And yet, as the Court Historian makes no effort to conceal, the zenith of power passed quickly and tragically.
The first sign of David's subtle turn of fortune was an ugly diplomatic rebuff by one of his new tributaries, the kingdom of Ammon. David had subjugated the Ammonites, as we have seen, and their king had become his vassal. When the old king died, David sent emissaries to the new king of Ammon to comfort him on the death of his father. “I will show kindness unto Hanun, the son of Nahash,” David thought to himself, “as his father showed kindness unto me.” (2 Sam. 10:2) But the counselors of the Ammonite king agitated against David. “Do you suppose David means to do honour to your father when he sends you his condolences?” they whispered. “These men of his are spies whom he has sent to find out how to overthrow the city.” (2 Sam. 10:3) (NEB)
So on the orders of the king of Ammon, the royal messengers from Jerusalem were subjected to a series of indignities—half of each man's beard was shaved off, and each man's garment was cut halfway up from the ground so that his buttocks were laid bare, a public humiliation that McCarter compares to “symbolic castration.” 18 Then all the emissaries were sent back to King David as living symbols of Ammonite defiance.
When David learned of how his emissaries had been abased and disfigured, he resolved to punish the insolent Ammonites with a new campaign—and, in the meantime, he ordered the messengers to remain in Jericho until their beards grew back, thereby sparing himself and his ambassadors any further embarrassment. The people of Jerusalem, at least, would not see the contempt with which the new king of Ammon regarded the king of Israel.
Realizing that “they had fallen into bad odor with David,” the Ammonites fully expected a punitive expedition, and so they began recruiting soldiers of fortune from the land of Aram and other neighboring kingdoms. Against the Ammonites and their mercenaries David sent an Israelite army under the command of Joab. “Be of good courage,” Joab declared, echoing the words that Moses spoke to Joshua, the original conqueror of Canaan, “and let us prove strong for our people, and for the cities of our God.” (2 Sam. 10:12) So impressive was the sight of David's army that the Arameans and then the Ammonites broke and ran, and Joab returned in victory to Jerusalem.
The victory, however, was only temporary. The Ammonites regrouped, recruited a fresh supply of Aramean mercenaries from beyond the Euphrates, and marched in the direction of Israel again. At news of the renewed threat from the insolent Ammonites, David placed himself at the head of the army and led the fighting men of Israel across the Jordan River to engage the enemy on its own soil. Again the Arameans were put to rout, and David followed to inflict a bloody punishment on the fleeing soldiers: seven hundred charioteers and forty thousand infantrymen of the mercenary army from Aram were slain on David's orders. (2 Sam. 10:18)
“When all the vassal kings saw that they had been worsted by Israel, they sued for peace and submitted to the Israelites,” the Bible concludes. “The Arameans never dared help the Ammonites again.” (2 Sam. 10:19)19
As for the Ammonite king himself, however, David resolved that further punishment was necessary. He would bring the war to the gates of Rabbah, the royal capital of Ammon, and he would extract a price in blood for the shaved beards and exposed buttocks of his couriers. But the Court Historian pauses here to note an odd and somehow ominous fact: the army of Israel would go to war, but David, the warrior-king who had been blooded in so many battles, would stay home.
And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.
(2 Sam. 11:1) (KJV)
Some of the old fire had gone out of David, or so the Bible seems to suggest. He was now well into middle age, and apparently he was no longer willing to endure the discomforts and dangers of a long march and a hard campaign in enemy territory. So he sent Joab and the army to fight, and he remained behind in the royal palace in Jerusalem. But as it turned out, David still burned with the white-hot sexuality that had always made him so compelling to both men and women. So it was that King David, idle and alone, embarked upon a sexual adventure that turned out to be at once the greatest love of his life and the scandal that signaled a sea change in his once-glorious destiny.
Chapter Ten
THE DAUGHTER OF
THE SEVEN GODS
His captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellow and the fan
To cool a gypsy's lust.
