Transcript
Jesus’ Family Tree: Bathsheba
First Baptist Richmond, February 16, 2025
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
2 Samuel 11:1-5
It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.
One of the most popular TED Talks of all time was given by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s called, “The Danger of a Single Story,” and it begins with her memories of growing up on a university campus in Nigeria, reading children’s books at a very early age, and then, around age seven, writing her own books in pencil with crayon drawings. But because she had read only British and American books she said, “All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.” But she lived in Nigeria. She and her family didn’t have snow, they ate mangoes, and they never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
She says, “I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails. It was not until I discovered African books by African writers that I began to find myself in the story.”
She remembers her family’s houseboy, Fide, who came from a nearby village. She said, “The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family
was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, ‘Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.’ So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
“Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautiful basket his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.
“Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
“What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.”i
So this morning, as we continue to look at Jesus’ family tree as it is found in the first chapter of Matthew, as we consider the five women in that genealogy and turn our thoughts toward the fourth of those women, Bathsheba, I’m wondering if perhaps we have heard a single story about her, and if there might
be more to tell.
What we know is found in the biblical book of 2 Samuel, beginning in chapter 11, where we are told that it was the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle. But King David stayed home in Jerusalem. Instead of going out to battle himself he sent his general, Joab, along with his officers and all of Israel, to “ravage the Ammonites and besiege the city of Rabbah.”
I didn’t realize it until this time around, but I think I’ve had a single story of Bathsheba in my head. Maybe I got it from Frederick Buechner, whose writing I have appreciated so much through the years. In a brief essay published nearly fifty years ago he wrote:
When King David lay on his deathbed…he still remembered the first time he had ever seen her. The latest round of warfare with the Syrians had just ended, and his victory had left him feeling let down. He drank too much at lunch and went upstairs for a long nap afterward. It was almost twilight when he awoke. The palace was unusually quiet, and he felt unusually solemn and quiet inside his own skin. There were no servants around for some reason, nobody to remind him that he was anointed king, victorious general, all that. He bathed, made himself a drink, and with just a towel wrapped around his waist, walked out onto the terrace on the roof where he looked down over the parapet in a kind of trance.
If the whole Syrian army had been drawn up in battle dress, he would have simply noted their presence and passed on. There was a horse tethered to a tree, sweeping the flies away with his tail. In the servants’ court, a cistern had overflowed onto the cobbles leaving a puddle the shape of Asia. Beyond a wall, a naked girl stood in a shallow pool dipping water over her shoulders with a shell. In as detached a way as he saw the girl, he saw both that he had to have her at any
cost and that the cost would be exorbitant.ii
This close to Valentine’s Day it sounds almost romantic, doesn’t it? Buechner says she “glimmered in the dusk like a peeled pear.” And if you’ve ever heard Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah,” you may have a single story of Bathsheba in your mind, as well. Speaking of King David he sings, “Your faith was strong but you needed proof, you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.” But it’s my friend Amy Butler, a woman and a preacher, who taught me to look at this story in a different way.
In a sermon about Bathsheba she writes, “Thanks a lot, Leonard Cohen. We love your song but you told the story wrong. And when you tell the story wrong, especially in such an iconic, culturally well-known way, it’s often likely that the right story—the real story—never gets told.” And so let’s start again with the real story, the one we find in 2 Samuel 11, and let’s listen like people who are trying to hear Bathsheba’s side of that story.
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, ‘This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.’ So David sent messengers to fetch her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.
Amy points out that, first of all, it was the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, but David didn’t go. For whatever reason he decided to stay
home in Jerusalem. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Secondly, he had spent most of the day lounging on the couch. He was bored, he was restless. And thirdly, when he finally got off the couch, he took a stroll on the roof. Amy says, “Did you hear me? DAVID takes a stroll on the roof.” She says, “If you’ve ever been to Israel and seen the ruins of David’s palace, you can walk out on the roof, too, and you can see that the palace was built at the top of a very tall hill, looking out over the homes of those who lived in the city.
