Advent 2, Bathsheba
A special guest post from Beth Allison Barr
Fellow Pilgrims,
Today brings the second in a series of Advent posts about the four women named in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew Chapter 1.
You can find my introduction to the series here, and the first post in the series, by Joy Moore on Ruth and Naomi, is here.
Today’s guest post is from Dr.
, who writes about Bathsheba. Note on content: material dealing with rape and sexual assault.
Dr. is James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University. She earned her PhD in Medieval History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the bestselling author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth and the forthcoming book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry. She is also a pastor’s wife and mom of two great kids.
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“Bathsheba,” a digital collage by Beth Felker Jones. Feel free to use and share this image. Hi-res images, without the watermark, are available for purchase here.
Bathsheba, Did You Know?
Beth Allison Barr
“and Jesse the father of King David. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Matthew 1:6, NRSV
Jean Bourdichon (French, 1457 - 1521), illuminator; Bathsheba Bathing, 1498–1499, Tempera and goldLeaf: 24.3 × 17 cm (9 9/16 × 6 11/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 79, recto, 2003. 105.recto
Bathsheba is the fourth woman listed in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. She isn’t named, and her description as “the wife of Uriah” who bore David’s son Solomon is provocative, to say the least. The phrase makes it clear that Bathsheba was the wife of another man when she conceived a child with the Israelite king.
Adultery, right?
This is what illuminator Jean Bourdichon suggests in his late-fifteenth-century painting of Bathsheba’s story.[i] It is a startling, even disturbing, rendition of the first few verses of II Samuel 11. Bathsheba bathes openly on her roof garden, bold and beautiful in her nudity. She is not ashamed of her body; nor is she unaware of being watched by David. Indeed, her eyes seem to meet his gaze as he stands at the palace window. She could be described as enticing him. Her blonde hair glows, emphasizing her beauty, and silver paint makes the water around her genitals glitter. It is an image not of rape but of seduction.
What makes the image even more startling, more disturbing, is that it was created for a private prayer book to illuminate the psalms medieval Christians believed were sung by a penitent David. For the devoted readers, would the bold nudity of Bathsheba have mitigated David’s sin? Would her beauty have exonerated David’s lust? Would they have seen her as complicit too?
I can almost hear a Southern Baptist pastor bemoaning David not following the Billy Graham rule; not distancing himself enough from the danger of a woman’s body. Yes, David sinned. But like the sermons of too many modern preachers, this medieval painting suggests that Bathsheba sinned too. It was adultery. She was complicit. Perhaps even a seductress.
Does this mean that Matthew included “the wife of Uriah” in his genealogy to emphasize the sin of Bathsheba alongside the sin of David? That David and Bathsheba, complicit in adultery and murder, could still be used by a gracious and forgiving God?
Maybe.
Except Bathsheba wasn’t complicit.
Just read the biblical story.
“In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem. One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliamand the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her.” II Samuel 11:1-5, NRSV
The actor in the sin is David. He didn’t go with his army. Instead, he became a voyeur—choosing to watch a bathing woman from his window and lust after her. Despite the medieval painting, Bathsheba wasn’t bathing to entice David. Nothing in the text suggests she was aware of David’s gaze—at least not until his men showed up in her home.
Nothing in the text suggests that she consented, either. When David learned Bathsheba was the wife of a man he knew to be away (fighting as a general in his army) and thus not home to thwart the lust of a king, David ordered his men to get, or “take,” Bathsheba.
Not to ask her.
Not to woo her.
David sent his men to take her.
Do you really think, given the power dynamics, that she had the ability to say no? “The absolute power of an ancient Near Eastern monarch combined with the absence of her husband’s protection greatly reduce Bathsheba’s ability to consent to the sexual encounter,” writes Wilda Gafney. “To come when beckoned by the king does not imply consent.” [ii]
Does this mean that Matthew included “the wife of Uriah” in his genealogy to recognize what happened to her? To acknowledge Bathsheba’s experience as a survivor forced to marry her rapist; the man who also murdered her husband.
Maybe.
It is a nice thought. It is unlikely that the gospel author (or any contemporary male author) would have recognized what happened to Bathsheba as rape.