—SHAKESPEARE, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
The turning point in the life of David—and, in a real sense, the whole sweep of biblical history—is described in a single sentence that throbs with unresolved sexual tension and acute moral peril.
And it came to pass at eventide, that David arose from his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
(2 Sam. 11:2)
The Bible suggests that David rose from an afternoon nap and idled on the rooftop of his palace in order to catch a cool evening breeze. But we might also imagine that David woke from his slumber in a state of agitation and perhaps even sexual arousal. And perhaps he wondered whether he might be able to spot some willing woman from his observation point atop the palace—the Bible suggests that the king's bed was placed on the rooftop, at least during the warm seasons of the year, and more than one alluring woman may have displayed herself within sight and reach of the king, so handsome and so powerful! And so, when David spotted a naked woman at her bath on a nearby rooftop, he may have found exactly what he was looking for.
And here the biblical life story of David hangs in suspense for one exquisite moment. Will David, the anointed of God, turn away from the tantalizing sight of the bathing woman and return to his own bed, alone or in the company of one of his many consecrated wives? Or will he plunge forward into a new adventure in forbidden carnality? Will he spurn temptation in the way we would expect of “a man after God's heart,” or will he yield to the demands of his own mortal heart?
A moment later, the suspense is over. King David chooses pleasure over piety, and both king and country will pay a terrible price.
THE SEVENTH WELL
The Bible does not disclose whether the beautiful and beguiling woman who bathed on the next rooftop was an innocent victim of David's voyeurism or a calculating exhibitionist who sought to catch the king's eye. Either or both may be true. But it does confirm that David moved quickly to recruit the object of his desire for his bed—“And David sent and inquired after the woman” (2 Sam. 11:3)—and his courtiers reported back with all the particulars.
Her name was Bathsheba, the courtiers told the king, and she was the wife of a man called Uriah the Hittite, a member of David's military elite, “the Thirty,” and one of the many men of foreign ancestry who served in the army of Israel. (2 Sam. 23:13, 39)1 Bathsheba, too, may have been a non-Israelite. Her name was interpreted by one early medieval exegete to mean “seventh well” or “brimming well,” a metaphor used elsewhere in the Bible to indicate a fertile woman.2 But as Bible historian Karen Armstrong proposes, Bathsheba's name “may originally have been ‘Daughter of the Seven Gods,’ ” a polytheistic name in use among the Jebusites or other pagan tribes of Canaan.3 Intriguingly, the Chronicler gives her name as “Bathshua” (1 Chron. 3:5), which was also the name of the Canaanite wife of Judah, a distant ancestor of David and founder of the tribe of Judah. And so the king's eye fell on a woman who was doubly forbidden to him—Bathsheba was married to another man, and she may have been one of those seductive strangers whom the Bible routinely accuses of luring Israelite men into “harlotry and other abominations.”
Conveniently enough, Uriah was serving at the front in David's war on Ammon, and
so it was easy for the king to summon Bathsheba to the royal bedchamber without worrying about interference from a cuckolded husband. The courtship of David and Bathsheba, such as it was, is described in a single blunt line of biblical text, but it is enough to confirm that David was a man accustomed to using the high office bestowed upon him by God for unholy purposes.
And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her.
(2 Sam. 11:4)
At the moment of their adultery, Bathsheba “was purified from her uncleanness,” or so the biblical author pauses to note in a moment of stinging irony. (2 Sam. 11:4) Under biblical law, a woman was considered “unclean” during her menstrual period, and a man was forbidden to engage in sexual intercourse with her until her period was over and she was “purified” by immersing herself in a ritual bath. (Lev. 15:19 ff.) David may have engaged in a forbidden sexual encounter with someone else's wife, but the biblical author assures us that his sex partner was not—God forbid!—ritually impure at the moment of their fornication.
