Saul

The last few posts have caused some thoughts about David and Bathsheba, but that is also where we have been in our family scripture reading.

I often find myself in sympathy with people in the scriptures who are doing the wrong thing. I can see where their choices would feel reasonable. I always feel badly for Saul.

He started out so well, and his first offense of getting impatient for the delayed Samuel, and feeling like he can't wait any longer, feels familiar. He still should have known better, and clearly he acted out of pride, and not just fear, because his later actions show that is the course that he stayed on. You still see moments when he knows he is wrong, though that never really changes anything.

This time I was thinking about what he could have done to turn things around, and it occurred to me that he should have abdicated. Once Samuel cut Saul off, Saul should have stepped down.

Sometimes royalty seems like a trap where you can't extricate yourself easily, but in this case, David was popular enough that I think it could have been accepted by the people pretty easily, especially with him marrying into the royal family.

That started me thinking about what else might have changed. If David had not spent years on the run, acting as a mercenary and collecting wives, perhaps Israel could have been in a better position with the Philistines. It could have been better for Michal, instead of being abandoned by David, being given to Phalti, who loved her, and then ripped away from  him and back to David after her family was dead and she was just a means of strengthening his claim to the throne. (I have sympathy for Michal too.)

If David had stayed with Michale, ruling and building a family with her, perhaps he would have never been on that rooftop, leading to David's downfall.

That is all merely speculation, and there is no way of knowing. It is a good reminder that our actions affect others. They make their own choices, and there are plenty of ways to make bad choices, and sin, but I don't want to be actively causing pain to others.

Ultimately, that can't all be predicted. The reason Saul should have stepped down was to stop the path of his own rebellion, and work on his own peace with God. The two acts of disobedience that led to the rift were bad, but staying on his course led to Saul trying to murder David, deception, ordering the deaths of innocent people who had helped David without even knowing that David was out of favor, and finally to his suicide on the battlefield where three of his sons died and the Ark was lost.

Staying on a bad course does not make things better, and for his own sake Saul should have gone back. It could have also done a lot of good for others. Our own actions can do the same.

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.

The women in the lineage of the Savior, part 2

When I gave the lesson, my focus was on how these individual women had specific hardships that were answered in the promises of the Savior. I still believe that all sorrows and trials have their eventual answer there.

Daniel Hill's writing pointed out that showing foreigners and sinners in the lineage was a deliberate way to emphasize the inclusiveness of Christ's mission. That is also a good point, and it shows that you can see the same facts and notice different things from them.

There is another new aspect for me now, that I am open to for different reasons, and that's what I want to get at today.

One thing that helped was my friendship with Marla. I haven't seen her for a while, but in one conversation she had mentioned a professor telling her that her name meant "little rebel" as a diminutive of Mary.

That was interesting. If you look at baby names now, Mary is often shown as meaning "mother of God", but it didn't mean that before. Possible roots for the Hebrew name are "desired child", "bitterness", and "rebelliousness".

That seemed surprising, because we don't think of Mary as a rebel. Prophecies about her showed her as fair and pure, she is commonly referred to as blessed, and even today some people will hold on to that image so strongly that they believe her own conception was free from original sin, that she always stayed a virgin (even though the scriptures mention siblings to Jesus), and that she was bodily taken up into Heaven. Those are mainly Catholic beliefs, and I don't know how popular they are, but they seem to demonstrate an inability to let Mary be human and have a life of her own.

That may be due to a general distrust of humanity, and there is evidence to support that, but to imagine yourself capable of playing a role in God's work, which we are asked to participate in, then we need to be able to believe that as mere and fallible humans we can still accomplish good things.  We will grow from serving God, and we can't wait for that growth before we get started. You may be doing bigger things later, but you should be doing something now. It may also turn you into a rebel.

We'll talk more about Bathsheba next week, but with Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, it had always been clear how they could be marginalized and on the fringes. It was also clear that they took actions that were dangerous and unladylike. Judah did declare Tamar more righteous after finding out the whole story, but before that he wanted her burned, and that was thinking she had only played the harlot, which Rahab made a career of. Ruth's gleaning and seeking out Boaz would have been the most acceptable actions, but they were still pretty bold.

The eternal virgin free from original sin doesn't fit into that company unless you think about her position. She was righteous, but once she turned up pregnant before being married she would not have looked righteous. Joseph could have had her killed. Before the angel's visit he was going to put her away quietly, which would not have been a great position. There would have been shunning and insults, and she probably still got a fair amount of those, even with Joseph marrying her. Mary could be righteous or appear righteous, but she couldn't do both.

That struck me hard this time through the stories, mainly because of the protests against police brutality that have been going on since the death of Mike Brown.

These protests are against the social order, which is built upon some lives being more valuable than others. They make people uncomfortable, and yet, people should be uncomfortable. There have been so many deaths, even if you don't count the other signs of inequality, that no follower of Christ should be comfortable with the current system.

