Bathsheba

• 1. Introduction

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  Bathsheba carries a name that can mean Daughter of the Oath, or possibly Daughter of Sheba. Few figures in scripture have attracted so much argument behind so short a name. She was an Israelite queen who was married twice, first to Uriah the Hittite and later to King David. By David she had all five of her children. In the Book of Samuel she appears in a single, famously dark episode, and that episode has been told, retold, softened, rejected and painted for centuries. Jewish writers gave her a grandfather with a grudge. Christian writers placed her among the ancestors of Jesus. One Islamic tradition declined to accept the story at all. Modern scholars still disagree about whether she was a victim, a participant, or something harder to name. This documentary asks what the earliest account actually says, what it cost the people in it, and how she came to be remembered as a queen, a saint, a warning and a subject for the painter's brush.

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• 2. A Roof in Jerusalem

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  In 2 Samuel 11, King David is walking on the roof of his palace when he notices a beautiful woman bathing. He asks about her and learns that she is the wife of Uriah. David still wants her. He has sex with her, and she becomes pregnant.

  The army is away on campaign, so David sends for Uriah, hoping the soldier will go home to his wife. If Uriah did, the child could be taken for his own. Uriah refuses. He holds himself to the rules that bind a warrior on campaign, and he chooses to stay with the palace troops rather than sleep in his own bed.

  After repeated attempts fail, David gives an order to his general Joab. Uriah is to be placed on the front lines, where the danger is far greater. David even makes Uriah carry this message back to the army himself. Uriah is killed during the siege of Rabbah. Bathsheba mourns him, and then David brings her into his own house as his wife. She gives birth to his child.

  One observer was displeased with all of this, and he was the prophet Nathan, who arrived at the palace with a story about a lamb.

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• 3. The Price of the Rooftop

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  Nathan's story concerns a rich man who takes the lamb of his poor neighbor. David is enraged by it, and Nathan turns the parable directly on the king. God, Nathan says, will punish the house of David for the murder of Uriah and the taking of his wife. Someone close to David will seize his wives and lie with them in broad daylight, for everyone to see.

  David confesses at once and shows sincere repentance. Soon after the birth of the first child, God strikes the infant with a severe illness. David pleads for the child's life. He fasts, and he spends his nights lying on the ground in sackcloth. After seven days the child dies. David accepts the loss as his punishment and goes to the house of God to worship.

  The prophecy ripens years later, in 2 Samuel 16. David's much-loved son Absalom leads an insurrection that drags the kingdom into civil war. To announce his claim as the new king, Absalom has sex in public with ten of his father's concubines. Readers have long seen this as a tenfold, public answer to a secret taking.

  But another son of David and Bathsheba was already growing up, and his path to the throne is a story in itself.

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• 4. The Queen Mother

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  Hebrew has a word for the queen mother, Gebirah, and Bathsheba earned it as the mother of Solomon. David had older surviving sons by other wives. In his old age, Bathsheba secured the succession for Solomon instead, relying on promises that David had made to her.

  Rabbinic tradition adds a scene. Bathsheba sees Adonijah attempting to have himself crowned. She joins forces with the prophet Nathan and wins an audience with the aged king, who is then keeping company with Abishag and has been presumed impotent. After that meeting David affirms that Solomon will follow him on the throne.

  The rabbis praise her for this work. They apply the verse from Ecclesiastes 4:9, "Two are better than one," to David and Bathsheba together. The threefold cord of verse 12, which is not quickly broken, they apply to Nathan, who joined the effort.

  The woman who helped to crown Solomon was herself surrounded by questions about family, beginning with the identity of her own father.

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• 5. Ahithophel's Granddaughter

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  Two books of the Hebrew Bible give her father two different names. According to 2 Samuel 11:3, he was Eliam. According to 1 Chronicles 3:5, he was Ammiel, and there she appears as Bathshua. In 2 Samuel 23:34 an Eliam is listed as the son of Ahithophel the Gilonite, one of David's thirty heroes.

