king of the kingdom of Israel back around 1000 B.C. He was a shepherd boy who took out a giant named Goliath with just a slingshot and a stone. He had to run and hide from his father-in-law, Saul, because his life was in danger and there was basically a price on his head.

Saul had started off alright, but he let his ego get the best of him and he did some stuff that directly went against what God had told him to do. So God told Samuel, who was his prophet, that the next king was to be a “man after God’s own heart.” You’ll find that story in 1 Samuel 13.

A bit of time elapses before God actually gets Samuel to Bethlehem (1 Samuel 16). Samuel gets together with Jesse and his family, and looks over all of Jesse’s sons. Except one. Turned out, the youngest was out in the pasture with the sheep. When the prophet asks you to get that son home, too, you get that son home. So David was called home. God told Samuel that David was the one to be the next king, so Samuel anointed him with oil in front of his whole family.

David goes back to being a shepherd. Until King Saul hears about his musical skills, that is, and asks him to come play his harp at the palace. Turns out, Saul has some issues and David’s harp music calms and soothes him. These days, Saul’s family would probably get him some therapy and some medication. I did some googling and there are some articles I really wish I could read, but I don’t have the spare cash laying around to purchase the academic journals to read about what psychologists have to say about the psychiatric disorders they think that Saul may have had given the descriptions given in the book of 1 Samuel. From a couple of summaries I read, it sounds like some think that he may have been bipolar. Kinda gives me a bit more compassion for the man.

For awhile, David goes from the pasture to the palace. Then his oldest brothers go to war, and dad sends David to the front lines with some food for them. Old school care package–send your youngest son. This is where David distinguishes himself in front of the entire army. You might be familiar with the name Goliath.

We use it a lot when we talk about the little guy taking on the really, really big guy.

There was this really tall guy who belonged to the other army, so tall, some people called him a giant, and he liked to come out and shout challenges at them. Goliath wanted a one-on-one battle. Nobody liked those odds.

David, though, he knew that he had God on his side. Plus, he’d taken on bears and lions when he’d been out protecting the sheep, so he figured he could take on a really big guy. The perks for being the one to defeat Goliath weren’t half-bad either: getting to marry the king’s daughter and tax-exempt status for the entire family.

And David took down Goliath with just his sling and a stone right to the forehead, finishing him off with his own sword. He credits God with giving him the strength to conquer the giant.

Now, see, right here. If we stopped right here, and this was the David that everybody was talking about when everybody was talking about King David and him being a man after God’s own heart, I could get behind that. It seems that for this period of his life that he was very in tune with God and focused on following God with his whole heart.

But that’s not the david they’re talking about

The David that all of the people essentially defending the abusers are referring to is the middle-aged man who raped another man’s wife and had that man killed in an effort to cover up his actions (see 2 Samuel 11).

David doesn’t go to war with his army. He stays home, and he happens to see a woman bathing. He asks about her and they tell him who she is–Bathsheba. She’s the wife of one of his captains, Uriah. Dude should’ve stopped right there. Frankly, he should’ve stopped after he noticed her.

But, no.

He sent messengers to her house and they brought her to the king.

And he took her.

And he raped her.

Now I know there are some of you who have been told this story all of your lives (like I have), and you’re going to say that half of the blame gets put on Bathsheba. After all, she’s the one that was taking a bath where anybody could see her. But, just because she’s taking a bath, doesn’t mean she’s doing it specifically to attract anyone’s attention.

Ok, but she could’ve said, “No,” right?

No. No, she couldn’t.

We have to consider the culture. David was a man and the king. Bathsheba was a woman and his subject.

Women were considered property, less than. If a king wanted a woman, he could take her.

David had started out a man after God’s own heart.

But he happened to see this woman doing what is likely believed as ceremonial cleansing, rather than just taking a normal bath, following her monthly menstrual cycle. He decided to look even after he realized what she was doing.

And he sent people to go get her. When you live in a monarchy, your husband, your father, your grandfather all work for the king in some aspect or another, you have to go when the king sends for you.

When there’s a power differential like that, can you imagine what it would have been like once he made sexual advances?

I’m going to stop right there, because I can’t go any further. I can’t. But I want to leave you with this. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you definitely knew you weren’t in control and being taken advantage of, you know that there are a handful of ways that your body is programmed to react. Traditionally, there were only two responses, fight and flight. Now, professionals know that there are four: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (here’s a Psychology Today article for extra reading). These are all self-protective reactions by the body.

We don’t know exactly how Bathsheba reacted, but it probably wasn’t flight. She was sent home after.

Used. And sent home.

The cover up

Because this wasn’t going to be a sin that was going to go away quietly, Bathsheba became pregnant. She sent a message to David and he sent for Uriah. He was hoping Uriah would go sleep with Bathsheba. If the baby came a little bit early, that would be okay, not like that doesn’t happen anyway.