Bathsheba's menstrual cycle is significant for other reasons, too. The fact that her period had already ended when she encountered King David suggests that she was likely to be ovulating, a detail that was recognized and remarked upon by the medieval sages whose commentaries are preserved in the Talmud. Thus the biblical author is subtly suggesting that Bathsheba was indeed a “brimming well,” a woman ready to conceive, when David summoned her to his bed.
WARRIOR AND CUCKOLD
At the moment of creation, according to an apologetic tale from the Talmud, God decrees that Bathsheba is destined to be the beloved wife of David. But God later resolves to postpone the day of their wedding because of some wrongdoing by David—in one version of the tale, David displeases God by offering Bathsheba to Uriah, a non-Israelite, as a reward for his assistance in the battle with Goliath.4 Ultimately God bestows Bathsheba upon David, as he had always intended to do, and “so [David] took only what was rightfully his.”5 Thus the rabbis invite us to regard David's relationship with Bathsheba as the great love of his life, a union sanctioned by God, even if the biblical author insists on presenting it as an illicit and ill-fated sexual encounter.
Still, the first spasm of sexual pleasure was brief, according to the Bible, and Bathsheba promptly returned to her own home. But like countless cheating couples before and after, David and Bathsheba were confronted with the most awkward possible evidence of their adultery. “And the woman conceived,” the Bible reports, “and she sent and told David, and said: ‘I am with child.’ ” (2 Sam. 11:5) And David, so skilled in the arts of deception, decided that the only way to hide their adultery was to make it appear that the bastard child in Bathsheba's womb had been fathered by her husband, Uriah.
Here we see yet another reason why the biblical author is so specific about the timing of Bathsheba's last period. Since Uriah had left Jerusalem for combat duty in far-off Ammon before Bathsheba's last period, he could not be credited with paternity of the child unless he returned to Jerusalem and slept with his wife after her period. Both David and Bathsheba—and, significantly, the biblical author, too—understood the implications of her menstrual cycles, and that is why David saw the necessity of putting the faithful soldier into bed with his unfaithful wife before the pregnancy manifested itself for all to see.
Thus begins a conspiracy that starts out as a bedroom farce and ends in darkest tragedy. First David sent word to his trusted general and confidant, Joab: “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” (2 Sam. 11:6) The loyal soldier hastened back to Jerusalem, surely baffled at the strange summons from the king, and he must have been even more confounded after he was ushered into the throne room and listened to the king's prattling. “David asked if Joab was well and if the army was well and if the war was going well,” the Bible reports, and Uriah, perhaps still wary of the king's purpose, replied noncommittally: “Yes, well.” (2 Sam. 11:7) (AB) After only a few moments of such aimless chitchat, David abruptly dismissed him with a pointed suggestion.
“Go down to thy house,” David said to Uriah, “and wash thy feet.” (2 Sam. 11:10)
The washing of feet might suggest only a long soak in the tub to modern readers, but David meant something much more intimate. The Hebrew word for “feet” or “legs” (raglayim) was sometimes used in biblical Hebrew as a euphemism for genitalia, and the thrust of David's suggestion was that Uriah should avail himself of the opportunity to clean himself up and join his wife in bed for some well-deserved “rest and recreation.” Then, of course, David would be able to plausibly deny that he was the father of the child that Bathsheba already carried.
But David badly misjudged Uriah by attributing to him the same uncontrollable sex drive and the same lack of moral restraint that were so prominent in his own nature. Uriah left the palace with the gift of food that David had thought to bestow upon him, but he did not return to his own house. Instead, the ever-faithful Uriah spent the night at the door of the palace. With Uriah on guard at the king's door, of course, neither her husband nor her lover joined Bathsheba in bed that night.
“Why did you not go down to your house?” David asked Uriah the next day, astonished that the man would not avail himself of the comforts of his own bed and his own wife—and not a little aggravated, too.