  The Talmud, and several scholars with it, assume that the two Eliams are one man. That would make Bathsheba the granddaughter of Ahithophel, David's renowned counselor. Doubters point out that the names in Chronicles are very different. They note that the list of the thirty in 1 Chronicles 11:36 gives Ahijah the Pelonite instead. Some have even asked whether Ahithophel could have been old enough to have a granddaughter.

  If the link is real, it may explain a betrayal. Ahithophel abandoned David when Absalom rebelled, and perhaps that was revenge for what David had done to Bathsheba.

  The Aggadah supplies a stranger motive. Ahithophel's knowledge of astrology convinced him that he was destined to become king of Israel. So he urged Absalom to commit a crime that Jewish law would eventually punish with death, mentioned in 2 Samuel 16:21. His aim was to remove Absalom and open the throne for himself. He had misread the stars. They predicted only that his granddaughter Bathsheba, the daughter of his son Eliam, would become queen. Tradition adds that she was much younger than David.

  Chronicles skips the story of how she became David's wife. It offers only the names of her children.

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• 6. One Story, Three Faiths

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  In the Midrash, the blame for David's glimpse of Bathsheba falls on Satan. She is bathing on her roof behind a screen of wickerwork when Satan arrives disguised as a bird. David shoots at it and strikes the screen, splitting it, and her beauty is exposed. The same tradition holds that she was destined from the Creation to be David's lawful wife. The union came too early, and so he became her partner in sin.

  Islam handles the story very differently. David is a prophet there, and Bathsheba is not mentioned in the Quran. Some Islamic tradition treats the Bible's account as incompatible with the infallibility of the prophets, known as Ismah. One hadith credits Ali ibn Abi Talib with a stern warning. Anyone who says David married Uriah's wife as the legends tell would be punished twice, once for qazf, which is falsely accusing someone of adultery, and once for defaming a prophet.

  A second hadith from Shia scholars shows the bird again. Ali Al-Ridha asks a scholar of another religion what he says about David. The scholar describes David leaving his prayer to chase a beautiful bird, seeing Bathsheba on the roof, and then sending her husband to die. Ali Al-Ridha is upset. He answers with the words "Inna Lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji'un" and rejects every part of the accusation. His own explanation is that women whose husbands died in war never married again, and that David was the first to break the custom. People struggled to accept the marriage, and legends grew around it.

  In Christianity, Matthew 1:6 names "the wife of Uriah" among the ancestors of Jesus. Medieval writers read her as a foreshadowing, or antetype, of Ecclesia, the church personified, while David foreshadowed Jesus. As a queen and a mother, she was also linked with the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven. Her son Solomon rises to greet her, bows in veneration, and gives her a seat at his right hand. From there she acts as an intercessor and carries the petitions of her subjects to the king.

  The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church venerates her as a saint, under the names Barsabeh and Bathsabeh. Her feast day falls on the 27th of November, which is the 1st of Tahsas.

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• 7. Victim or Seductress

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  The passage that tells her story, 2 Samuel 11:2 to 12:24, belongs to the oldest layer of the Book of Samuel. Scholars describe it as part of a court history of David, written by someone who stood close to the events and who did not idealise the king. They rate its historical value above that of later layers. Budde connected it to the Jahwist document of the Hexateuch.

  Some verses were added later. Karl Budde marked 12:7, 8 and 10-12 as insertions that sharpen the moral tone of Nathan's rebuke. Friedrich Schwally and H. P. Smith went further and regarded the whole of 12:1-15a as an addition, which would join 12:15b directly to 11:27. None of this alters the narrative about Bathsheba herself.

  Kenneth E. Bailey reads the scene from a different angle. David's Jerusalem was tightly packed, he argues, and Bathsheba's house may have stood as close as twenty feet from the rooftop. People in ancient times were exceptionally modest about their bodies. He therefore suggests that she displayed herself deliberately, to be rid of Uriah and move in with the king.