Can you imagine how much work that took back in the day? It wasn’t just a phone call. He had to send a person with a message out to the front lines wherever the battle was happening. David put thought and work into this. When Uriah got back to Jerusalem and checked in with the king, he didn’t think anything of the visit. Just a check in to see how the war’s going, you know?

I wonder what he was thinking. Wouldn’t this have been the General’s job? Or was he really in a position to give a report like this? Do you think he thought it was strange? Wouldn’t he have thought that maybe the king should have come out to the battlefield to look the troops over and check things out for himself? He could’ve felt smug. “The king must really think a lot of me because he’s asking me about the battle and all that.” Though his later actions don’t really reflect any sort of smugness.

Uriah refused to go home. He said that everybody else is camping out in tents on the battlefields and away from their wives and homes; there’s no way he was going to his home and wife. He slept where the king’s servants slept. The next day, after King David found out where Uriah slept, he got him drunk to try to convince him to go home and sleep with his wife.

That still didn’t work. Uriah was more honorable than David.

David could have come clean right here to his friend.

He could’ve come clean at any point up until now. He’d had time. It had been at least a month since he’d had Bathsheba up at his place.

But, no. He was determined that no one was going to find out. So Dude goes and writes out Uriah’s death sentence in a letter to the general, and sends it with Uriah when he goes back to the front lines. Uriah didn’t peek at the letter. He handed it over to General Joab, and the general followed the king’s orders, put Uriah right there in the middle of all the fighting, and Uriah was killed. Uriah was one of David’s mighty men. He was an excellent fighter. That man had skills. I imagine it took a lot to bring him down. I wonder how many people he took out.

I imagine it was like the scene at the end of The Fellowship of the Rings where Boromir was battling the orcs all on his own to try to keep Merry and Pippin safe. That’s what Uriah would’ve looked like. That’s the kind of fighting skills that he had.

In bathsheba’s shoes

We don’t know how she felt about her husband. Culturally, she would’ve had a mourning period. What if it was one of those rare marriages where the wife and husband actually loved each other, and it wasn’t just an arranged marriage? Can you imagine the depths of her mourning? This is a woman who’s been traumatized by the king, and now she’s lost her husband in war. More trauma and grief while she’s pregnant with a child she didn’t necessarily want.

The second her mourning period is over, King David has her moved to his house permanently. She becomes one of his wives. Yes. ONE of his wives. He didn’t do what he did to her because he was starved for sex. He had more than enough women at his disposal already; but they weren’t enough.

We don’t know how long all of this took. It doesn’t say. But Bathsheba had a boy. So we’re about 40 weeks out from the initial choice King David made. 40 weeks. Is Bathsheba happy to have a son, or does this son remind her of her trauma at the hands of her now-husband? Maybe both?

Bathsheba’s losses don’t stop with the loss of her husband and being thrust into the king’s harem. Her newborn son dies. But not after an illness and a visit from a prophet.

Here’s the thing. The prophet doesn’t come to chat with Bathsheba. Nope. He comes to tell King David a story. It’s not just any story, though. He tells this former shepherd turned king a story about sheep. Nathan the prophet knew how to hit a guy where it counted.

Nathan the prophet

If you read the last part of the last verse of 2 Samuel 11, it says, “But the Lord was displeased with what David had done.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this isn’t the first time in the story that the Lord is displeased with David’s actions, but this is when the author of the book is going to introduce the prophet and what happens next. Chapter 12 verse 1 says, “So the Lord sent Nathan the prophet.” After David got good and riled up because of the story Nathan told him about sheep, he said this:

“The Lord, the God of Israel, says: I anointed you king of Israel and saved you from the power of Saul. ⁸ I gave you your master’s house and his wives and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And if that had not been enough, I would have given you much, much more. ⁹ Why, then, have you despised the word of the Lord and done this horrible deed? For you have murdered Uriah the Hittite with the sword of the Ammonites and stolen his wife. ¹⁰ From this time on, your family will live by the sword because you have despised me by taking Uriah’s wife to be your own.

¹¹ “This is what the Lord says: Because of what you have done, I will cause your own household to rebel against you. I will give your wives to another man before your very eyes, and he will go to bed with them in public view. ¹² You did it secretly, but I will make this happen to you openly in the sight of all Israel.”

2 Samuel 12, New Living Translation

That doesn’t sound like God’s excusing what David did. God was holding him accountable and telling him what the consequences were going to be.

¹³ Then David confessed to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Nathan replied, “Yes, but the Lord has forgiven you, and you won’t die for this sin. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, because you have shown utter contempt for the word of the Lord by doing this, your child will die.”