“Israel and Judah are under canvas, and so is the Ark, and my lord Joab and thy majesty's officers are camping in the open on the battlefield,” Uriah protested. “Shall I then go into my house, to eat and to drink, and to sleep with my wife? As thou livest, as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.” (2 Sam. 11:11)6
Uriah's words carried a subtle reproach. He was reminding David of God's demand that soldiers refrain from sexual contact with women while at war. (Deut. 23:9–11) Ironically, David had once invoked the same rule of sexual purity to trick the priest of Nob into giving him holy bread.* Now, however, David was too desperate to be deterred by Uriah's pious words.
“Tarry here today,” the king ordered Uriah, “and tomorrow I will let you depart.” (2 Sam. 11:12)7
Then David insisted that Uriah join him for a feast at the royal banquet table, where the king urged cup after cup of wine on the soldier. A drunken Uriah, David calculated, would surely yield to temptation.
But David guessed wrong again. Even drunk on the king's wine, Uriah continued to put duty before pleasure. At last he fell asleep among the servants who bedded down at the king's door, where the whole court of King David was witness to the fact that Uriah had not lain with his wife. So it was that the king's attempt to concoct a cover story for Bathsheba's pregnancy was unwittingly foiled by the remarkable sense of piety, loyalty, and duty of a cuckolded warrior.
THE DEVOURING SWORD
On the next morning, David woke up with a new thought. He decided to abandon his plan to put Uriah in bed with Bathsheba and instead to send the faithful soldier back to the front. But he asked Uriah to do him the favor of carrying a confidential message to his commander, Joab, who was directing the siege of Rabbah. And David counted on the faithful Uriah to carry the letter without opening it. If Uriah had peeked inside the sealed letter, he would have discovered that he was carrying his own death warrant.
“Put Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle and then fall back,” David had written to Joab, “and leave him to meet his death.” (2 Sam. 11:15)8
Joab did not question the king's strange order, nor did he shrink from carrying it out. “That old watchdog of the monar-chy”9 was always ready to kill in the service of David and his kingship even when David himself was suffering from a failure of nerve. Joab had been studying the defenses of Rabbah, and he knew exactly where the Ammonites would offer the stiffest resistance to attack. And so, when he opened the letter that Uriah had handed him, Joab knew what to do to carry out the king's command.
Joab assigned Uriah to a skirmishing party that he sent into action at one of the strong points along the city wall. Sure enough, the Ammonites sallied out en masse to engage the at
tackers while the archers on the high wall fired down on them, and Joab's men began to fall under the fierce counterattack. Amid the chaos of battle, presumably at a moment when Uriah found himself face-to-face with the enemy and fighting for his life, Joab ordered the rest of the men to withdraw. Just as David had intended, the Ammonites struck down Uriah and left him dead on the battlefield.
Then Joab dispatched a courier to Jerusalem with a report on the war in Ammon—but he carefully instructed the messenger on how to break the news of Uriah's fate. “Thy servant Uriah is dead also,” the man was ordered to say, as if it were an incidental detail. (2 Sam. 11:21) And David, upon hearing of the only casualty that mattered to him, responded with a few words of comfort for Joab that betray a chilly indifference to Uriah's death.
“Do not let this distress you—the sword devours one way or another,” David ordered the messenger to tell Joab. “Press home your attack on the city, and you will take it and raze it to the ground.” (2 Sam. 11:25)10
Bathsheba, too, showed neither relief nor satisfaction at the death of her husband. She observed the customary period of ritual mourning—but when the formal display of grief was done, David and Bathsheba wasted no more time on appearances.
“David sent for her and brought her into his house,” the Bible reports. “She became his wife and bore him a son.” (2 Sam. 11:27)
Surely the royal courtiers were careful not to mention the unfortunate cuckold or name the real father of the child within earshot of King David and his new queen—but it is just as certain that the whole scandalous affair was the subject of hot gossip throughout the palace and beyond. Indeed, the very fact that we find the story of David and Bathsheba within the pages of Holy Writ is the best evidence that David's wrongdoing was so much a matter of common knowledge that the Court Historian could not leave it out.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 20