Bathsheba

I actually made two mistakes when giving the lesson all those years ago.

One was that a question came up, and I put it aside to get back to the material. I have made that mistake twice when teaching. Both times it bothered me later, and so I wrote something up for the person who had asked, but there may have been multiple people who needed to hear it, and there is no way of knowing. That doesn't mean that all questions need to be given significant class time, but it is important to be sensitive to the moment.

In addition to wanting to finish the material I had, it felt like an awkward question, but it was one that I brought on. As I was going over the issues that the different women had, I said of Bathsheba "essentially raped". I thought the question came up because I used the word "essentially", but it could have been because I used "raped".

Not using the word has been fairly common. Artwork tends to refer to the "seduction" of Bathsheba. If you think about how they defined rape under the law of Moses, a man taking hold of a woman in a field would be, but if it was in the city, she could have screamed, so it must have been consensual.

In Bathsheba's case, they were in the city. We don't ever learn much about her really, or how she reacted to it. The reason I used the wording I did was because I don't believe she would have thought that she had the right to refuse. David sent for her, and that was after asking about her where part of the answer was that she was married. No one questioned it, just like no one questioned it when he gave orders to get her husband killed. Kings can do things like that, which is one problem with monarchy.

Because of that, I questioned whether she would call it rape, and that is why I put in the "essentially". Now I would have just said rape, because a lot of women who get raped don't call it that. They feel it was somehow their fault, or they brought it on somehow, and society will do a lot to reinforce that, when the real problem was that the rapist did not respect another person's right to determine what happens to her body.

Bathsheba may have accepted that the king can do what he wants, and in a society where women were disregarded, and their status was dependent on men, she had probably further internalized that she didn't have a lot of power. She does come across as far more passive and dynamic than Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth.

The terrible thing about that is that I don't find any reason to believe that would have made it feel any better. There would be that sense of powerlessness, the guilt for what was not her fault, the fear that she would be shamed and her husband would not want her, and then the guilt for his death, which was again not her fault, but I do not doubt that she felt guilt for it.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that the chapter starts out saying that it was the time when kings go to war, but then says that David was at home, or that Bathsheba's story is followed so closely by that of Amnon raping his half-sister Tamar (a different Tamar), and all of the consequences from that. They might not have used the word rape, but they all knew it was wrong.

I write this partially because I regret the mistakes I made in that one lesson, so many years ago, but also because of last week's post, where sometimes we need to be rebels. That doesn't mean rebelling against God, but we will often have to cast aside convention and popular opinion.

Part of that can be a need to speak plainly, and to use the proper words for things instead of euphemisms. We can't be afraid to speak openly of sex or drugs or anything that matters. We don't have to wallow in it, or be unnecessarily crude, but we can't be so afraid to name a thing that we find ourselves unable to say anything useful about the thing.

Things are speeding up, so there's no time for beating around the bush.