The Women Who Saved Christmas: Bathsheba, An Abused Woman Brings Hope
Correcting the narrative on a familiar story
Photo Credit: Unsplash
It’s Christmas week! In the last post, we looked at Ruth and her role in saving Christmas. Even though there are many women in the story of scripture, I had planned to move on from the genealogy of Jesus for the last two posts. I planned this series a while ago (and wrote many of the posts already), but I couldn’t get one woman out of my mind last week. Let’s look at Matthew’s genealogy again (emphasis added):
Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.
Matthew doesn’t tell us the name of Uriah’s wife, but 2 Samuel 11:1-5 does.
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”
If you’ve spent any amount of time in church, you’ve probably heard about Bathsheba before. For most of my life, I saw this as a mutual relationship. I believed the narrative that David and Bathsheba committed adultery. I saw the unfolding of events as a consequence on both parties—they lost their baby and the kingdom because of their fornication. Sure, the bulk of the burden was placed on David, but Bathsheba wasn’t an innocent party—or was she?
But as I’ve gotten older, and read the text more closely, I’ve seen Bathsheba in a different light—and that is one of survivor of abuse. Consider for a moment the cultural context. David is the one who sees her. David is the one who summons her. David is the one who brings her to his bedroom. In our modern context, we read this and believe she had agency. If an adult woman goes to a man, surely she has a choice in the matter. Couldn’t she just have said “no”—or so the conversation goes. In the ancient near eastern context, to deny the king is to die—and not just you, but your whole family as well. Bathsheba had no more power to deny David than if the text had clearly said “he took advantage of her.” When the king summons you, you come to him. When he touches you, you don’t stop him. This is not a level playing field. He had all the power, she had none. David didn’t just commit immoral acts, he abused his power. He abused her. The king who was supposed to be the representative of God’s kingdom on earth fell swiftly and took a family down with him.
The story doesn’t end well. David tries to cover his tracks. He kills her husband, heaping more abuse on her. He then brings her to his palace to be his wife, forcing her back into his power. And then her baby dies.
By the time David comes to repentance, Bathsheba has lost her home, husband, and child. She’s been violated on every front. David ultimately repents, but God doesn’t remove the consequences for David’s actions.
In all of this, God extends his mercy to broken people. He extends mercy to a contrite David, and he extends mercy to an exploited Bathsheba. He sees her.
When we watch this woman, we should weep. Couldn’t the seed of the woman have come another way? Couldn’t God have stopped this abuse of power and agency?
But this is where the genealogy in Matthew comes in. In every part of watching the woman, God sees them. God uses them. God hasn’t forgotten them. Sometimes he sees them by opening their womb. Sometimes he sees them by using them to stop a crime. And sometimes he sees them by giving them a place in the story when a powerful king almost stripped it away from them.
Bathsheba doesn’t save Christmas by her actions, because she is not the active party in much of her story. She doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. We aren’t given her hidden thoughts. We aren’t even shown what she believes about Yahweh. But God uses her to save Christmas by putting her in the path of the Messiah. He could have used any one of David’s many wives to be the woman who carries the promise forward. But he used her, a broken, grieving, abused woman to be the far-removed grandmother of the Messiah. Just think for a moment about all the women in the genealogy of Jesus—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary—all of them are women the world would not expect. Some of them are outside the nation of Israel, but joined to him by faith. All of them are women God sees in their brokenness. All of them are women God uses to move his story to completion.
Abuse of women is not new. It’s all over the Bible and it’s all over our world today. We see it in secular institutions and inside the walls of our most sacred spaces. Ever since sin entered the world, men have used their power for evil and not good. Instead of using privilege to protect, they use privilege to hurt.
God’s not having that. He upends the worlds ideas of influence and puts people—men and women the world despises—in the path of the Messiah.
This is our story too. There’s no injustice we’ve experienced that God does not see. There’s no sorrow we’ve felt that God does not promise to make right.
Bathsheba never saw the Messiah. But she saw a glimpse of hope on the horizon when her son, Solomon, took the throne.
We watch this woman and see that God’s eyesight keeps working, even when David didn’t see her for anything more than what her body could give him. God turns that story on its head and uses the woman for something greater—giving birth to the Messiah who will right every wrong, even those done to her.