  Most of the other scholars quoted here read her as the victim. Lawrence O. Richards holds that the text supports her innocence, because David took the initiative to learn who she was and summoned her. She was alone and could not refuse a king. David J. Zucker calls her a victim of "power rape." Andrew J. Schmutzer argues that by taking her, David became responsible for her coming to him. Antony F. Campbell prefers the phrase "violation of Bathsheba," while admitting the text's storytelling is ambivalent.

  Michael D. Coogan finds the fault placed on David from the start: "It was springtime, the time when kings go forth to war... but David remained in Jerusalem" (2 Samuel 11:1). Had David been with the army, the incident would never have happened.

  After the incident, the book's perspective shifts, and David is described as largely at the mercy of events rather than directing them. He loses control of his family and is eventually overthrown by Absalom. In 2 Samuel 13, Amnon rapes his sister Tamar, and the placement of that story seems to draw a parallel between the misconduct of father and son.

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• 8. Bathsheba at Her Bath

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  Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath, held in the Louvre, is the most famous painting of the subject. The subject itself is old. Along with Eve, Bathsheba was almost the only woman whose nude image could be regularly justified in Christian art, which made her important in the development of the nude in medieval art. The usual scene shows her bathing while David watches. The degree of nudity varied with her pose and with where a towel or clothing was placed.

  One common setting in the 15th century may surprise modern viewers. Her bath appeared in miniatures illustrating a book of hours, a personal prayer book that overtook the psalter as the most popular devotional book among lay people. This was especially true in France. The scene also became one of the most frequent examples of the Power of Women theme. From the Renaissance onward, it gave painters a reason to place a large female nude at the center of a history painting.

  Artists sometimes added her maids or David's messengers, and often a distant David on his roof. The messengers are occasionally mistaken for David himself, although most artists follow the Bible in keeping him far away.

  The list of painters is long. Hans Memling painted her around 1485. Veronese's version from 1575, now in Lyon, is unusual because she is clothed. Rubens painted Bathsheba at the Fountain around 1635. Artemisia Gentileschi's picture dates to 1637, and Ricci's to the 1720s, now in Budapest. Hayez painted her in 1834, in a canvas now in the Brera in Milan.

  Writers followed. George Peele's play David and Bethsabe appeared in 1588. Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd echoes the triangle of Bathsheba, David and Uriah. The Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Crooked Man, from 1893, builds its main structure on it. Joseph Heller's tragicomic God Knows, from 1984, is narrated by David as deathbed memoirs. In Geraldine Brooks's The Secret Chord, from 2015, the prophet Nathan narrates. Novels by Jill Eileen Smith in 2011, Angela Hunt in 2015, Jenifer Jennings in 2018 and Amanda Bedzrah in 2022 give Bathsheba the central place. Liz Curtis Higgs's 2000 anthology Really Bad Girls of the Bible recasts the first part of 2 Samuel 11 in a contemporary setting. Elizabeth Cook's 2020 novel Lux compares David and Bathsheba to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, seen through Thomas Wyatt.

  On screen, Susan Hayward played her in the 1951 film David and Bathsheba. Rosalind Elias sang the role in Ezra Laderman's And David Wept in 1971. Jane Seymour played her in the 1976 television film The Story of David, and Alice Krige in the 1985 film King David. Melia Kreiling appeared in the 2013 miniseries The Bible, and Moriah Smallbone in the 2017 series The Chosen.

  In music, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" from 1985 never names her but describes a woman seen "bathing on the roof," with "her beauty in the moonlight." The Bastille song "Bathsheba & Him" followed in 2025. Sting has said that his song "Mad About You" is about David and Bathsheba. In a 1989 interview with NME, Pixies singer Frank Black said that "Dead," from the album Doolittle, concerns the same story.

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