2 Samuel 11:1-5
He sent, he took
The chapter tells us who she is by naming two men, and then describes a sequence in which every verb belongs to the king. Her only words are four: I am with child.
People of the Bible
Bathsheba
Is given no words at all in the chapter she is famous for, and secures the throne in the one where she speaks.
Bathsheba is introduced through someone else’s eyes, from a roof, and the grammar of the chapter is relentless about who is doing things: he sent, he took, she came. She is the wife of one of David’s thirty mighty men and the daughter of another, so the house she is taken from is not anonymous. Her husband is killed by arrangement, she mourns, and she is brought to the palace. The child dies. Years later, when David is old and another son is already being proclaimed king, she walks into the bedchamber and calls in a promise.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Bathsheba
- 01
- 02
2 Samuel 11:14-27
The letter her husband carried
Uriah refuses to go home while the ark is in a tent, twice, sober and drunk. He then carries his own death warrant to Joab, and afterwards she mourns for him.
- 03
2 Samuel 12:15-25
The seven days
The child sickens and David fasts on the ground, then gets up and eats when it dies, which nobody understands. Then he goes to comfort her, and Solomon is born.
- 04
1 Kings 1:11-31
Did you not swear to me
Adonijah is being proclaimed king a mile away. She goes in first, sets out what happens to her and Solomon if this stands, and Nathan follows to confirm it. David swears the oath again that day.
Why it matters
Two chapters, two completely different positions. In 2 Samuel 11 everything is done to her and she says one sentence of four words, that she is pregnant. In 1 Kings 1 she is the one who moves first, names the danger to herself and her son plainly, and gets Solomon on the throne before the rival’s feast has finished. Matthew names her in the genealogy of Jesus, and does it by naming her husband instead, which keeps the crime in the record.
4 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
