Today’s text is the description of a tragic decision: wrong thinking becoming wrong action compounded with cover-up. Instead of having the text interpreted for you, imagine that you are a person within this story. Identify with a character, named or not. You don’t know what is coming; you only know what is past and what is happening. Remember that the king was absolute monarch, controlling life and death. Remember that there were people serving him who would steal miles through enemy territory just to get the king a drink of water out of a particular well.
How would you feel?
What would you say?
Is there something that you can do?
What does it say about a community where you can have a cover-up this big?
How secret really is the cover-up?
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, "This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house.
The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I am pregnant."
So David sent word to Joab, "Send me Uriah the Hittite." And Joab sent Uriah to David.
When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the people fared, and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, "Go down to your house, and wash your feet." Uriah went out of the king's house, and there followed him a present from the king.
But Uriah slept at the entrance of the king's house with all the servants of his lord, and did not go down to his house. When they told David, "Uriah did not go down to his house," David said to Uriah, "You have just come from a journey. Why did you not go down to your house?"
Uriah said to David, "The ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing."
Then David said to Uriah, "Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back." So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day. On the next day, David invited him to eat and drink in his presence and made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.
2 Samuel 11:1-13 – NRSV
Blessings,
Ron
