Palace Scandal - Bathsheba

2 Samuel 11; 1 Kings 1; Matthew 1:6

From the roof of his palace, King David looked out on his city and noticed a beautiful woman bathing—Bathsheba, wife of one of his best soldiers, Uriah. In that moment he wanted her—and he was the king.

Knowing that her husband was off fighting a war, the king sent for Bathsheba and slept with her. She got pregnant. David tried to “fix it” by calling her husband home, thinking Uriah would sleep with Bathsheba. But Uriah refused to enjoy such pleasure while his friends were risking their lives in combat. So David sent Uriah to the front lines with secret orders to the general—pull back and leave Uriah to die. And after Bathsheba had a respectable period of mourning, David married her.

The king would have gotten away with it, if not for the pesky prophet Nathan, who announced that God knew all about these sins of adultery and murder. David was deeply—and publicly—repentant. Bathsheba’s baby died a week after it was born, but she bore David another son, Solomon, who eventually became Israel’s most prosperous king.

Some scholars have suggested that Bathsheba somehow tricked David into these actions, but the biblical text has no hint of that. Bathing was part of the religious purification ritual. From atop his palace, the king saw what he wanted and took it.

Religious groups have been very good at dishing out “scarlet letters” for sexual misconduct, whether deserved or not. Maybe you’ve seen this in your own church—or in your own life. People can get branded with some big sin or scandal. Some people define themselves by some major life error. “How can God forgive me? Just look at what I did!”

Matthew puts Bathsheba in Jesus’ ancestry as “widow of Uriah.” This phrasing does two things. Since Uriah was a Hittite, it advances Matthew’s interest in foreigners. But it also makes us face up to the sordid story of David’s adultery. Come to think of it, the other women in Jesus’ genealogy are also touched by sexual scandal, whether excusable or not—Tamar seducing her father-in-law, Rahab working as a prostitute, Ruth lying down at the feet of Boaz (which was considered scandalous at the time). Maybe Matthew was subtly responding to charges that Jesus was illegitimate.

By putting together this speckled roster, Matthew might be saying, “Hey, we’re all stained with sin. That’s why we need a Savior like Jesus.”

David was the father of Solomon (whose mother was Bathsheba, the widow of Uriah).

Matthew 1:6