2 Samuel 12, New Living Translation

And Nathan held him accountable as well. He didn’t say, “Well, what God really means is…” He laid it all out there. I can’t imagine that would have been easy for him, but he did it anyway. He was confronting a man who had just killed a man to cover up his sin. What’s to say he wouldn’t do it again?

The author of 2 Samuel only focuses on how King David dealt with the death of this son. They don’t talk about how Bathsheba dealt with it. We don’t know if she had any children with Uriah. We only know about this son and about Solomon, the other son she had with David.

This is the king

When people talk about how King David was a “man after God’s own heart,” they’re talking about this David. They talk about how he made this “mistake” with Bathsheba, but God still called him a man after his own heart. God forgave him. God used him. We even have all of these poems of his in the Bible that we use for worship.

And they stop there.

They conveniently forget that David & Bathsheba’s son died.

They forget God told David that his family would live and die by the sword.

They forget that God said David’s family would rebel.

They forget that God said he’d give David’s wives openly to someone else.

The biggest thing they forget is that they’re siding with the abuser instead of the victim.

Of course, they also forget that when God said that he was looking for a man after his own heart, that was way back at the beginning, right when David was a teenager, not when he was a middle-aged man, not after he had raped a woman and had her husband killed as part of an effort to cover up his actions.

This is the man they’re generally thinking about when they bring up that phrase, “man after God’s own heart.” After all, he still got to stay king. He was the foundation of the Davidic line–there was always one of his descendants on the throne until Babylon came along hundreds of years later and killed the last king of Judah. He was an ancestor of Jesus.

He was.

Here’s the thing though, his choice had some serious repercussions.

1. He raped another man’s wife
2. He killed that man, who had been fighting by his side for years
3. He made his general complicit in his cover-up
4. He cost his newborn son his life
5. His actions gave his son, Amnon, a good excuse to rape his half-sister, Tamar
6. He likely saw himself in his son, Amnon, and didn’t punish him for what he did to Tamar
7. His lack of punishment led Absalom, Tamar’s brother, his half-brother, to take vengeance into his own hands and led to Amnon’s death
8. He had to flee from his palace because Absalom decided to make himself king for awhile
9. His most trusted advisor whose words were like the words of God, betrayed him and sided with his son, because the advisor’s granddaughter was Bathsheba
10. He left 10 concubines (female servants that it was legally okay to sleep with) to take care of the palace while he and his family and household fled, leaving them vulnerable; and Absalom raped them in a tent pitched on top of the palace
11. His son who did become the legit king after his death (Solomon) ended up having 300 wives and 700 concubines

So what to do?

There are so many things that we could and should do, really.

Stop using King David as an example. Stop using him as an excuse. His attitude toward and treatment of women was a product of his time and should not be an example for us.

He was not a religious leader. He was a political leader. If we want to use a religious leader from the Bible as an example, why don’t we pick Eli? He was the high priest. He didn’t conduct himself inappropriately with any women. Himself. But he allowed his sons, also priests, to take advantage of (abuse) women while on priestly duty. Check out 1 Samuel 2 & 3. Eli knew and he didn’t do anything to stop them or discipline them. He could have and should have done both–not just as their father, but as their leader.

But nobody uses Eli as an example, because Eli and his sons all died because of what they did or didn’t do.

The story of King David is more appealing because David repented and he got to keep his position. He even wrote this psalm of repentance that we like to quote.

But, the biggest thing–the BIGGEST thing–is to stop siding with and identifying with the abuser.

Just cut it out.

We MUST listen to the victims.

We MUST take their sides.

We MUST stand up for them.

You know what a victim hears when they hear you identifying with an abuser? They hear an unsafe person. They hear a potential abuser.

And, you know what? At least one third of women that we come in contact with, and one fourth of men, will have experienced some type of sexual violence during their lifetime (according to the CDC). These statistics are limited to physical contact. This doesn’t include non-physical sexual abuse, which would include being exposed to pornography, among other things.

The numbers are probably closer to one half to one third of everyone that we come in contact with. One half. Especially when we consider that women aren’t believed when they report (so they don’t), men are shamed when they report (so they don’t), and children aren’t generally believed or listened to when they try to report.

One half.

Every other person we come into contact with has been sexually abused at least once in their lives.

And if they hear you defend and abuser or side with an abuser–instead of the victim–and then they hear you talk about how you’re a Christian and you try to “convert” them, they aren’t going to want to listen to you. Especially when they hear you saying that Jesus loves the children, the widows and the orphans, the tax collectors and the prostitutes.

But they remember what you said about that abuser.

Instead of siding with the victim, someone you said that Jesus would have stood up for, you sided with the abuser.

That’s what you’re doing when you identify with King David instead of Bathsheba.