“So, sorry Leonard Cohen, but it wasn’t Bathsheba who was on the roof, it was David.” He was out there sipping a cocktail, watching the sun go down, and peeping into every private courtyard and every bathroom window in Jerusalem. He saw a woman bathing, purifying herself after her monthly period, as prescribed in the Law of Moses, and he saw that she was very beautiful. Amy says, “It wasn’t like Bathsheba was out there on the roof for all to see. She was performing a prescribed religious ritual in the privacy of her own home, but David looked into her home, he violated her privacy.”iii
And then he asked one of his servants to find out who she was. The report came back: She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Walter Brueggemann writes: “Her name is dangerously hyphenated. She is identified by the men to whom she belongs. Now David knows who she is—and whose she is. The mention of Uriah should have given him pause: Uriah was one of his mighty men, one of his most valiant warriors. David does not pause however because he is the king and a king can do whatever he wants. David acts swiftly, as he has always done. He is not a pensive or brooding man but one who will have his way. The action is quick. The verbs rush as the passion of David rushed. ‘He sent; he took; he lay.’
“The royal deed of self-indulgence does not take very long,” Brueggemann writes. “There is no adornment to the action. The woman then gets some verbs: she returned, she conceived. The action is so stark. There is nothing but action. There is no conversation. There is no hint of caring, of affection, of love—only lust. David does not call her by name, does not even speak to her. At the end of the encounter she is only ‘the woman.’”iv It’s not much of a love story. And my guess is that if Bathsheba hadn’t gotten pregnant, David would have never noticed her again. But she did, and she let David know, and that’s when David realized that he had a problem.
The rest of 2 Samuel 11 is the story of David trying to cover the tracks of his sin and failing miserably, bringing Uriah home from battle in the hope that he will sleep with his wife and assume that he’s the one who got her pregnant, and then, when that doesn’t work, sending Uriah back to the front lines of the battle where he could be easily killed and where he is, in fact, killed. It’s only after all that and after Bathsheba has observed a brief period of mourning that David sends for her, and marries her, so that the child won’t be born out of wedlock. But Nathan, the prophet, isn’t fooled for a moment. He goes to King David and confronts him with what he has done. And David breaks down weeping, saying, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Not Bathsheba: David.
If we have been walking around with a single story of Bathsheba in our heads, thinking that somehow she seduced David by dragging her bathtub out onto the roof and bathing where he could easily see her, we need to think again. It wasn’t Bathsheba who was on the roof, it was David. And it wasn’t Bathsheba who sinned, it was David. The author of 1 Chronicles omits this story altogether. In
what was meant to be the official record of David’s reign he tells us it was the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle. He tells us that David stayed home in Jerusalem while Joab went to fight the Ammonites. But in the very next verse he describes David bringing home the spoils of war; Bathsheba isn’t even mentioned. If the author of 2 Samuel hadn’t told his story we wouldn’t know about David’s adultery with Bathsheba; we wouldn’t know that he was confronted by Nathan, the prophet; we wouldn’t know that he confessed and repented of his sin; we wouldn’t have Psalm 51.
So, it’s good to have more than one story of Bathsheba. It’s good to know that she was not some brazen seductress, but an innocent victim of David’s unbridled lust. Maybe that’s why Matthew included her in his genealogy. Maybe he wanted us to think again about Bathsheba and realize that she was blameless in this whole affair, and that she took her place on Jesus’ family tree with honor. And maybe Jesus knew that, and knew that when someone tries to tell you a single story about anyone, you need to listen a little more deeply.
Like the time the scribes and Pharisees brought to him a woman they said had been caught in the very act of adultery (notice that they didn’t bring the man, who must have also been part of the act). They said the law insisted that such a woman should be stoned. But Jesus said, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” And then, one by one, they walked away, beginning with the oldest. When they were gone Jesus said to the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” He said, “Neither do I condemn you. Now go, and sin no more.” In that moment her story changed. It could have ended with death, but instead it ended with life, and with a second chance. Jesus saw something in her worth redeeming.
Amy Butler says, “What’s the story you tell yourself about your life? Is it a story you’ve just accepted because that’s what you’ve always been told?”
The danger of a single story is real. It was real for Bathsheba. It was real for the woman caught in adultery. And it was real for Jesus, even as the scribes and Pharisees conspired to manufacture a single story about him that would lead to his death. Butler says, “Don’t let anyone ever tell a single story about you. And don’t ever forget the story Jesus came to tell about us: that we are deeply beloved by God; that the failure and pain by which we have been defined or by which we define ourselves is not the only story about who we are; that Jesus came to offer us a new story, a new life.”v
Thanks be to God.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
