Seeing Bathsheba

Give her a share in the fruit of her hands

Gentle reader,

I’m still fond of Veggie Tales: especially the silly songs, Jr. Asparagus when he’s scared, and that gorgeous queen of materialism, Madame Blueberry, but I’ve never gotten over what the franchise did to Bathsheba.

The episode is called “King George and the ducky;” David becomes King George, a selfish king who loves to take baths, and Bathsheba becomes . . . a rubber ducky. Maybe, for a moment in the writer’s room, this seemed like a hilarious joke about bathing, but it’s a erasure of Bathsheba. Gone is gender and power and violence. All we’re left with is a silly, selfish king who must learn not to take toys that aren’t his. Listen to that sentence again — not to TAKE TOYS. Gone is the woman: a person with feelings and relationships and a marriage. It’s not unlike the degrading erasure David himself works on Bathsheba when he looks down from his roof and fails to see that beautiful woman as a person, beloved of the King of Kings, created in the image of God.

Some kings love horses,
And some kings love cattle
Some kings love leading their troops into battle
But me, I'm not like that,
I find that stuff yucky
I’d much rather stay in my tub with my ducky

I get that Bathsheba’s isn’t an easy story to translate into vegetable-dom, but I’d much rather it have been left off the list for veggie adaptations.

We’ve been so good at failing to see Bathsheba.

Faced with this digital collage, which includes elements generated with AI, I hope we will stop and see Bathsheba. Uriah faces his wife, and she looks unflinchingly at us. The columbine flower and the key reference their fidelity. The bit of Greek wrapped around the flower is from Matthew 1:6, where Bathsheba is seen in being recognized in Christ’s family tree, as Solomon’s mother who “had been Uriah’s wife.” Uriah’s faithfulness (which the narrator contrasts with David’s lack of faithfulness) is met here in Christ’s faithfulness to Bathsheba and to us all. Much Western art figuring Bathsheba uncovers her, baring her body. In this collage, she is covered in crimson, a reference to Proverbs 31 and to the blood of Christ. Though they are generally unseen in Western churches, Bathsheba and Uriah are venerated as saints in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and I’ve added icon inscriptions in Amharic honoring them as such (I have no competency in Amharic, so I hope I’ve managed this rightly; please let me know if I have not!). The angels holding up that crimson covering are are also quotations from Ethiopian Christian iconography. Feel free to share this image. High resolution print products, without the watermark, are available at my Redbubble shop.

“Holy Uriah”

“Holy Bathsheba”

“She girds herself with strength
    and makes her arms strong” (Proverbs 31:17).

“When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him” (2 Samuel 11:26).

The ruby in Bathsheba’s ear references the tradition in the Ethiopian church identifying Bathsheba as the woman of strength in Proverbs 31.

“A woman of strength who can find?
    She is far more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 31:10)

The Ethiopian church claims the Queen of Sheba as part of its heritage, and Ethiopian kings claim a connection to the Davidic monarchy through Solomon (the 14th century Kebra Negast or “Glory of Kings,” a national epic of Ethiopia, recounts the tradition that the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba returned to Ethiopia with the ark of the covenant. Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church buildings have replicas of the ark at their centers). That special connection to Solomon seems to come with an attendant respect for Bathsheba as his mother.

Photo of a church in Ethiopia, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve marked Uriah and Bathsheba with signs of the blood and cross of Christ. The color of that blood one symbolic interpretation of the crimson clothes covering the household of the woman of strength.

“She is not afraid for her household when it snows,
    for all her household are clothed in crimson” (Proverbs 31:21).

While countless sermons have denounced Bathsheba as seducer and adulterer, the biblical text:

“portrays Bathsheba as a victim and David as the perpetrator of a crime.”

(This quote is from Sarah Bowler’s chapter on Bathsheba in Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible, ed.

Sandra Glahn

. See the chapter for textual analysis which speaks against any tendency to blame Bathsheba for David’s assault.)

“…the thing David had done displeased the LORD (2 Samuel 11:27).

Bathsheba is a woman of social standing (married to one of David’s elite soldiers, from the family of more of David’s most trusted men), but David ignored her dignity, violating her and the network of social relationships in which both stood. God remembers her dignity.

“Strength and dignity are her clothing,
    and she laughs at the time to come” (Proverbs 31:25).

See Bathsheba, appearing in a few stanzas of Timothy Donnelly’s invitation to seeing—to attention—in his long poem, “Hymn to Life:”

in Bathsheba, a fishing village
built on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes
and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind
the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother so

perilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would have
acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead,
dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork
in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat content
would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere
of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew, yireh shalem,

means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make her
into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest,
was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing
opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure
with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird
but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby

revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time
but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious
from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger
than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern
in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether
it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else

threaten to is debatable.

(from Timothy Donnelly, "Hymn to Life" in Poetry, July/August 2014)

See Bathsheba get a different story in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

See how Hardy sees another vulnerable woman in his Tess of the d'Urbervilles (the link takes you to the edition with helps for reading from

Karen Swallow Prior

).

“She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought.”

David, looking down from his rooftop, didn’t see. He wanted to possess and consume. Let us practice seeing as God sees.

^“Give her a share in the fruit of her hands,
    and let her works praise her in the city gates” (Proverbs 31:31).

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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