As people who proclaim themselves Christians become more avaricious and hardhearted, there will be more condemnation for actions to try and work for equality and declare the value of every soul. There may be loss of prestige and respect, there may be jail time and injury, and there may even be loss of life. There may even be ridicule from people at your own church.

Sometimes God works through unexpected sources, and there may be ways in which they are more open, having less to lose. That is good, and it is a reason to not look down on anyone, but the message for today is that as believers it should not be hard to get us to hear and act.

The women Matthew named were not well-behaved women by some standards. Sometimes it was just that they did what they needed to do rather than what they were expected to do. They made history.

We need to be prepared to do the same.

Women in the lineage of the Savior

Many years ago there was a painting featured in the Ensign. It was called something like "The Women in the Lineage of the Savior", and it was just five women in a line, with no real distinctions in dress or facial features.

I didn't get the point of the painting, but it stuck in my memory. Later on I realized that it referred to the five women who are specifically mentioned in Matthew 1: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

Obviously, there were as many women as men, and these are not the only ones whom we could name. Starting with Abraham, we know the names of the first three women: Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah. If we dig around in the Chronicles, we can find other names: Azubah, Maacah, and Naamah, just to start. This is a royal lineage, and so we know more about them then we would know of other lines. Often in the Chronicles they say whether the king did evil or righteously right after the mother is named, which I think shows an acknowledgment of the influence, but it is still not traditional to list mothers in genealogies.

I thought the significance might be in the stories of these women. Back when I was teaching Sunday School it was common that at the end of the year you would have a week or two left after the lessons in the manual had run out, and one year (I think 2001) I devoted a class to the topic.

I would think about it from time to time, but recently a Twitter contact, Pastor Daniel Hill, has been writing about what we learn from Matthew, including the lineage:

http://pastordanielhill.com/

It is worth checking out.

His tweets reminded me of the lesson I taught, but they also included aspects that I had missed. It also reminded me of something that I did wrong in my lesson. I addressed it later with the person involved, but it still felt insufficient. Perhaps it is time to revisit that as well. Finally, at a different point in my life now than I was then, I find new meaning in the genealogy. Nothing detract from the old meaning, but there is more than I realized. Scripture reading should be like that.

In the original lesson I did not focus much on Mary, but talked about the other four, and their circumstances, and then used scriptures to illustrate the blessings and promises that were found for them.

It was common for them to be widows. Tamar and Ruth had both been left widowed and childless. At the time I only thought of the loneliness in that, but it was also a very dangerous financial position. A woman would be supported by her father, then her husband, then her sons, because they were the ones who would inherit. Males provided security.

Rahab would have been more independent, supporting herself as a prostitute - it is not a coincidence that when Tamar decided to take matters into her own hands she disguised herself as a prostitute - but there are ways in which that is not ideal, and it would not have given her high status. In addition, Rahab and Ruth were not Israelites, in a society where that was very important.

(Yes, I am talking around the sex. It will be more important in the other posts.)

Bathsheba was widowed as well. She gained a new husband right away, and he was a husband with higher status, but even if you disregard any feelings that she would have had about the rape, the loss of Uriah, and the loss of the child, her new environment was not really that secure. There were many other wives and heirs and palace intrigues, for which she seemed ill-equipped. No sooner was David dead then another son, Adonijah, tried to use Bathsheba in his plotting to take the throne away from Solomon. That could have placed her own life in peril as well.

The point of my original lesson was that each of these women survived their circumstances, but also that the Lord had compassion on their circumstances. He had regard for widows and orphans, for strangers and sinners, and that there would be a path for them.

I do not still have my original list of scriptures used. I probably used Ephesians 2:19 for the foreigners, because then they were no more strangers and foreigners. That is something that we can do now, even if do not always choose to. If we have faith, that should be motivation enough to find no such thing as a stranger based on their birth.

For the widowed and childless, the scriptures were probably from Isaiah, and talking about the covenant of Israel. He used the symbolism of a bride who sinned, and her children were lost, and she was sold into slavery and alone, but then restored.

Inside that promise, though, are individual promises. There is resurrection. There is reunion. There is forgiveness. That is the work that the Savior came to accomplish. It was not appreciated at the time, and the work is not fully done, but there is faith now, and strength and comfort from that.


I may have used some verses with Mary too. There is a theme in her exclamation to Elizabeth:

"He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree."
-- Luke 1:52

These were Women who were not of high stature, who were not even supposed to be part of the covenant in some cases, women who were sinners (and aren't we all), women who had such bad things happen to them that they could have been regarded as out of favor with God. They endured. They not only survived their hardships, but they played a role in bringing about the salvation of the world.

There are moving and powerful lessons in that. There is also more.