I can’t help but wonder what Bathsheba would make of the phrase. Of being remembered in the genealogy of Christ—even if just as “the wife of Uriah.” H. Daniel Zacharias, in his commentary on Matthew in The New Testament in Color, remarks on the “unique aspect” of Matthew’s genealogy including women at all, even if unnamed. It helps “prepare readers” to see “connections to women and Gentiles” throughout the gospel account. [iii]
Would Bathsheba, like Mary fourteen generations after her, have known the significance of her inclusion? Would she have understood, as she fought for her son Solomon to become David’s successor, that she was also fighting for something more? Something bigger than an earthly crown? She worked closely with the prophet Nathan, the biblical text of I Kings tells us, so maybe she knew more than we realize.
It is a nice thought.
But we can’t know from the text.
Unlike Mary who knew, Bathsheba probably didn’t.
So why was she included in the genealogy? I mean, Luke just records her son (Nathan instead of Solomon) in his genealogy. Matthew could have done the same. The text also could have omitted the scandalous clue. It names Tamar and Rahab and Ruth. Why doesn’t it just name Bathsheba instead of writing that “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah”?
I can’t help but wonder if this is a moment where we see what Wil Gafney calls “the God beyond the texts”? As she writes in a Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne, “The biblical text is fundamentally androcentric and regularly (though not exclusively) patriarchal. Yet there are texts in which God or the narrator addresses women directly, texts in which women and their children and other vulnerable people are the primary concern of God and the text (not to mention texts in which feminine language and imagery is used for God).” These passages “illuminate the gulf between the god of the text and God beyond the texts.” [iv]
Fifteenth-century paintings of the Annunciation and Visitation in the parish church of St. Thomas and St. Edmund, Salisbury, England. Note Mary holding a book when Gabriel appears to her. Photos by author.
Could Matthew 1:6 be one of these passages in which we see God lift up a woman? Inspiring her inclusion in the genealogy of Christ in such a way that the crime against her is remembered? Could Mary have remembered Bathsheba, too, when she spoke the words of the Magnificat? “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” I can’t help but think of the medieval tradition that Mary herself taught the life of Jesus to the gospel writers. Could the inclusion of women in Matthew’s genealogy suggest the influence of women like Mary on the gospel account?[v]
I can’t say for sure.
What I can say is that the God of David was also the God who saw Hagar, an enslaved, sexually and physically abused girl who was the first person in the biblical text to name God— “the one who sees me.”
What I can say is that the God of David was also the God of Nathan the prophet sent to call out David’s sin after the rape of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah.
What I can say is that in a world where sexual assault is still trivialized and overlooked, even by men who claim to be of God, the Word of God doesn’t allow us to forget that David’s inclusion in the lineage of Jesus came through Bathsheba’s body, “the wife of Uriah.”
What I can say is that, during this advent season when the whole Church waits for the coming of Christ, God doesn’t let us forget that salvation—even though it came in the body of a man—came through the body of a woman.
[i] https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103KAR. See also Thomas Kren and Mark L. Evans, eds., A Masterpiece Reconstructed: The Hours of Louis XII. Getty publications, 2005.
[ii] Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 82-83.
[iii] H. Daniel Zacharias, “Gospel of Matthew,” in The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary, eds. Esau McCaulley, Janette H. Ok, Osvaldo Padilla, and Amy L.B. Peeler (Intervarsity Press, 2024), 72-73.
[iv] Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, 211-221.
[v] See Laura Saetveit Miles, The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2020).
Biblical references for Bathsheba from II Samuel 11-12, 1 Kings 1; Hagar Genesis 16 & 21; genealogies of Jesus Matthew 1 and Luke 3; Mary Luke 1. All quotations from the NRSV.
“The geneaology, stars” a digital collage by Beth Felker Jones. Feel free to use and share this image. Hi-res images, without the watermark, are available for purchase here.
The collages in today’s post and the entire Advent series are available for purchase as digital downloads (hi-res, watermark free), and proceeds will be shared with the guest authors.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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I’ve long thought that naming Uriah the Hittite in the genealogy was also about not erasing the hero immigrant, Uriah, from the record. It forever contrasts David the king who should have joined the troops and his many sins with Bathsheba, to the dutiful Uriah who would not leave his post, abandon his men, or give into momentary pleasure when pressed by David to do so. David tried to erase the immigrant, but God would not.